Gus Van Sant is a multi-talented artist who excels in several creative arenas. He's a filmmaker, painter, writer, and musician. It would be annoying if it weren't for the fact that he's so unassuming. He was at the Palm Springs International Short Film Festival recently to receive the Spirit of Short Film award, and participate in a Q&A and screening of some of his shorts. At one point during the discussion, moderator PSISFF Director Darryl Macdonald mentioned his work as a musician and proded him to a little self-promotion, asking him to tell everybody where they could purchase his albums. Van Sant declined the opportunity and moved the conversation forward.
His mainstream success with films like Drugstore Cowboy, To Die For, Milk, and Good Will Hunting, has not altered his experimental filmmaker heart. He continued to make shorts even after his box office success with feature films. One of his more recent shorts, Ballad of the Skeletons features a close up of Allen Ginsberg reciting his poem against a backdrop of archive film and music by Paul McCartney. The provocative 4-minute piece must have been one of the last things Ginsberg did since it was made in 1997, the year of Ginsberg's death.
Van Sant also collaborated with William Burroughs. He talked about being a longtime Burroughs fan after reading Naked Lunch and other Burroughs selections and he took a liking to a story called, The Discipline of DE. He thought the story would make an interesting short film. So he tracked Burroughs down and it didn't take much tracking. He found him easy enough in a New York phone book. This was in 1982, a time when you could still track down a literary icon in a phone book. When he told Burroughs he wanted the rights to the story so he could make a short film based on it, Burroughs made a sarcastic comment about what a non-money maker that would be and gave him permission free of charge. Thus began their friendship.
The storyline of The Discipline of DE is about "DE" - about going through life in a "Do Easy," extremely efficient fashion. It's droll and feels dated (even earlier than '82), but got into the New York Film Festival and Van Sant says it was a "big start" for him.
Burroughs had a memorable role in Van Sant's 1989 film Drugstore Cowboy as Tom the Priest, but it wasn't the end of their collaboration on shorts. In 1991, Van Sant made A Thanksgiving Prayer with Burroughs. It features Burroughs reciting an Allen Ginsberg poem with music by Phillip Glass and Paul McCartney. It isn't your grandmother's Thanksgiving prayer, that's for sure. It's pure Burroughs and Ginsberg. One of the more mild lines is, "Thanks for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business." (The film can be found on youTube.)
Out of the all the shorts screened, I most enjoyed the two video diary pieces. They were raw and funny, and Van Sant was in them. They're two of seven 2-1/2 minute films he made once a year in the '80s while he was in New York trying to save money for his first feature. He describes the shorts as basically "one liner jokes" that cost him about $50 a piece. Interestingly, they are very much like a million other short films found today on youTube that showcase any silly thing about a person's life, but Van Sant's were made in the mid '80s.
One of them, called Junior, could easily have been the first viral cat video if youTube was around then. It shows Van Sant's cat, Junior, chasing a circle of sunlight dancing on the ground while Van Sant plays guitar.
Van Sant took question after question from the audience at the Palm Springs screening. He talked about his music videos (he wrongly thought music videos would be easier than making commercials); the turning point in his career ( Drugstore Cowboy was his first real job - "before that I hadn't made an honest living"); the serendipity of fnding his actors (he found the four boys for his short 4 Boys in a Volvo at a Grateful Dead concert); and how sometimes it's easier to direct a multi-million dollar feature film than a short with a bunch of friends ("it's harder to get your sister to do something on film than someone like Nicole Kidman").
When it comes to Van Sant's approach to filmmaking, possibly the most telling remarks he made that point to his willingness to still pursue the experimental were comments he made about cinematographer Christopher Doyle who he worked with on Paranoid Park (Doyle is on the left in the photo above). He told a story about how he was looking at some of the film Doyle shot and noticed it was out of focus. He mentioned this to Doyle. Doyle brushed off his concern and shouted excitedly, "Focus sucks!" And that was when Van Sant knew he was going to enjoy working with Doyle. He laughed at the memory.
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