Gus Van Sant remains one of the highest-profile gay filmmakers working today, and even though his new movie Promised Land is an eco-drama about fracking (an "issue film," as some have called it) with nary a mention of the LGBT community, it's impossible to think of Van Sant without remembering his gay-interest films: Mala Noche, My Own Private Idaho, Elephant, and Milk.
Promised Land marks the director's return to another hallmark of his career: Matt Damon. Damon, who scored an Oscar with Ben Affleck for writing Van Sant's film Good Will Hunting, cowrote Promised Land's script with The Office star John Krasinski. Together they lead a cast that includes Frances McDormand, Rosemarie DeWitt, and Hal Holbrook in a fabulous supporting turn.
We caught up with the 60-year-old director for a quick chat about Krasinski and Affleck's writing dynamic, his favorite new gay movie, and the best casting decision of his career.
AfterElton: Matt Damon is one actor who has proven his versatility. Did working with him on this film reveal anything new about him? Any surprises?
Gus Van Sant: I don't know if I work in ways where I'm conscious of what actually surprises me. As a viewer, sometimes you would be. I just take what I can get -- and then try to figure out how it works into the idea of the movie. If there are surprises, I don't know if I'd call them surprises to me.
AE: What do Damon and Krasinki bring out of each other as writers?
GVS: I heard [Damon] say just yesterday that he wouldn't necessarily write much unless he had a writing partner. Or he wouldn't write at all. It's not like he's turned out a bunch of screenplays in his spare time. I think he's used to writing from the perspective of a performer. Because they're both performers, they can act out ideas or do scenes together as they're writing. The writing comes from those scenes, that imagining. They're making each other laugh by imagining a scene in a given part of the story, and they get into it. I've seen them do it. Even if it was a wrong turn. "What if you two guys were playing pool together?" And they'd visit it, and start doing it. They'd make stuff up. If they liked the dialogue that came out, then they might take out the pool table [in the scene]. They're actually writing, but they're writing out loud. They both need someone to ping-pong off of. In John's case, he can go faster than Matt and be as quick-witted or quicker -- probably quicker. And probably because Matt feels John is quicker than he is, there's some competitiveness there.
AE: The town where Damon and McDormand plot to move in and drill is both beautiful and nondescript. What were you looking for when choosing the film's Kentucky town?
GVS: It just needed to be a great-looking but depressed town, a town that seemed not depressing, but not super at the top of its game. It's a town that could use a good business to come in.
AE: One thing I routinely love about your movies is casting. From Nicole Kidman in To Die For to Sean Penn in Milk, there's a great range of actors at the top of their game. Do you have a favorite or most inspired casting decision in your career?
GVS: The most inspiring to me were the kids in Elephant, mostly because they weren't actors. We were casting people that could perform and behave in front of a camera without appearing self-conscious. We weeded out the ones that couldn't move in front of a camera because they were too self-conscious. One out of ten were actually quite brilliant in front of the camera and could make stuff up and behave, yet they weren't actors. Because they were in high school, they couldn't help but be exactly what they were, which was high school students. The type of high school student that they were varied depending on who they were, but they were 100% authentic. Then we put them inside of a high school, so the hallways where they actually existed were like their high school. It was 100% realistic because there was no other way to make it. You couldn't make it any other way. It was inspiring because of that.
AE: Did that technique work in other films?
GVS: I've tried to do it in other films, but I was unable to in Last Days [a fictionalized account of the end of Kurt Cobain's life], the next film I did. I think we could've done it in Last Days, but we didn't organize our casting correctly. We cast in the same way we did Elephant, which was having general audition calls. You can have a general audition call for high school students and they'll come, because they don't really have the ability to do much else. They might have after-school sports and stuff, but they all kind of want to be in films, and they all have a lot of free time. They're just high school students; they're not old enough to actually have jobs. So it works for them. But when we came to twentysomething rock musicians, our core group in Last Days, nobody showed up. High school students showed up again for the postings. We did really poorly. We went city to city, and what we needed to do was go to clubs at midnight. Which we didn't do! Maybe it was too late to stay up or something. So we just ended up casting our friends because we knew friends who were twentysomething rock musicians, but we just didn't get the fresh, authentic feel because we weren't casting correctly. It's harder when you go into other areas, you have to adjust your casting concept. It can be done, but we weren't doing it right on Last Days.
AE: Have you seen Hitchcock? What did you think? How familiar are you with the book it's based on, Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho?
GVS: I read Dark Side of Genius, but there's another book, right? I didn't see Hitchcock, but I saw The Girl [HBO's film about Hitchcock's fiery working relationship with Tippi Hedren while filming The Birds]. I know a lot about it, and from what I know of Hitchcock, the ideas were proper, but somehow the delicacy with which the indelicate moments happened was a little too -- I mean, it's like a sex scene. It's like, how do you shoot a sex scene? It's really easy to make it look grotesque. So I think in Hitchcock's world, that was a sex scene! That was him trying to have a little intimacy with Tippi Hedren in the back of a car. And that's a sex scene. It's really easy to make it look indelicate -- and no doubt it was very indelicate in reality, if that particular [scene] actually happened -- but somehow I get the feeling that Hitchcock had a certain poise, so even the indelicacy would've been actually funny because of his haughtiness. But everything else seemed really good.
AE: Finally, what's the last film you saw that said something incisive about gay people?
GVS: There's this really good one I just saw that I'm actually associated with called Laurence Anyways. They're trying to go for some recognition in the Hollywood community for Foreign Film. It was made in French in Montreal. It raises a lot of gay questions, but in some ways the guy isn't gay. He's a transvestite and he has a girlfriend. She freaks out when he starts to become what he wants to become, and in the end he doesn't have a lover or doesn't have sex with guys. But she's so upset. So it's quite interesting, the whole existence of this character.
