Written by Peter Bowen
[The following article originally appeared in Filmmaker Magazine to commemorate Gus Van Sant being honored at this year’s IFP Gotham Awards.]
In the early ’70s as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, Gus Van Sant made a momentous decision. He changed his major from painting to film. But Van Sant didn’t leave painting behind. Rather he brought to film a painter’s concern for the materiality of the image. In his latest feature, Milk, a historical portrait of the slain gay San Francisco politician, Van Sant does not simply reconstruct a chronology of events but breathes life into a series of tableaux from another time. Milk lives in this strangely real world from the past as well as in our imaginations. He is a figure who still speaks to us.
As an artist, Van Sant makes moving pictures––moving both in the sense that he animates the frozen composition of photography and in the way he invests those images with emotion. In Milk, this becomes an almost literal practice as archival footage frequently dissolves into the film’s “real life” universe, and Harvey Milk (Sean Penn), his lovers––Scott Smith (James Franco) and Jack Lira (Diego Luna)––and his band of political pranksters, from Cleve Jones (Emile Hirsch) to Anne Kronenberg (Alison Pill), take over San Francisco. But Milk’s San Francisco belongs neither to the past or the present, and neither to history or fiction, but rather, as with so much of Van Sant’s work, it partakes of all these worlds. In shooting Milk, Harris Savides elegantly elides the difference between documentary and the dramatic. The sight comes from actual footage, gay photography, personal memory and dramatic transformation and the sounds from Puccini’s opera, disco diva Sylvester and the actual noise of modern – and past -- San Francisco.
From the start, Van Sant has unfolded his stories about sad-sack lovers and good-humored hustlers in the real world, like the wet, scraggily streets and suburbs of Portland in Mala Noche and Drugstore Cowboy, the immense sublimity of nature in Last Days and Gerry or the real back streets of Boston in Good Will Hunting. Even the Hollywood imagination can become a real world as, for example, in his faithful reconstruction of Psycho, he pays the fictional realm the same reverence he maintains for the archival footage in Milk. In Van Sant’s filmic world, the “real” and the fictional are not opposing forces, but collaborators and partners. In Milk and his other work, the photographic images present a tactile materiality that far exceeds the controlling needs of fiction, and his fictions bring to the natural realm an unexpected poetry and perspective.
FilmInFocus: When I started thinking about your career, I originally thought this was your first reality-based, historical film, but then I realized most of your films are based on some sort of real event, a piece of history refracted through your aesthetic lens.
Gus Van Sant: Yes, I guess the real difference between this film and my other ones is that we use the real characters’ names here. Although in Mala Noche, the characters of Walt and Pepper have the same names as the people they are based on.
What about your other films?
Drugstore Cowboy was based on a novel written by James Fogle who had lived that life. There was a real Bob (whose name wasn’t actually Bob) and a real Dianne. James LeGros played Rick who was the based on the real James Fogle. These were real people that we could meet and talk to. My Own Private Idaho was based on guy I used to know. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues was not based on real people. However, there was someone that Tom Robbins said inspired him, but I think she was a waitress he met at a bar in Vegas. And To Die For was based on the Pamela Smart case, which was one of the first real television media events. Good Will Hunting was loosely based on people that Ben and Matt knew. It was fashioned into a fictional film, but Tim Affleck, Ben’s father, was actually a janitor at Harvard who was very intellectual and could have probably answered those questions in the film.
In most of these films, the real elements are somewhat buried, but Milk appears to be a transparent look at an actual historical event. How was that different for you?
It is mostly the same process of trying to learn from reality that we go through in the other films, of trying to understand the logic behind the things that happened. But using real people and their names in Milk was difficult because you can never really get it completely true. You are doing a play about real characters, but it doesn’t have fictional base. So in a way it’s more like pantomime, the replication of something that happened in real life with the characters called by their real names. It’s like an opera about those people. You can never really get to the real place.
To read the rest of this article, please visit http://www.filminfocus.com/article/mighty_real__gus_van_sant_on__em_milk__em_
Tags: harvey milk, sean penn, gus van sant
