Gus Van Sant A Thousand Compositions
Since the mid-1980s, Gus Van Sant has directed a succession of films that, though often unpredictable from one to the next, has been consistently engaged in an ongoing study of storytelling and memory, life on the harsh margins of modern American society, and the disaffection of youth. After early films such as Mala Noche (1985), Drugstore Cowboy (1989), and My Own Private Idaho (1991) secured him a position as a celebrated indie director and a leading proponent of the New Queer Cinema movement, Van Sant won massive mainstream success with Good Will Hunting (1997), written by and starring then newcomers Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. He returned to his independent roots with what he has called his “death trilogy”—Gerry (2002), Elephant (2003), and Last Days (2005). The director’s latest film, Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot (2018), premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year.
Once a painting student at Rhode Island School of Design, Van Sant has always taken photographs. He first published his Polaroids in 1992, in a limited-edition book, 108 Portraits, now a collector’s item. More recently, Van Sant’s photographs were included, along with films and paintings, in Gus Van Sant/Icons (2016–18), a traveling exhibition organized by La Cinémathèque française. Having sold his home in Portland, Oregon, the city with which his films are often associated, the filmmaker now divides his time between Palm Springs and Los Angeles, where Jonathan Griffin met him at his modest hillside house not far from the Griffith Observatory, in Los Feliz.
Jonathan Griffin: Well before your directorial debut, in 1985, with , you were making photographs.
