Gus's Good Will - Gus Van Sant & Chasing Ben

With the success of his Oscar-nominated film Good Will Hunting, Gus Van Sant is hot. In an exclusive interview, the director talks about fame, fortune, and the star appeal of Matt Damon

It's little like trying to picture Casablanca with Ronald Reagan in the Humphrey Bogart role. Mel Gibson was set to direct Matt Damon and Ben Affleck's screenplay, Good Will Hunting. But prior commitments intervened. "When Miramax told us the director was going to be Gus Van Sant, I was beside myself," says Damon. "I knew what Gus had done or Matt Dillon in Drugstore Cowboy and River Phoenix in My Own Private Idaho. I was excited about his helping me bring an edge to the character."

If ever a screenplay were in search of an edge, it is this oft-told tale of a bad boy waiting to discover his true inner glorious self. And that edge is immediately recognizable to anyone familiar with Van Sant's other films. "We didn't offer the kind of street kids Gus is used to," Affleck says of the characters in his script. "But it's still young guys trying to find an alternate home for themselves. It played into one of Gus's favorite themes: the notion of a person traying to create his own family."

As for the "street kids" Affleck mentioned, he and Damon do hold down jobs in Good Will Hunting, but Van Sant has made sure to retain the feel of grimy asphalt under their boots. Along with Dillon in Drugstore and Phoenix in Idaho, these boys are not-so-distant cousins of Joaquin Phoenix's high school hit man in Van Sant's To Die For. In Hollywood they call that the Hitchcock Effect: directors who keep replicating a certain type of hero or heroine in movie after movie. For Hitch, it was always the same icy blond. For Van Sant, it's the young and the skanky.

His world, however, embraces much more than a bunch of street kids. Look for a moment at the movies in Van Sant's head, the movies that he wants to make but that Hollywood may never let him make. There was the aborted Andy Warhol biopic and the still-shelved Harvey Milk project, The Mayor of Castro Street. There are the two screenplays he is writing. One is about gay cartoonist John Callahan, a paraplegic now living in Portland, Ore. The other is being adapted from David Schneider's 1993 biography, Street Zen: The Life and Work of Issan Dorsey, about a World War II veteran turned transvestite turned Zen guru turned AIDS caretaker who died from complications of the disease in 1991 and whom Van Sant calls "a kind of gay Forrest Gump." If anyone can get these films made in the next millennium, it is Gus Van Sant. The 45-year-old director is suddenly a player of incredible clout, thanks to the critical and popular success of Good Will Hunting, which, not so ironically, he refers to as his most conventional film.

Living in Portland, Ore., do you feel like an outsider here in Hollywood?

Hmm. Not really. I've done too many things with too many people who are in the inside to be an outsider in Hollywood.

Bud by and large you are perceived as an outsider.

You know, the outside culture becomes the inside culture eventually. It evolves.

The theme of the outsider or rebel is a very gay one, and that seems quite prevalent in your films, including Good Will Hunting.

A friend of mine told me that Good Will Hunting had this closet-homosexual theme running through it. I always thought there was a closet something going on. I was never really sure if it was with the friendship between Will and Chuckie [Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, respectively] or with Will's relationship with Skylar [Minnie Driver]--it wasn't quite working out.

A few of us, even during filming, Joked about it and saw little odds and ends of closet activity. But a friend of mine said that the mathematics was the closeted part of [Will's] life. He can't share the math with his friends, but he does it at nights, in dark hall-ways, kind of clandestine. It's almost a sexual activity. It takes the psychologist to tell him that there is something wrong here, that he's hiding, that he has to sneak around at night to do it.

Do you agree with that interpretation?

Sure. Well, not literally. I don't think it's a metaphor for a sexually closeted person. Maybe an intellectually closeted person.

There are a lot of movie directors who are gay but who are not out of the closet to the general public. Did you ever consider not coming out publicly?

The subjects of my films have sort of ... they were about gay characters. They were what brought me out of the closet.

So it was really your work that brought you out?

Yeah, the films brought me out. That's what my interest was. These gay characters and gay stories. And I was gay. My private life became my public life.

Were you always out?

I wasn't really out in the 1970s, At the time I lived in Los Angeles. From the stories that friends of mine who were into the club scene there told me, it sounded incredibly wild and crazy--lively, late, exciting.

So when your friends would tell you these wild stories about the gay clubs, did you take off with them to partake in the excitement?

No, it really wasn't a life that I was connected with.

What life were you connected with?

I was just doing my films. I was locked in my own film world. And I was writing scripts.

When did you unlock yourself?

Probably when I was around 30. I was a late bloomer.

Is there a character in your movies that is the closest you've gotten to putting yourself on film?

I'm not sure if, in fact, I have a character.

Well, how about the Keanu Reeves character in My Own Private Idaho? There are some similarities between him and you: You're from an affluent family, your father was president of a company, and you didn't exactly follow in his footsteps.

All of the stories of my films have always had this dispossessed family and a searching for home and an embracing of a pseudofamily. Drugstore Cowboy, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, To Die For, Idaho--they all have that as a strong central theme. There aren't characters who are like me, but the stories are like me. They're my stories.

How does that theme of family relate specifically to your life?

I had a family that moved around a lot in the United States, and I was always amassing a new group of friends whenever we moved. We would stay in a place for only a year or two. I grew up in seven different cities. Each city had its own group of friends. In my making a new group of friends over and over again, these themes became ingrained. For whatever reason, if it's just by chance, I'm drawn to these stories.

The creation and embracing of an extended family is also a very gay theme.

Yeah, you could liken that to it. Not having an acceptance of one's sexuality within your family and the embracing of another family, a gay family.

Your first film was a featurette called Alice in Hollywood, which you made when you were living in Los Angeles during the 1970s. Now that you know Los Angeles a bit more intimately, did you get it right?

Yeah, I got the part that I knew right. It was a sort of Valley of the Dolls story, about this girl climbing her way to TV stardom. The character reminds me of Nicole Kidman in To Die For. It was about-what happens in Hollywood when a person becomes famous: They drift away from their old friends because of fame. They're drawn into an area that doesn't include their old friends. It happens all the time. I see it more and more now. But I hadn't seen that before, because when I made Alice I'd just moved to Hollywood. I was working for a bunch of people who were on different levels of achievement and stardom.

Has fame taken you away from your old friends?

In my eyes it hasn't.

Why?

Because I'm not that famous. I don't think I am. I'm not Matt Damon, the poor man.

Poor man?

It's interesting to work with Matt. Only three months ago we were walking down Hollywood Boulevard, and I said, "Kiss your anonymity good-bye." People were already recognizing him. And he wanted to know why people were looking at him and whispering about him. It was almost like he didn't know what that was. And then it happened overnight. And he can't go back. He's so young, and it's only been two months, and it's stardom. You can't go back. It's like losing your virginity. You can't be a virgin again.

In Good Will Hunting, Matt had an overt sexuality that he didn't have in The Rainmaker. Did you feel that too?

Hmm. Yeah, I think I know what you mean.

Are straight directors, such as The Rainmaker's Francis Ford Coppola, not as good at eroticizing their leading men as gay directors?

No, I don't think so at all. Coppola can easily eroticize any of his characters. All the characters in The Godfather are eroticized, don't you think? You're not out of touch with their erotic elements. It's hard for me to know what they were doing on The Rainmaker. Maybe they were trying to limit that side of his character. Maybe he was innocent enough as a character that something like "eroticizing" him was downplayed, in a way. Matt himself has a very erotic presence.

Can you describe that presence?

When I first met him, he came in for a reading of To Die For. He was an amazing actor. He could turn on a dime--whatever you asked him. When he left the room, Laura Ziskin, the film's producer, said, "He's a movie star. There's no doubt about it. The guy who just left is a movie star." She meant that he has what it takes. I think part of what he had was just an element of his own eroticness.

I understand that in Good Will Hunting you let Matt and Minnie Driver choreograph their love scene.

I let my actors choreograph every scene, because they're the ones who are getting up and going to the window. They have their own motivation for going to the window. If it looks weird, I'll tell them. If they need something to do, I'll give it to them. Actors generally show me what their ideas are, and then I say, "That's great. Can you try this?" It's the same thing with a sex scene.

I wrote an article about the film when it first opened, and for that article I asked Matt what a gay director brings to a straight sex scene. He got quite nervous. He seemed shaken by the question.

He was? That's cool!

Yeah, he defended you.

Was it an attack on me?

It wasn't an attack. I was very specific. I said, "What does a gay director bring to a straight sex scene?" He kept saying, "His being gay doesn't preclude his directing a straight love scene." When I asked Minnie Driver the same question, Minnie ran with it.

That a gay director can show the guy better than the girl?

No, Minnie said--

Now, Minnie--she would know the right answer! What did she say?

She said she didn't know if your sexuality had anything to do with it but beyond that, there was no feeling of a "top" or "bottom" in the Good Will Hunting love scene.

Hmm. A gay director who is directing a straight sex scene is removed, which helps. He can objectively see what the dynamics of the two characters are. But when you're making movies, it's like designing a building. If you're designing a room and you're gay, there are some things that will be affected--maybe the shape of the room, the interior decoration. But when you're talking about just getting people through doors with the right kind of perspective, your sexuality doesn't necessarily apply, as Minnie is saying. And a sex scene is architecturally rendered by the filmmaker. The actual sexuality of the characters is the last thing you come in contact with.

First of all, you're just trying to get across to the audience that two people are in bed. When you're learning to make movies, it's hard just to set up your first camera angle. You realize, Oh, the audience doesn't know we're in a room if I shoot your face too close. You get into very basic graphic representation of things. Eventually you get to a state where you want the characters to be intimate. Their sexuality is the last thing to be manipulated.

The sex scenes in your films really aren't very graphic. Is graphic sex something you consciously avoid?

A lot of directors don't have graphic sex scenes. Before 1960 there were none. The reason for that, besides morality, is that it's a subjective situation. Since the audience isn't having sex while they're watching the screen, they're removed all of a sudden from what's going on. You can be part of certain dramatic situations, but when it involves sex it has to be presented through a character you're identifying with closely enough so that you're involved in the sex scene itself. It's difficult. My movies have had really good sex scenes, though. My first one, Mala Noche [1985], had a terrific sex scene.

How so?

It wasn't hard-core, but it was relatively graphic. The film is about this man's attraction to a Mexican migrant who frequented this store the man worked in on skid row in Portland, Ore. It was sort of a Death in Venice, but with contact. It was all about this one thing, so the sex scene is a centerpiece. It was written with this in mind, so it was an easier thing to get across to the audience. A lot of times sex scenes become bumping and grinding activity, and then it's not particularly sexy.

There are some good sex scenes in films. [Pedro] Almodovar's Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! had a really good sex scene. There are some sex scenes where it's really exciting. In My Own Private Idaho we were always just representing it, not showing sex but giving you an idea. Not seeing it is a way to get it across. It would be interesting to do a film where you do see stuff, where you see people and it seems like they're really having sex. There's just always that area where you might not get away with it dramatically you're making a pornographic film, it's a totally different situation. It's a different objective.

Why was there graphic sex in Mala Noche and very little sex in most of your other films?

Sex is a taboo. It's a thing you get to know when you make films, because it's the thing you try first.

Sex in the movies is a taboo? I don't understand.

It's not a taboo morally. It's logistically that you find it doesn't work. There are certain things that don't work on-stage. There are certain things that don't work on film. I think it can be arrived at. The directors who get those great sex scenes have done something: They've found a way in to show that. A lot of times it's your humor or the fact that you're identifying so closely with the character that it draws you in to the scene.

With Mala Noche, basically, sex is all the characters are thinking and talking about for the first 20 minutes. By the time you're in the scene and they're having sex, you've been talking about it for 20 minutes. By that time you might as well be having sex. But in My Own Private Idaho, aside from it being something the characters are doing for money, it's not really what the story is about. So we just displayed it. We showed it by having still images of naked bodies. You got the idea. You got to see the positions. We didn't see movement. After you saw the tableaux--this is what happened--the scene really starts after the sex.

When you were growing up, were there any gay sex scenes in movies like Midnight Cowboy or Sunday Bloody Sunday that had a profound effect on you?

I just ran into Jon Voight, and I told him Midnight Cowboy was a movie I used as a guide to learn how to write, a template so I knew how to construct a film story. But Midnight Cowboy didn't really have any sex scenes, did it? There's him cavorting with Sylvia Miles on the bed. It's funny. That's a way of doing a sex scene: There's the dog barking; there's the channels changing on the TV set. That's a way to get into sex.

So there was no revelatory gay sex at the movies for you?

The first time I'd seen it done dramatically--and it was utterly hard-core sex--was Taxi Zum Klo. From the very first bit in the movie--it was almost a disclaimer--[director Frank Ripploh] was going to take you on a journey. You saw all these postcards on his bulletin board, so you were set up. He could take you anywhere once he set it up that way. That's the only time I've seen someone get away with that type of graphic sex. How he got you into that area was very successful, and yet it wasn't pornographic.

Let's talk about some other projects of yours. What became of the Harvey Milk project? Is it just not happening?

No, it can happen. The Harvey Milk story has always been an ongoing saga. I remember [director] Rob Epstein telling me about it; he made the documentary The Life and Times of Harvey Milk. He said [director] Oliver Stone was trying to do a feature project about Harvey Milk. He told me they were looking for a director. I said, "That's interesting." Then I thought about it. The documentary did such a great job, and also it had Harvey in it. You saw the real guy, so why did you need a re-creation?

So I was talking to this old producer of Oliver Stone's, and I mentioned the Harvey Milk story as something I was interested in. It happened really quickly, because at the time Oliver was looking for somebody to direct it. Oliver said, "Let's do it!" So it was all very locked up within a couple of days. Suddenly I was going to direct the Harvey Milk project, The Mayor of Castro Street. Then we wrote a screenplay. It was something I thought needed work. Warner Bros. wanted to go ahead with the project immediately. But I said, "I can't really go ahead unless the screenplay is right, because Harvey was a gay man and had a gay life."

And we want to see something like that on the screen. We don't just want to see politicians and in the middle of the film Harvey kisses his boyfriend and that's his life. I wanted to get a sense of the Castro and the neighborhood and the people who live there. And we didn't quite have that. Getting all the facts down got in the way of the humanity of the story. Anyway, we parted ways. Warner Bros. said they were trying to get somebody else to do it. Later it just never happened. But after I did To Die For, they were interested again.

Was it the commercial success of To Die For that made them interested in you again?

Yeah, it usually always has to do with commercial success. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues was not a commercial success, and it did not make them call me and say, "Let's get the Harvey Milk project going again."

On the subject of Cowgirls, were the critics right or wrong.?

Right or wrong how?

Well, it didn't get good reviews. Should it have?

In general the critics are writing what they think. So they're correct. People have their views. I don't think they were wrong.

What did you think of Cowgirls?

Sometimes you like the more enfeebled child best. It's the most loved child.

Back to the subject of Harvey Milk: There must be lots of calls now with Good Will Hunting doing so well.

It makes sense. It's like the stock market. The stock goes up, everybody wants to buy in. If it goes down, no body's going to buy in. Good Will Hunting is heading up. So, yeah, the stock's going up, and so Harvey Milk might happen. I haven't really talked to them about it. I handed in a second screenplay that I wrote by myself that I really liked. I thought, This is the way I'd like it to be.

In your script, how did you represent the Castro?

We just showed the Castro as we knew it. Whenever there was the topic of sexuality or there was a scene that involved sex or there was a scene in a bedroom, we didn't relegate it to "This is the one scene." Sexual innuendo permeates the script. Everything that everybody says has some connection to their sexuality. I know life in the Castro. I know gay life in general. It's not just one scene. It's a whole life.

RELATED ARTICLE: Chasing Ben

Ben Affleck--costar of Good Will Hunting and Chasing Amy--talks about director Gus Van Sant and his own desire to play a gay character.

What was your reaction when Gus Van Sant signed on the project?

We never though he'd be interested and we knew Gus. He had worked with my brother Casey on To Die For, and he had interviewed Matt for that movie as well. It's funny, because even when you know people, you assume it's impolite to ask--as if, when you add a layer of business to that relationship, you're imposing on the relationship that already exists. You're sullying it. But we were dying to get Gus.

What did Gus bring to the film that other directors might not have been able to?

He pulls extraordinary performances from his actors, and part of what he does is that he gives you room to make your own discoveries. A lot of directors aren't comfortable enough with themselves to let you have that freedom. There's no ego involved with Gus. He's not trying to show everyone how brilliant he is. Which in turn makes you trust him implicitly.

Were you at all apprehensive to work with an openly gay man?

Not at all. I was lucky enough to be brought up in an open environment. My godfather, whom I love and adore, is a gay man. Besides, gus isn't somebody who is aggressively sexual. It's the same in the straight world. There are sexual predators whose sexual identity is who they are. But Gus's sexuality isn't the first order of business. In fact, I ended up being the one to prompt him into saying something about his private life. We'd hang out so much, and I'd be blathering on about myself, until I finally said, "So what's the deal, Gus? Do you have a boyfriend?" And in typical fashion he'd say, "Well, no, not right now."

If you were offered a gay role, would you take it?

I'd welcome it. There's nothing more irritating than watching someone play a gay character and swish it up. It's so rare when an actor does it in a subtle way, where not everything he touches turns into flames.

Let's talk about that GQ cover of yours.

Oh, no, not the cover! You know, I was tricked into taking my shirt off. It seems like such a vain thing to do. I wasn't trying to show off. We were on the beach for two days shooting that cover, and the photographer asked me to take off my shirt. I said no, and he said it was just for his own collection. It was the last roll of film on the second day. And it was cold, and I wanted to go home, so I said OK.

Are you really that tan?

In the film I was working on at the time, Armageddon, I play an oil worker. So we had to lie in the sun to make it look as if we really do work outdoors. I assume now that that film has wrapped, so will my tan.

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