Last Days

A director who is capable of crafting both deeply unconventional independent films and mainstream crowd-pleasers, Gus Van Sant has managed to carve an enviable niche for himself in Hollywood. Since debuting in 1985 with Mala Noche, Van Sant has become one of the premiere bards of dysfunction, populating his films with a parade of hustlers, junkies, psychopathic weather girls, homicidal teens, and troubled geniuses.

The son of a traveling salesman, Van Sant was born in Louisville, KY, on July 24, 1952. One constant in the director’s early years was his interest in painting and Super-8 filmmaking. Van Sant’s artistic leanings took him to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1970, where introduction to Avant-Garde cinema quickly inspired him to change his major from painting to cinema. After mobving to LA, Van Sant became fascinated by the existence of the marginalized section of L.A.‘s population, especially in context with the more ordinary prosperous world that surrounded them.Van Sant would repeatedly focus his work on those existing on society’s fringes, beginning with his 1985 Mala Noche, which was a tale of a doomed love between a gay liquor store clerk and a Mexican immigrant. The film featured some of the director’s hallmarks, notably an unfulfilled romanticism, a dry sense of the absurd, and the refusal to treat homosexuality as something deserving of judgment. Unlike many gay filmmakers, Van Sant, who had long been openly gay, declined to use same-sex relationships as fodder for overtly political statements, although such relationships would frequently appear in his films.Mala Noche earned its director almost overnight acclaim on the festival circuit. Later, with the assistance of independent production company Avenue, the director made Drugstore Cowboy, his 1989 film about four drug addicts who rob pharmacies to support their habit.The film’s exploration of the lives of those living on society’s outer fringes were mirrored in Van Sant’s next effort, the similarly acclaimed My Own Private Idaho (1991). Centering around the dealings of two male hustlers (River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves). The film won him an Independent Spirit Award for his screenplay, as well as greater prestige.

Van Sant’s next project, a 1994 adaptation of Tom Robbins’ Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, was an excessive flop, both commercially and critically. His next project, 1995’s To Die For, helped to restore his luster.The same year, he served as executive producer for Larry Clark’s Kids. In 1997 came true mainstream acceptance for the director; Good Will Hunting. Starring and written by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, the film, about a troubled, blue-collar genius, was a huge critical and commercial success. In addition to taking in more than 220 million dollars worldwide, it received a number of Academy Award nominations, including a Best Director nomination, and it won a Best Screenplay and a Best Supporting Actor Oscar. The unprecedented success of Good Will Hunting allowed Van Sant to pursue whatever project his heart desired, which ended up being an unusually faithful remake of the Alfred Hitchcock classic Psycho. In addition to directing, Van Sant also devoted considerable energy to releasing two albums and published a novel, Pink.

Van Sant fared somewhat better with 2000’s Finding Forrester, a drama about a high-school student from the Bronx (Rob Brown) who becomes unlikely friends with a crusty, reclusive author (Sean Connery). Later Van Sant – longing to return to more-intimate production methods — decided to leave behind big-budget studio filmmaking for his next two features. Inspired by the works of Hungarian director Bela Tarr and American maverick John Cassavetes, Van Sant retreated to the deserts of Argentina, Utah, and Death Valley for 2002’s Gerry. It took Gerry over a year to make it to theaters, in which time Van Sant began production on his next film, the controversial Elephant. Melding improvisational long takes like those in Gerry with Savides’ fluid camerawork, the finished film provoked strong reactions from audiences at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival, who either embraced or rejected Van Sant’s aesthetic decision not to offer a definitive rationale for his characters’ homicidal tendencies. The Cannes jury awarded Elephant with their top prize, the Palm d’Or, and Van Sant with his first Best Director statue from the festival.

(From http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:115102~T1)