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Gus Van Sant: Gay indie maverick

	More on "Last Days" A review of the movie Profile: Michael Pitt Explore Cobain's Seattle haunts Gus Van Sant's Portland More Gus Van Sant "Mala Noche" review "My New Friend" review "My Own Private Idaho" review Also on PlanetOut More Movies More Entertainment PROMOTION

LGBT film guru Jenni Olson sat down recently to talk with the director about his latest feature film, "Last Days," an exploration of the final days of a troubled rock star based on Kurt Cobain.

When Mark Finch and I were programming the San Francisco International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival in 1993, we asked you to tell us your Top 10 movies and the filmmakers who have influenced your work. You cited Stanley Kubrick as your greatest influence, and listed "Clockwork Orange" as your top film. Is this still the case? I was so excited to see that you listed Chantal Akerman's "Jeanne Dielman" as an influence in the "Last Days" presskit.

Yeah, this is very "Jeanne Dielman"-like. I guess I always feel it's weird to answer those questions. It's always the one you can think of in the moment, and then you realize later, "Oh it's not." But I guess everyone sort of studies Kubrick on their way. He's somebody who's sort of self-made. I guess I would say the reason I'm influenced by Kubrick is he sort of started just doing it by himself and then continued on. Like, everything he did was actually something that he invented, like an autodidact.

What about a favorite movie or a favorite gay movie?

It's really hard to say. I think that Almodóvar is the best serious gay filmmaker who makes movies that are interesting to me. I really like "Law of Desire."

You have such a great sense of humor. For such a dark movie, "Last Days" has a lot of really funny stuff in it. Can we ever expect to see an unconventional gay romantic comedy from Gus Van Sant?

Um, probably not a comedy. But there have been quite a number of projects that never made their way, I guess Harvey Milk being one of them. There was one about Issan Dorsey. His story is really this fantastic kind of [walk] through gay history starting in San Francisco. Some friends of mine and I wrote a script, and Jeffrey Friedman ("The Celluloid Closet," "Paragraph 175") was going to do it for a while, and I don't know what happened. I think it's back, sort of up for grabs now.

But it's kind of a great story, and it just was one of those things that, I guess unless you play the game, like attaching a star and saying, "We have Jim Carrey to play Issan Dorsey," nobody really listens to you. And I'm always kind of unwilling to play that game, because I think they should be making the film because they want to make the film, not because they want the movie star to have a vehicle.

Harvey Milk fell through for different reasons. I mean, we had a script that I thought wasn't ready, and I wanted to get going on it and do it differently. There were a bunch of scripts that Oliver Stone had written, and I tried one with a different writer, and ... it sort of resembled the other scripts. There was no way to get out of this kind of Oliver Stone patina. It resembled "The Doors," or something like that. It had all the greatest moments of Harvey's life, but because it was so busy keeping track of all the main things, and especially Dan White, it ignored what I thought was important: the '70s in the Castro. I wanted to do something that was focused more on a different point of view, so that it somehow encapsulated the rest of the goings-on and didn't so much concern itself with City Hall, except for at the end. So it was hard.

But Bryan Singer's going to do Harvey Milk now -- that's what the latest announcement is. I have been back involved with that project through the years. I wrote a whole other script again later, which I liked, and then Warner Brothers -- you know, they never really want to do it because they're afraid of it. And it's again about getting the stars -- I mean, I guess that's the way you play. I just think it's really fake. I mean, you can get the star afterwards.

Your films have often had plots about gay men pining over troubled young straight guys (or you've simply told stories of troubled young straight guys) -- all the way back to "Mala Noche" and your early explicitly autobiographical shorts, like "Five Ways to Kill Yourself," "My New Friend," and "Ken Death Gets Out of Jail," where you would get these cute straight boys to talk to you on camera. I hate it when people ask me this question, but can you talk about how this theme taps into your own psyche?

Hmm. Yes, well, these characters are really interesting to me. Actually, in "My Own Private Idaho," it was River Phoenix who wanted his character to be gay, or to be in love with Keanu's character. Originally the characters were both straight. River wanted there to be this affection, this love, and to have his character tell Keanu that he loved him. [Smiles.] Maybe he wanted to tell Keanu that. ...

I was talking with a friend last night about the question of whether Kurt Cobain was perhaps gay or bisexual. You depict him in a black slip and makeup for part of the film, and there are no intimate scenes to speak of with Asia Argento. Do you have a perspective on Cobain's sexuality?

He once said that his idea for getting out of Aberdeen [Cobain's hometown] when he was young was that he would hitchhike to Seattle and become a kept boy. It's so funny that he would have that as this vision. Like, not owning a record label or something, but basically finding a john to take care of him.

He did this interview with the Advocate once where he was asked his favorite movie. He had just seen "No Skin Off My Ass," by Bruce LaBruce, and he said that was his favorite. I only met him once. He was probably straight, really, but he was very cute and charismatic. [Pauses, laughs.] But I don't know, I never slept with him!