The Times of Gus Van Sant

Van Sant's art school background has a lot to do with the look and feel of the films he makes. He resonates not so much to Howard Hawks as to the undergrounders like Stan Brakhage, Ron Rice, Taylor Mead, and of course, Andy Warhol. In personal demeanor Van Sant shares Warhol's eerily removed manner of implacable, ironic cool, and he also has Warhol's fondness for playing the magnet to an ongoing sideshow of street characters and putting their stories into his films. But the resemblance ends there.

The elegant eye and poetic touch that give a film like Idaho an unmistakable mind (one in which salmon leap from some distant, interior river, and houses fall from the sky) are pure Van Sant. So is the humanizing impulse that makes you curious and nonjudgmental about people that the residents of Darien, Connecticut regard as scum. The inspiration for the more refined side of Van Sant's sensibility comes from, among other places, Orson Welles, whose Chimes at Midnight influenced the Henry IV subplot of Idaho, and, especially, Stanley Kubrick, who made Van Sant's favorite film of all time.

"A Clockwork Orange is the best film I ever saw. It's hard for me to defend it, though. Kubrick is really cruel at heart. I really think he is."

Leaving aside whatever appealed to the younger Van Sant about the violent adventures of Alex, what appeals to the grown-up Van Sant about Kubrick's filmmaking is clear:

"The whole thing about A Clockwork Orange is that it was a really low budget movie, like a million-and-a-half dollar film in 1971, which was probably about the kind of film I make today. When he couldn't make his dream project, an extravaganza about Napoleon, he figured he could make Clockwork really cheap. He figured out how to light it and shoot it with a small crew--he just went back to something he'd done in the '50s when he made Killer's Kiss and all those films. It's a complete discipline, a filmmaker making do with what he has. I could never get the camera to do what I wanted on Drugstore or Idaho or Cowgirls the way I did on Mala Noche. There's like 60 people on the set. The whole thing is to get the crew smaller. Like Kubrick. But I'm not him, I just started. If you told people you were going to have five people on the set, they might think you were going crazy. I'm pretty sure if I told the bond people I wanted five people on the set they'd freak out. But maybe not next year."

If you have to have 60 people on your set you might as well make films for $20 million, instead of $5 million, and that's what Van Sant set out to do with Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, which he's referred to as "a great women's film...a chance to make the ultimate remake of The Women, the great film by George Cukor." Cowgirls was a big, popular stoned-out novel of the '70s, a must-read for anyone who read, "which is probably why I got it," says Van Sant. "I just barely achieved that niche."

Like Joseph Heller's Something Happened, Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool Aid Acid Test and William S. Burroughs's Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead, Cowgirls was a book the aspiring, unconnected Van Sant immediately knew he wanted to make into a movie someday. Many years later, after the success of Drugstore Cowboy, director Alan Rudolph introduced Van Sant to author Tom Robbins. "Tom and I pitched it around town and nobody cared about it. I remember meeting with Mike Medavoy when he was at Orion, and he kinda asked about it, and he had his cigar and he said, 'Yeah, I remember that book, it was a big hit, yeah.' And nothing happened until he got to TriStar. And then he called us and said, you know, 'Cowgirls. I want to do it.' And I said, 'Well, okay, but I'm busy and I don't know if I can come and pitch it.' And he said, 'You don't have to pitch it to me. Just do it.'"

When Van Sant came back with a finished script, "Medavoy said, 'Well, I can't do it.' I could never figure out why they couldn't do it."

"Maybe Medavoy didn't remember the book all that well," I suggest, "and got a shock when he saw what it's really about." Which is, by the way, a hitchhiker with huge thumbs who goes to a ranch peopled by drugged-out lesbians.

"I don't think so. I think it was just money."

"He didn't have problems with TriStar bringing out a film in which people drug whooping cranes?"

"Could be. I don't think so. I don't think those guys are all that afraid. They just want to make money."

"That's what I'm talking about."

"People drugging whooping cranes, and they're not going to make money? I don't think so. I think that might help it make money. Especially considering the spotted owl. The temperament of American society is very cruel. They'd just as soon drug everybody.

When a studio executive tells me they don't think they're going to make that much money, I understand. But with Cowgirls I think they could. It was totally proven as a novel. And now a Western has won the Academy Award, so what's the problem? There was a Japanese problem, I think."

Probably no one but Van Sant thinks Cowgirls will obviously make money because Unforgiven won Best Picture, but in any case, Fine Line Features bought Cowgirls from TriStar and it's been made. Along with surprises like Pat Morita, Angie Dickinson and John Hurt, and major question marks like Lorraine Bracco, it predictably stars some of the best of young Hollywood--Uma Thurman (in the lead, as big-thumbed Sissy), Keanu Reeves, and River Phoenix's sister Rain in a crucial role.

Van Sant is brilliant with actors, and young actors who generally have the choice between iffy independent quirk-projects or studio drivel line up for him. River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves are personal friends of Van Sant's after the experience of Idaho, and they wanted in on Cowgirls. "I never talk to them about their careers. Because you figure, I know their careers and they know my career and we just know it. Keanu's involved in Cowgirls because I said I was gonna do it, and he said, 'Oh I gotta play this role.'" (Phoenix ended up not doing the cameo he'd been set for.)

If Tom Robbins's pothead fiction can be realized on-screen, Van Sant is the best bet to bring it off. But for the moment, perhaps because San Francisco is sparkling peacefully for miles outside the window next to us, I can't help thinking back to the film Van Sant isn't going to make when he's finished with Cowgirls. What might the saga of Harvey Milk have been like, run through Van Sant's camera?

"Harvey's scene was exactly like Queer Nation," says Van Sant, "only it was the '70s. Queer Nation is '90s, a bunch of kids who don't give a shit and don't care if you do either, they just want you to fuckin' listen to them. Seventies is, 'It's groovy, man,' and 'we're groovy' and 'you're groovy.' That's what Harvey was. I was interested in how the '60s segued into the '70s. There were hippies and hippie gays. Harvey was a hippie and he came to San Francisco and said, 'Castro Street is my home. These are my people. And I'm bored, what'll I do? I'll lead my people.' The rise of a gay neighborhood and the rise of the gay politician, that's all very interesting.

"I wanted to end the movie in Washington," Van Sant explains. "Because Harvey always talked about a march on Washington. There was a march the year after he was killed, and he was in the midst of the people marching. It seemed to me the ultimate extension of the story was that it should go to Washington, not just remain in San Francisco. But they weren't keen on my ending." Then he adds, laughing, "They weren't that keen on anything I'd come up with.

"I still haven't worked for a studio," says Van Sant, sipping a fresh margarita. "It comes down to fighting. It seems like Spike Lee and Oliver [Stone], they just fight. They say, 'Yeah I'll do exactly what you say,' and then they fight them and say, 'You bastard, you double-crossed me. I'm gonna fuck you.' And it's this big weird fight and the press is involved and then they get what they want by bullying. I'm not interested in that. I just wanna say, 'I'm gonna do it this way,' and they say, 'Okay, you're gonna do it this way.' And then I just do it. I don't want to get heavy."

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Virginia Campbell is one of the executive editors of Movieline.

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