A light in the storm by Nick Lee

A LIGHT IN THE STORM

THE Films

“For all the boredom the straight life brings, it’s not too bad.” —gus Van sant

the Director

Biography Filmography A Inter v iew w ith Van Sant

CONTENTS

08 10 12

the films

the events

Schedule Photography Exhibition

40 42

Drugstore Cowboy My Ow n Private Idaho Good Will Hunting Finding Forrester Paranoid Park

18 22 26 28 34

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the director

the Director

A LIGHT IN THE STORM

the director

Biography

Gus Van Sant is an independent filmmaker whose forays into mainstream movies have included Good Will Hunting (1997), Finding Forrester (2000) and Milk (2008). He made a name for himself on the arthouse circuit with 1985’s Mala Noche. For the next decade Gus Van Sant specialized in gritty dramas about outsiders, usually starring young upand-comers: Matt Dillon in 1989’s Drugstore Cowboy; River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves in 1991’s My Own Private Idaho; Uma Thurman in 1993’s Even Cowgirls Get the Blues; and Nicole Kidman and Joaquin Phoenix in 1995’s To Die For (based on the true-crime story of Pamela Smart). The success of Good Will Hunting made stars of Ben Affleck and Matt Damon and Van Sant won heaps of praise for that film and his earlier work. Besides

a 1998 color remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and the Sean Connery drama Finding Forrester, Van Sant has done mostly independent features f rom his home base in Por tland, Oregon. His other f ilms include Elephant (2003), Last Days (2005), Paranoid Park (2007) and Restless (2011, starring Mia Wasikowska). Milk was based on the life stor y of San Francisco selectman Har vey Milk (played by Senn Pean); the movie was nominated for 8 Oscars, including best picture (Penn won for acting, and Dustin Lance Black won for writing).

A LIGHT IN THE STORM

the director

filmography

Complete of Film for Van Sant

Awards

Mala Noche (1985) Drugstore Cowboy (1989) My Own Private Idaho (1991) Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1993) To Die For (1995) Good Will Hunting (1997) Psycho (1998) Finding Forrester (2000) Gerry (2002) Elephant (2003) Last Days (2005) Paranoid Park (2007) Milk (2008) Restless (2011) Promised Land (2012)

Berlin International Film Festival Boston Society of Film Critics Awards Cannes Film Festival French Syndicate of Cinema Critics Gotham Awards Independent Spirit Awards Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards National Society of Film Critics Awards, USA New York Film Critics Circle Awards San Francisco Film Critics Circle Seattle International Film Festival Toronto International Film Festival Nominated Academy Awards Berlin International Film Festival Bodil Awards Broadcast Film Critics Association Awards Cannes Film Festival Chicago Film Critics Association Awards Cinema Brazil Grand Prize CĂŠsar Awards, France Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association Awards Deauville Film Festival Film Critics Circle of Australia Awards Independent Spirit Awards Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists Locarno International Film Festival London Critics Circle Film Awards Venice Film Festival

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A interview with van sant How did your life change when you moved out here to Portland; can you compare it to where you lived before? Well, Darien, Connecticut was like a bedroom community. Even the downtown part was very quaint. Everyone there had business in NYC. All the fathers in the town either took the train or drove to work. Out here in Portland, there weren’t really suburbs, although Oregon did have a few classic residential communities, too, but it was a small enough city, that there wasn’t enough space for people to lose their fa mi lies. Whereas in Da r ien, t he fa mi lies didn’t seem to have a heritage or a family infrastructure. The grandparents were not around because everyone in Darien were sort of like cor porate g y psies. The fathers had been transferring from city to city, and they just happened to bring their families to Darien. My parents moved away as soon as I got out of school because it was always their plan to just be there for the time being. When I moved out to Portland, all of a sudden I wasn’t living in a suburb. While in school, you started painting, but then switched your focus to film? Yeah. When I was in Junior High school, I was painting because we had a really good ar t teacher who painted his own paintings in class. And there was a certain group of people that were like the art kids, who got attracted

to this one teacher. I a lso had an English teacher who was show ing us f ilms from the Canadian Film Board. So, I had this film side. We wou ld ma ke f ilms becausesome of the kids would get cameras and then we’d show them in class. I would actually make ex perimental films, but they were like the films that painters like Stan Brakhage made. You’d make a Stan Brakhage-like movie. You’d print on it, draw on it, paste moth wings on it. At the time, you are outside the city but inf luenced by what’s going on in the cit y, which was this A merican Avant-Garde under-ground cinema revolution. Lots of people were shaped by the movement. Andy Warhol was greatly inf luenced by the movement, but there were others like Kenneth Anger, Stan Vanderbeek, the Kuchar Brothers, and Derek Jarman, after he made his first film, Jubilee, which was kind of tr y ing to be too traditional, Jarman just tossed it and started shooting in Super 8 and made all of these amazing films like The Last of England. Later, I got to know him and he was telling me that he got his inspiration from the filmmakers in NYC in the early ‘60s. I realized that being in the city at the time I could go to the anthology film archives in the MoMA and see some of the films. Each filmmaker had created their ow n language. You looked at Hollywood films, like even Citizen Kane, which was one of the best of the Hollywood films; they didn’t go as far as the experimental films, and

as a kid that was very exciting. Is that school in Portland? Torn down; they were about to tear it down because of mold. It looked like the school had abandoned itself, as if a nuclear bomb was about to hit. Ever y thing was actually there, u ntouched, w it h basketba l ls i n t he g y m. There was even a coach’s jacket w ith hall passes in it. We used the overhead lights sometimes and we really tried to use the window light. The nex t one w ith no lights was Last Days. If there was a lamp there, then we’d use the light f rom the lamp. But when you had a budget, sometimes you’d make commercia l f i lms, li ke Good Wi l l Hu nt i ng a nd Finding Forrester. To Die For as well. It was a lower budget Sony f ilm but it was commercial. The other films were conceived by me, I knew everybody and I hired the producer. In the case of To Die For the producers put it together, not me. It wasn’t exactly a job we had w r itten the scr ipt for, but we got in on it early. It was a studio picture. Good Will Hu nting was M ira ma x, which was a sma ll company. They had this script that suggested a certain type of film; you read it and it felt like a script that I had seen before, like a Robert Redford f ilm or something. Mala Noche, Drugstore Cowboy, and My Own Private Idaho, those three films were all non-comm-ercial ideas. A film about a gay wino, grocery store

the director

clerk falling in love with a younger Mexican boy is just not something you’d see in a theater. And it proved hard for you to show that film? It was even hard to show at gay film festivals. It just didn’t have any place. Which is kind of why I did it. Same thing w ith Dr ugstore Cowboy, it wasn’t the usual. It was written by someone who had lived the druggy life, It was like pulp fiction, but also authentic. Then My Own Private Idaho was like that, too. So, those three had something in common and then To Die For was a dark comedy. It wasn’t particularly a cozy movie, it didn’t fit anywhere. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues was my attempt to make something that was commercial, but the whole transference of Tom Robbins to the screen was something the public wasn’t into. It was quite different than many of my films because it was my take on commercial filmmaking. I chose something that was hard, a screwball comedy, and that was the way I read Tom Robbins. What I hadn’t done was something super straight and that was what Good Will Hunting

suggested. Ben and Matt wrote it like straight American Cinema. The story was about someone who was enigmatic but also was f lawed and needed help, a traditional stor y, which I liked a lot but had never considered doing. It was one mov ie of mine that made a lot of money, and it was intended to ma ke a lot of money. The w r iters were w r it ing it li ke all of their favorite films — t here was even an action side to it. The idea was that Will Hunting was so smart that the government kept an eye on him, and monitored him because he would be a liability if anyone else got a hold of him. There were black cars always following him around and sometimes for fun, Will Hunting would try to ditch them and there would be these big action scenes. Psycho was the result of Good Will Hunting. I could do whatever I wanted because Good Will Hunting made money. When you ma ke money people inv ite you to do stu f f. I had a choice of what to do, and I made something experimental. I was reacting against the general habit of people doing remakes. People would grave-rob the scripts from the

’50s a nd cha nge the ending because the ending was too dark. I thought, why don’t I make an actual remake. For odd reasons, one of the things I was interested in was keeping Alfred Hitchcock’s hand alive, to try to keep the original in tact. For other people li ke academia a nd teachers at UCL A a nd exec ut ives i n Hol ly wood t he y t hou g ht I was challenging Hitchcock, when in fact I was copying him. Weren’t you also their choice? Yeah, they wanted me. They dug my f ilms. I knew Ben because his brother Casey was in To Die For. They just wanted it to happen more than anything. I think there were like 30 people who came and went, and I was one of them. Matt and Ben wanted to just go. And in the end, it all worked out. It was different and it wasn’t like I was doing anyone a favor. For me, the one that I was really cashing in was Psycho. It didn’t seem like I was selling out. Finding Forrester was a really good payday, but it was trying to see if I could go back into Good Will Hunting territory.

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Did you want to go back to that Good Will Hunting territory? Yeah because Finding Forrester read sort of like Hunting because it was warm and cozy and life affirming. It didn’t pan out to be a big hit but it did well. I decided that with Gerry I would just go small. I hadn’t made a small movie since Mala Noche. You just had a book published, One Step Big Shot. The book has 30 portraits. The guy who made this was aware of my old book, 108 Portraits, so he was trying to make a grouping of photographs that didn’t appear in 108 portraits. Like that one of Minnie Driver or Matt Damon. The 108 Por traits had been pr inted when I took that picture. The one of Ken Kesey, also in this book, was also in 108 Portraits. So the stuff you showed with Andy Warhol in Eugene? The one in Eugene with Warhol was one of these, yea h. It was the same curator, Lar r y Fong fromthe University of Oregon, Jordan Schnitzer Museum. There were Warhol’s photographs that were little SX70s he’d make prints of and put them next to the photo. He made a print of Mick Jagger. My side of the room were small Polaroids and then six blowups. They also showed a William Burroughs video where he was reading a poem and one

for Allen Ginsberg that I had done, which was a video for one of the poems that he made into a song. That was really my first art show, which was last June. And then I showed at the PDX Gallery.

white print. I was in the process of making a book with Twin Palms. I was trying to make good prints for this book they were curating. I was making color prints for that reason; I used some of t hese pr i nts for t he show.

Did you ever expect to have a show of your photos? Well yeah, I used that film, Polaroid 665. But all the films are discontinued, and after taking a few pictures of people I rea lized that if I used the f ilm that had a negative, I would have a huge detailed negative and you could have a show. Actually, the Eugene show wasn’t my first; I did have a show at Jameson Thomas Galler y in 1993, which was quite extensive, their whole gallery filled with big blow-ups. I was meet i ng a lot of i nterest i ng people, and in the end, a lot of the people I shot in ’89 ended up being famous, like Noah Wyle, or John Cameron Mitchell. They were geeky 19-year-old kids trying to be actors who hadn’t gotten too far. So now, those photos are very interesting because these people who I shot are now more established. I had the negatives and I had the little Polaroid print, which is not as detailed. I was trying different things, and I arrived at this way to print which was on a “comp maker color printer” which would print a little bit sepia, but acheive all the nuances and the grey areas t hat were being missed by t he black a nd

Interview by Joshua Blank

the director

“Everything’s changing so fast that it’s sometimes hard to keep up.” —gus Van sant

A LIGHT IN THE STORM

the films

the director

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THE Films

Lionsgate Rate R 102 Minutes Crime | Drama

drugstore cowboy Plot Summary The operative word in Drugstore Cowboy is “drug”. Matt Dillon plays the leader of a group of dopeheads who wander around the country robbing pharmacies to feed their habits. Dillon’s chums include doltish James Le Gros and teen-age junkie Heather Graham; also along for the ride is Dillon’s wife Kelly Lynch. Their nemesis is cop James Remar, whom Dillon takes perverse delight in humiliating. When one of the young addicts dies of an overdose, it promps Dillon to try to go straight, a task complicated by w ife Ly nch’s determination to stay high and by the corrupting presence of an ex-priest, played by Naked Lunch author William Burroughs. Drugstore Cowboy was director Gus Van Sant’s breakthrough picture. Writen by Hal Erickson

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“ I was once a shameless full-time dope fiend.”

— Bob

THE Films

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Warner Bros. Rate R 103 Minutes Drama | Romance

My Own Private Idaho Plot Summary Gus Van Sant’s dreamtime riff on Shakespeare’s “Henry IV, Parts I and II” features River Phoenix as Mike Waters, a narcoleptic male hustler who is first seen drifting on a stretch of highway in Idaho. Mike shifts from Seattle to Portland, where he has taken up with Scott Favor (Keanu Reeves), who is also a hustler. The difference between them is Mike’s sleepy state betrays an uncertain future, while Scott is ready to inherit a fortune from his father within a week. Mike feels a real affection for Scott, but Scott does not believe men can really love each other. Besides, Scott is mostly hustling as a means of slumming and killing time before he inherits his money. Mike, however, delusionally thinks Scott will continue with his life as a drifter after receiving his inheritance. Mike’s belief is shared by the dregs of Portland, who live out of an aband-oned hotel with their spiritual leader Bob (f ilm director William Richert). They’re convinced Scott’s fortune will benefit them all, when in reality Scott has other plans. Writen by Paul Brenner

THE Films

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THE Films

“This road will never end. It probably goes all around the world.”

— Mike Waters

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THE Films

LIONGATE Rate R 126 Minutes Drama

GOOD WILL HUNTING Plot Summary Matt Damon and Ben A f f leck co-scr ipted a nd sta r i n t h is d r a ma , se t i n Boston a nd Cambr idge, about rebellious 20-year-old MIT janitor Will Hunting (Damon), gifted with a photographic memory, who hangs out with his South Boston bar buddies, his best friend Chuckie (Aff leck), and his aff luent British girlfriend Skylar (Minnie Driver). After MIT professor Lambeau (Stellan Skarsgard) stumps students with a challenging math formula on a hallway blackboard, Will anonymously leaves the correct solution, prompting Lambeau to track the elusive young genius. As Will’s problems with the police escalate, Lambeau offers an out, but with two conditions — v isits to a therapist and weekly math sessions. Will agrees to the latter but refuses to cooperate with a succession of therapists. Lambeau then contacts his former classmate, therapist Sean McGuire (Robin Williams), an instructor at Bunker Hill Community College. Both are equally stubborn, but Will is finally forced to deal with both his past and his future. Writen by Bhob Stewart

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THE Films

“Real loss is only possible when you love something more than you love yourself.”

— Sean Maguire

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Sony pictures Rate PG-13 136 Minutes Drama

Finding Forrester Plot Summary In the spirit of his Oscar-winning Good Will Hunting, Gus Van Sant directs this tale of the unlikely bond that develops between an aging, reclusive novelist na med For rester (Sea n Conner y) — w ho hasn’t w r itten any thing since winning a Pulitzer Prize decades earlier — a nd Jamal (Rob Brown), a 16-year-old with a hidden desire to be a writer. When Jamal is cited for his athleticism in basketball by an elite Manhattan prep school, he is forced to adapt to an environment far from his South Bronx upbringing, and a small mishap leads him to the eccentric, uneasy Forrester. After their initial apprehension of each other, they begin to fuel each other’s fire for writing, and become unlikely friends despite their ages and backgrounds. Forrester’s devotion to Ja ma l becomes en ha nced when he mu st defend allegations of plagiarism enforced by Professor Crawford (F. Murray Abraham), jeopardizing Jamal’s future. The f ilm also features Anna Paquin, Busta Rhymes, and Zane Copeland, Jr.. Writen by Jason Clark

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“Writers write things to give readers something to read.”

— William Forrester

THE Films

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THE Films

IFC Films Rate R 85 Minutes Crime | Drama

Paranoid Park Plot Summary A teenage skateboarder has a run-in w ith a security guard that results in the man’s death. Conf used, fear f u l, and evasive, the teen wanders the streets of Portland as his life takes a turn for the worse in director Gus Van Sant’s screen adaptation of author Blake Nelson’s grim coming-of-age tome. Alex (Gabe Nevins) is a withdrawn 16-year-old boy who has recently discovered Paranoid Park — a massive skate park in Portland, OR. The Portland skate punks built Paranoid Park so they could have a place to cruise the concrete without being hassled by the cops. One day, after befriending a local skater and anarchist at the park, Alex decides that a little adventure might be just the thing to help him forget about his problems back home. When Alex and his new friend attempt to hop a train and a security guard gives chase, tragedy strikes so quickly that the two teens are barely able to comprehend what has just happened. In the aftermath of the fatal accident, one man is robbed of life and two teens are left to ponder the consequences of their youthful recklessness. Alex doesn’t think that

anyone will believe him if he explains how events really unfolded that night, but why would anyone have cause to think he wasn’t telling the truth in the first place? As the police launch an investigation into the death and Alex begins to express himself in a deeply personal diary, the audience is able to experience the pain and confusion of adolescence from the perspective of a young boy who was only seeking to escape from reality when suddenly confronted by the concept of mortality. Writen by Jason Buchanan

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THE Films

“I just feel like there’s something outside of normal life.”

— Alex

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the events

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Schedule

Date one

Date Two

Date Three

Friday July 20

Saturday July 21

Sunday July 22

Lincoln High School 1600 S.W. Salmon Street Portland, Oregon

Events 07:00 PM Opening Night 09:30 PM A Conversation With Gus Van Sant

Events 10:00 AM 12:30 AM 02:30 PM 04:30 PM 07:00 PM 10:00 PM

Drugstore Cowboy My Own Private Idaho Good Will Hunting Finding Forrester Paranoid Park Photography Exhibition

the Events

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Photography ExhibitioN

Gus Van Sant began using a Polaroid camera regularly while he was a photo assistant in New York in the ‘70s. The Polaroid was often used to test camera exposures before a final picture was taken. He later transferred this practice to his film work, where he used a Polaroid to test lighting set-ups. Then, in the late ‘80s, he began to use the Polaroid to help cast actors for his films. The head shots of actors were lined up nex t to one a not her to judge how dif ferent actors looked together or in relation to one another. So the Polaroid camera was a practical tool, Van Sant says, not a vehicle of artistic intention. Unlike many who have a fondness for Polaroid cameras, Van Sant didn’t intend his photos to be a personal diary. Writen by D.K. Row

the Events

Colophon

type Freight Text, Freight Sans design Chin I Lee photography Chin I Lee, Caitlyn Adkins course GR612 Intevgrated Communication Academy of Art University Instructors Hunter Wimmer, Christopher Morlan contact 1489 Webster St. Apt.508 San Francisco, CA 94115 415 640 5685 stutnick@hotmail.com

A LIGHT IN THE STORM