THE SILENT LANGUAGE OF GUS VAN SANT

[July 20th, 2005] I'm finally beginning to understand Gus Van Sant. The Portland filmmaker is still an enigma, to be sure, but I'm starting to see enough pieces of his puzzle to get a grasp of the whole picture. Most importantly, I understand the cinematic language he communicates with. It's a specific dialect, honed in Gerry (2002), Elephant (2003) and most recently, Last Days, that's not too far removed from the traditional language of modern cinema, but with a cadence, accent and visual idiom that can be hard to comprehend.

Coming as the third installment of what some have dubbed Van Sant's "silent trilogy"-a series of films with sparse dialogue and prolonged scenes of silence-Last Days finds the director once again challenging his audience. With its casual pace and meditative mood, the film chronicles the last days of a popular rock musician who bears a passing resemblance to Kurt Cobain. Like Gerry and Elephant, Last Days forgoes such cinematic conventions of narrative film as clearly defined motivation and expository dialogue. Instead of delivering a nicely wrapped package that leads an audience by the hand to emotional destinations where swelling musical cues let them know that now is the time to cry or laugh or get scared, Van Sant hands his viewers a scribbled map and leaves us to our own devices.

WW: Just to be clear: Last Days is inspired by the death of Kurt Cobain?

Gus Van Sant: Influenced by.

Influenced by?

That's my new word. "Inspired by" seems too uplifting. You can say it is more "inspired by"-that's correct-but I think it is more "influenced by."

Your last three films seem like BYOB filmmaking-bring your own baggage. You ask your audience to bring more to the film.

More information?

More of everything. More of their own moral judgments. More of their own experiences. Is that your goal?

Well, it wasn't a goal, but it might feel like that in a way it relates to Elephant and Gerry. It's sort of thematically similar, but it's a different execution of a movie. I guess with the same style that the three movies are made in, you could make something different that didn't have the same theme. Although I think the concepts are similar as far as the way it's imparting information and what that information is supposed to be used for by the audience.

It's your way of presenting the information-the story, the characters, their motivations-that's different.

There was a way that I learned to make films. Dramatic filmmaking had the history of cinema to draw upon. There were very definite styles that if you had never made a film you were drawn to. At least I was. I was always thinking about Hollywood-about somehow making a film that would have come out of Hollywood. So I learned things from cinema that had been made in Hollywood or other places that had been influenced by Hollywood, including something like the New Wave. They had their own take on things, but they were still speaking that language. It took a really long time for me to understand what it was and develop it. And then on these last three movies, I've been trying to make up rules that I learned in the other films, bending them into something else.

You're talking about watching and relating to films in a way that falls outside the traditional concepts of cinema. And more specifically, you're talking about a drastic change in the way films are made.

I've seen it done elsewhere. It wasn't like a style that I thought was completely foreign. But I was doing a style that wasn't completely mainstream. We are stuck in this world that you really don't see beyond because it is all around us. Like a Satyajit Ray film is using the same cinematic language as a Quentin Tarantino film. It's part of the 20th century of filmmaking, and it seems like a film speaks a certain way. There are ways that the storyteller knows not to let his listeners stray very far because he needs to hold their attention, and he does that sort of like a novelist by presenting a conflict. A conflict is something that you learn when you are in English class in the ninth grade that is essential to dramatic storytelling.

What's interesting is what you choose to leave out or put into your films. There's so little dialogue in the past three films, and that drove some people nuts. There are the two boys kissing in Elephant, and a similar scene in Last Days. And I can't help but think, "Is this Gus messing with the audience, trying to ruffle a few feathers?"

I think it's mostly just me thinking of how things might be, and me just drawing upon my own observations of the world and experiences, and just not leaving out the things that you tend to leave out-like walking down the hall. I mean, normally you might tend to leave that out. Or like making macaroni and cheese. You leave that stuff out because somehow that is not contributing to the story fast enough, and in our films we are leaving it in because it's the story. Those actions are the story, and they're where all the story happens. The story doesn't happen with verbal exchanges. The dialogue is there, but it's not about the dialogue any more than it's about the macaroni and cheese. The dialogue is part of it, too, but it's like the dialogue is equal to the cheese.