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MY
DIRECTOR AND I
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| Magazine
& Date: |
Interview
Mag , March 1991 |
| Intro
Written by: |
Graham
Fuller |
| Interviewed
by: |
River
Phoenix |
| Provided
by: |
Rosanna |
INTRODUCTION
Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho
- the title taken from a B-52 song and the story, in part,
from Henry IV, Parts I and II - stars River Phoenix and
Keanu Reeves as street prostitutes in Portland, Oregon:
one a narcoleptic, the other a modern-day Prince Hal to
a gay, Falstaffian gang leader (William Richert). The movie
maintains the affinity for strung-out rebels that the thirty-eight-year-old
Van Sant, a Rhode Island School of Design film graduate
and former adman and Roger Corman PA, had demonstrated in
his two previous films. Mala Noche, shot with considerable
verve on 16mm for $20,000 in 1985, was the story of a convenience-store
manager's forlorn passion for a Mexican migrant labourer.
Drugstore Cowboy, probably the best picture of 1989, was
an agreeably grungy and bitterly funny slice of nostalgia
for the low-life junkie culture of the early 1970s that
sacrificed neither the jaunty skid-row lyricism nor the
raw romanticism of its predecessor.
Drugstore Cowboy's star was
the newly wise, swashbuckling Matt Dillon, its patron saint
William Burroughs, whose story 'The Discipline of D. E.'
Van Sant had filmed in 1977, one of several shorts he made
prior to his first, now forgotten featurette, Alice in Hollywood.
Van Sant's future films include an adaptation of Tom Robbins's
novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues and an elliptical biopic
of Andy Warhol.
Just before the cast and crew
of My Own Private Idaho left Scattle for the final days
of shooting in Rome, River Phoenix interviewed his director
over the course of a day as they ate, drove and ate again.
It was appropriate that the conversation should take place
in transit, for Van Sant's films are nothing if not investigations
of uprootedness and the spiritual quest for home - 'home',
of course, always connoting far more than four walls and
a roof.
THE
INTERVIEW
| [River's speech
is in this colour] |
[Gus's
speech is in this colour] |
In
a Seattle sushi bar ......
In general, do you have fun
?
In general? Do you mean when
I'm not shooting?
Specifically, do you have
fun if you like something that you're working on, or do
you just enjoy yourself anyway?
No, I don't actually.
I have fun sometimes when I'm not working, but when I'm
working I just concentrate on the work. I guess if you get
good results, then you start to have fun. But if you're
not getting good results, you say, 'Well, how can we make
this better? It's not sounding or looking right.' Then somebody
says, 'What do you mean by "right"?' And you say, 'just
better'. And they go, 'Well, sorry'. So in those instances
you don't have too much fun, because it seems like you can't
get what you want. I get frustrated.
I see you smirking very
often.
Really?
You get a sort of perpetual-bliss
glaze to your eyes.
During the work?
Yeah. But it's also like
a creative spark at the end of takes, say. If you're getting
new ideas, your eyes kind of vibrate.
Well, part of it's like
I'm the audience sitting in a theatre. I'm not really pretending
I'm in a theatre, but I'm looking at the scenes as I think
it's being shot, because I'm not looking through the camera.
Didn't you say that you
kind of slip in, like a hand in a glove - actor being the
glove - and share that sensation of being in the moment?
Yeah. Like I'm one of
the characters.
RP: So you lose objectivity
sometimes?
Yeah, so then - RP: So
you turn to your technical crew.
But I'm attached to them
too. See, they're also like the actors. I put myself into
each of those technical positions - sound, camera - so it's
confusing in a way.
Do you have a fragmented
personality at the end of the day?
No, because I'm doing
it intuitively. I'm not really doing it intellectually.
RP: As far as sitting down and applying motivation and drive
to your ever-changing creative world, how do you discipline
yourself? Is there any sort of philosophy that keeps you
in line with that discipline?
When I see something - a
film, say - that I think is a good idea, something that
I might want to die, I don't really see it as a whole. I
see an image that I think represents the whole film. And
so then I start to work towards that image, and then I fill
it all out, and it becomes very complicated, because you
have to have a lot of elements to make the image come to
life.
And on the way, you usually
lose that one image It becomes a new thing, a thing unto
itself. You keep it going along the lines that it's got
a mind of its own, and then by the end you say 'Oh yeah,
I remember the first image of this particular idea. I thought
it was going to be like this black-and-white, dark thing
that was set in the l950s.' And you actually end up with
a very colourful, bright story set in the 1990s.
Referring to My Own Private
Idaho?
Yeah, Idaho is a very
good example, because it is very bright and colourful, and
it is set in the 1990s. And I think the original ideas were
dark and shadowy, but there's not a lot of shadow in it.
Like there is in Mala Noche.
So you start with a 'theme seedling', and then that sprout
s into its own tree and don't really try to trim it. You
let it grow and the end result is - whatever. Do you refine
it? Do you try to reroute it back to what it was?
You refine it every step
of the way. Usually I'm presented with new ideas. Like,
our production designer, David Brisbin, showed up and said,
'I think that red and yellow are the colours of the film.'
And I might have no conception like that myself.
Right, right.
Except, actually, I gave
him a book cover that was yellow, and that book cover did
inspire the look of the film. So he was actually reacting
to something. But it was a new idea to me when he said 'Yellow'
and based the colour scheme on pornographic bookshop storefronts,
which are usually yellow, and neons… the city colours. So,
directions keep changing, because everyone's interpreting
things in their own way. I know that you persuaded me against
using black and white. You said, 'No, no, no. It has to
be colour.' [chuckles] I don't know why you said that.
I wanted black and white, and,
for me, colour was wrong, and that's why I thought we should
try for it because otherwise we might have ended up with
something that really couldn't be redone, like Stranger
Than Paradise or Raging Bull.
But black and white is dated
in a sense, and this is a timeless picture. One of the things
that I really appreciate in working with you is that in
that collaborative stage you have no fear of your ego being
stripped or anything. You're not possessive, like some can
be, but you let others ideas filter through without stopping
them for fear of losing control, which would be rightful
fear for someone who wants it to stay as pure as possible.
Yeah, that whole method
of allowing new contributing factors to just enter in at
will is the thing that I've personally worked on. Like here,
for example, if you just walk around downtown, there are
things thrust in your face, like, every ten seconds. And,
like a documentary the film just absorbs that, or things
that happen during rehearsal. Happy accidents, as we call
them. Sometimes they're not so happy, and usually people
can tell when they're not working.
All these seedlings for
different projects you have - Even Cowgirls Get the Blues,
the Andy Warhol film - are starting to grow. Is that really
exciting for you?
Yeah, they're inspirational;
they're, like, my favourite stories. My Own Private Idaho
might be the only one of my own stories that I ever get
to tell, though of course I do have a bunch of Shakespeare
in the middle of it. It's the ability to actually do something
about these things now that is pretty unbelievable.
I was just telling Tom [Robbins]
last night that the first time I met him was at a book signing
in 1984, and I was standing in a long line of people with
Walt Curtis, who wrote Mala Noche, and we were just fans.
And Tom was signing books and you hoped that he'd write,
like 'To Gus. Best wishes Tom'.
I was a film-maker and I really
wanted to Even Cowgirls Get the Blues into a movie. I had
made one short film from a William Burroughs story, but
I had no clout or power, or any money. I probably made,
on average, like $100 a week doing something or other, and
so I was penniless and without a portfolio.
But I said to Tom, 'If I ever
get the money, I want to come back to you and do the film.'
He said, 'That sounds good', and signed the book. I figured
it'd never happen, but I might as well say it. So now it's
a pleasure to be able to have the kind of support to do
dream things like that. RP: Were you interested in film
at art school?
Yeah, I majored in film.
I changed from painting after my first year because I thought
that maybe a career in the film business was a more moneyed
career than a painter's.
[laughs] A safe assumption.
It was a safety bail-out.
But, also, films were more complicated, and I'd pretty much
mastered - at least in my estimation - painting. But film-making
was a big mystery, and I thought to get anywhere in the
business I'd have to work really hard and forget about painting
for a while. And that's what I chose to do.
Did some of your paintings
- particularly your more recent ones - conceptually influence
Idaho?
Yeah, because you know those
paintings are of Idaho. Idaho desert is what I'm painting.
The Sawtooth Mountains and a road that leads to a house
that's sometimes flying in the air and crashing to the earth.
So, in a way, the story of My Own Private Idaho is the film
version of the paintings.
Because the paintings are
about home, and they're about love, I guess. And they're
about relationships and turmoil. Something to do with my
upbringing in a middle-class family. And this is, like,
the generic, box-like, red-roofed, white $17,000 home, smashing
into a road. And a road symbolizes the journey of life,
and the horizon is the future.
Is it later that you articulate
and identify the images as symbolic? Or is it something
that you think out?
No, I think that it's something
I think out after the fact. I have been obsessed with my
family's house and where we lived when I was around six,
which was in Colorado. Because I guess that's where I first
lived, you know? That's my concept of home.
Then we moved away, and I
probably didn't like moving away. So then the house smashing
in the road is like my destruction of the house that I miss.
But when I painted the paintings, I never thought, 'Oh,
I missed my childhood, and now I'm showing how that childhood
has been smashed in 10 million bits' - though I can interpret
them that way and then be sort of surprised.
This is getting too close
to home.
But the road also - there's
been a lot of travelling. My family moved around alot, about
five or six times while I was a child. So the road symbolizes
the journey back and forth across the country: from Colorado
to Illinois, to San Francisco, to Connecticut, to Oregon.
Why did you move around
so much?
My father was making
it up the corporate -
Ladder of success?
Yeah. And he made it to president.
President of what?
Of McGregor Doniger sportswear.
Great!
And actually that yellow thing
that you wear is a McGregor. That's very symbolic, actually,
but it wasn't planned that way. McGregor windbreakers were
very popular in the 1950s - I should show it in the film.
Yesterday you were lying in
a White Stag sleeping bag, and my father was the president
of White Stag. That's why we moved to Oregon. He changed
his presidency from McGregor to White Stag.
Wow. So what is your father
doing now?
He's in the fashion business
- he has a women's clothing company called Intuition.
But he also does your accounting,
right?
Yeah.
Should we erase that?
No, no. You can ask me
anything.
In a van travelling to location
......
I had a Thai dinner the other
day with some women on this shoot. On this film I've been
around a lot of boys, but for variety I like sitting and
listening to women talk about what they do.
And I mentioned it to you afterwards:
'Well, I have some gossip about some gossip for you. And
not to mention names, but these two people are trying to
figure you out.'And your response was, 'What? Sexually?'
And that was the first thing. But more, I guess, intellectually.
Or what was your -
What makes me go?
Yeah. Trying to figure
out the Van Sant mystery.
Is that a mystery though?
See, I have no concept of what -
I know, I know. Me - I'm
the same way. I mean… um, you just live. We're all just,
like, living, hanging out, doing our thing.
But I'm fascinated by what
they said.
Me too. It was completely
like a cliché.
You can say that about this
film here.
Oh yeah. It all came back
to the film. You yourself said, 'What is Gus doing this
for?' Does it bother you when people try to figure you out?
No, not at all, because
I'd like to figure me out actually.
Yeah, so would I like
to figure myself out. So if they can give me a clue, I'm
always interested to hear.
Right. Yeah, I'm pretty
much in the dark about myself - I haven't done any psychotherapy.
I don't know if that would help. I don't think that there's
much to be figured out. I think that one thing about me
is that I've worked pretty hard since I was twelve, and
I don't know why exactly. Only on my own things, you know,
which first was painting. RP: You started when you were
twelve?
Yeah. Some time during
adolescence I just buried myself in my work. Before then,
I was pretty much like a normal neighbourhood kid. So the
work itself became pretty important, but it's impossible
to figure out what the kind of art that I do is, because
its progressed. You'd have to follow the progression and
say, 'Well, he made this piece because this happened to
him.'
Right. But I'm surprised
by the arrogance displayed by people who try to figure you
out by looking at a piece of your work.
Well, maybe there's people
in the business who have never written or directed before,
so maybe it's easier to interpret their work. There's this
thing where somebody was talking about this one director
they had worked for - it's gossip, really, - and they were
saying, 'He became obsessed with this one actress.' He would
work for ten hours just lighting this shot where she walked
through the door. It was like this sort of cuckoo obsession.
That was true. I heard
about that too.
I think it's really cool.
I mean, I can become obsessed with something, you know.
So far that hasn't happened in my work, but I guess it could
happen. I tend to be pretty professional that way and catch
myself if there's any inkling of that kind of stuff. It's
like the door shuts.
Right. How do you feel
about the way women are portrayed in modern-day cinema?
It's hard for them to
find themselves, really. They're not really portrayed at
all, except in a man's world.
How do you feel about that?
Because in this film you have this character, Carmella,
who's kind of a female cliché.
Yeah, she's one of those.
But then you want to do
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, which has to be one of the
first books -
Tracing the notion of
a female hero.
Right, so you're doing that,
so that balances this. Some people won't know that you're
doing that when they see this film and I guess it's no big
deal, except I've been kind of curious about that myself.
I can't imagine being an actress
today. If I was a woman, I wouldn't be who I am now. I wouldn't
have had the chance to grow to this point. It's like a real
hard road for someone to get to be like Sissy Spacek or
Meryl Streep.
Most of time, [a film] is
from a man's point of view. You know, the female characters
are one-dimensional sex objects and pieces of property,
and that's what Carmella is because she's seen from the
point of view of the male characters in the film. It's like
she's an attractive piece of flesh, you know? Like, it's
pretty innocent and first-love-ish, but it doesn't really
show Carmella's side of the story.
In Cowgirls, though, you don't
really get this sex-object angle, although at the same time
you can get the feeling that the writer is living in a fantasy
in sex-object land. It's sort of this other world, a city
of women. So, it does have that quality which doesn't cleanse
it completely from the point of view of the type of feminist
who might think that dead men don't rape. But the whole
project is a great women's film. It's a chance to make the
ultimate remake of The Women, which is a beautiful Cukor
film from the 1930s.
How do you feel about
sex in film today?
I don't see why it's
such a problem, because there's a lot of death, so -
Why should sex even be
rated as something as extreme as death, or something as
negative?
No, it should be more
positive. But it's the mystery. You know, men are embarrassed
by sex because they don't understand it. They can come to
grips with death and use it as an icon. And they can use
love as an icon, or sex even, but the actual involvement
of that intimate moment - the sexual moment - is somehow
embarrassing, because maybe we don't understand what it
is.
So what do you do about
it?
Well, in my films I just
try to be aware that people don't understand it. And I just
try and walk in that direction and say 'Well, this is this.`
But even when we did our scene - you know, when you're in
the middle of it - it was tough to do.
Well, when it came down
to it, we were just doing it. We were just, like -
You're just trying to,
like -
To fuck.
Just to do it from the
point of view of the partners involved in having sex. That's
the way to get around it. And it you can get there and make
the camera not a voyeur but a participant you can sometimes
get away with a little more. But it's still a problem because
of our own perceptions of sex. I mean, I'm embarrassed by
certain things. Being 'bad' is part of it, although it doesn't
have to be that way, and I think other cultures know that.
But our culture's pretty uptight. In an airport restaurant
What else? Let's talk about
favourites.
Yeah. What does that mean?
What's your favourite car?
My favourite car? Well,
I have a 1982 BMW-528E. And usually the car I have is my
favourite car.[laughs]
It's your favourite holiday
of the year?
Probably Halloween.
What's your favourite
brand of coffee?
I usually buy Medaglia d'Oro
espresso.
The reason why I'm asking
you your favourites is because I have none. I'm always split
decision. But it's so neat to be able to hear people commit,
and you're the kind of guy who can pretty much just say,
'It's my favourite.' What's your favourite pop artist?
I guess it would have
to be Warhol. He was sort of the Capra of the pop art movement.
With the Warhol project that I'm working on, I'm trying
to make a correlation between early 1950s to 1960s Warhol
and then intercutting that with the later Warhol of the
~g80s and his relationships with the younger artists, like
Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. It dawned on me that
you look a lot like Warhol did when he was, say, eighteen
to twenty-five. It would be a stretch, but you could pull
off playing the young Warhol.
What is your favourite
colour?
Green. It's my middle
name.
What's your favourite city
in America?
Portland.
Do you have a favourite
relationship that you've had. Sexual? You don't have to
mention any names.
Do I have a favourite
one? Yeah. The first one was the favourite one. But not
always, actually.
How old were you?
Thirty-two.
That was your first?
It wasn't my first sexual
relationship. It was the first one that was really, like
-
That you loved?
See, I worked all those
other years, so I had to catch up.
Wow, wow. What is your
favourite year?
I don't know. Probably
last year.
Nineteen-ninety is my
favourite year, too, which just means that it was consistent
and decent and OK. What is your favourite word?
My favourite what?
Word. Phonetically speaking.
Oh, I know you have one.
[pauses] God, I can't
think of one.
Like 'carousel' or 'jagged'?
I like Italian words,
because they're funny. We were just in Italy, and this big
truck passed us, and it was called - it was a brand name
- Bindi. B-i-n-d-i. Bindi. And that was like saying Hershey's
chocolate. Instead of saying 'Hershey's', they say 'Bindi'.
[laughs] What's your favourite
desert?
Um, I don't have one.
Chocolate cake.
What's your favourite
-
That's all. Let's just stop.
Just one more. Who's your
favourite interviewer?
River Phoenix.
Oh, that's a good answer.
END OF INTERVIEW
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