Twist of skate

>> Gus Van Sant returns with his halfpipe
murder mystery Paranoid Park

BORN INNOCENT: Gabe Nevins

by MATTHEW HAYS

“I didn’t know who Gus Van Sant was.”

It’s a funny statement, coming from Gabe Nevins, the lead actor in the latest critically acclaimed film from one of America’s most celebrated auteurs. But there you go. That’s what you get when you cast a local Portland skateboarder—at the wee age of 15, no less—with no acting experience whatsoever, as the lead character in your new movie.

The film is Paranoid Park, a murder mystery about a young lad who spends hours doing rounds on his board at a local park with a buddy. A murder is committed at a nearby rail yard, with Van Sant maintaining the mystery around the crime for the first half of the film. Someone has been killed—but did the sweet innocent Nevins actually have anything to do with it?

Soon enough, police begin showing up at Nevins’s school and asking the students questions about what they might know. Things begin gently enough, but the questioning sessions soon turn into interrogations. Whether or not Nevins is guilty is unclear, but it’s obvious that he knows more than he’s telling—through fleeting flashbacks, we see bits and pieces of what went wrong. In a basic synopsis, it sounds a great deal like a crime genre film, but it’s ultimately more of a character study about a teenage boy who is obsessed with the crime, wracked with guilt and horrified at the prospect of being busted for it.

Despite the rather glum nature of the proceedings, there’s a gee-whiz, gung-ho quality to Nevins that is entirely endearing. He and Van Sant were doing tag-team promotion on the film at the Toronto International Film Festival, where Paranoid Park became one of the entries on many critics’ don’t-miss lists.

Parental guidance

Wearing oversized pants and a t-shirt, Nevins is upfront about his background as a skate enthusiast who just happened to hear about auditions at a Portland shopping mall.

“I never even thought about being an actor,” he says, wide-eyed and seemingly still in a state of shock at ending up at one of the world’s premiere film festivals. “Me and my buddies were going to go down there and mess around at the auditions. But being good friends, they bailed. So me and my mom ended up going down. There were huge line-ups and I was standing there, and Gus came right up to me and pulled me aside, asking me about skateboarding, how old I was and stuff.

“When they told me that he was considering me for the main role, I kept telling my mom I didn’t really want it, because that would mean taking time out of school, and I thought that would be weird. I didn’t know what the reality would be like—it’s a big responsibility and I was scared. I’m just a normal kid. But then I met with the producers and the idea kind of grew on me.”

For Van Sant, Nevins fit the bill perfectly. The filmmaker had been intrigued by the novel Paranoid Park for years, after reading the work of author Blake Nelson, a man many see as the cultural inheritor of S.E. Hinton. Van Sant says he read Park and was immediately hooked on the idea of adapting the screenplay with Nelson: “I wanted to do it with him. It was like a miniature young adult version of Crime and Punishment. It had all the elements I really liked.”

Strange filmography

Those in the cult of Gus Van Sant will recognize all of the elements immediately. The director has what is arguably one of the strangest filmographies of any director anywhere, ever. First coming to notoriety in the ’80s at the vanguard of what critic B. Ruby Rich would call the New Queer Cinema, Van Sant has become famous for his rich, textured depictions of youth in crisis. His two films involving drug use and disaffected youth, Drugstore Cowboy (1989) and My Own Private Idaho (1991) are now widely regarded as two of the most important independent features of their time—and handed Keanu Reeves, Matt Dillon and River Phoenix some of the finest moments of their careers.

What grew stranger was the very concept of Van Sant himself, an artist so seemingly committed to the margins, who would then go on to make several decidedly mainstream movies as well. In 1997, he helmed Good Will Hunting, from a screenplay by its two young stars, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon (who would win an Oscar for their script). He also made Finding Forrester in 2000, with Sean Connery as an aging gay mentor to a young student.

Not one to relax, Van Sant grew bored. He then made one of the most audacious films of the past decade, Gerry (2002), with a small amount of money from a German investor. Forget the feel-good glow of a film like Good Will Hunting; Gerry was an existential conundrum set in the desert, with two men (Matt Damon and Casey Affleck) running, and occasionally talking, for the entire feature-length film. That was it. “Filmmaking can get boring after a while because, by then, I had done maybe eight movies,” says Van Sant. “It can be the same drill; you get a script, you get actors attached to it, you put together a crew—there’s always these different things that you’re saddled with.”

Young and the restless

Gerry was followed by Elephant, his award-winning take on the Columbine massacre, and then there was Last Days, inspired by Kurt Cobain’s suicide. But despite the trek across themes, budgets and hot young male stars, there is one steady constant in the oeuvre of Van Sant: this is a man who understands the machinations and intricacies of the lives of the young. Van Sant concedes it’s a draw for him: “That period in your life, when you’re 16, that’s the most important time in your life. It might not be a time when you get much done, but you’re influenced by everything that’s come your way. By 25, you’re going to be much more frozen in your ways.”

This fascination with innocence is what led to Paranoid Park’s central casting call. In Nevins, Van Sant saw that elusive blank slate of innocence that he felt would make a murder mystery so compelling. “Gus said that when he looked at my picture, he saw this innocent kid, and that that would work out really well for the movie,” Nevins tells me. “He said I was born innocent, and that professional actors might not have that innocence.”

Does Nevins really feel that innocent?

“Not really, but Gus seemed to think so.”

For his part, Van Sant makes an amazing confession about his latest as we discuss the film. Many filmmakers strive for narrative and moral ambiguity in their work—striving to keep audiences and critics pondering their movies long after the final credits have rolled. But Van Sant insists he’s not even sure about what to make of Paranoid Park. And he made it.

“This is the first time I’ve not had a strong opinion about one of my own films. This one was different, and I don’t exactly know why. With the other movies, I always felt like I had a certain identifiable thing when it was finished. So that meant that reactions to them were then pressed against my own opinions.”

And that, Van Sant notes, places Paranoid Park in contrast with his more mainstream work. “Those films, like Good Will Hunting or Finding Forrester, they have very specific intentions. You can ask someone, What are the intentions? Did you get this scene? It’s pretty straightforward. The intentions here are way more unspecific. This is a far more open film.

“I still have no idea why I have no strong opinion on Paranoid Park. I don’t have an opinion, still.”

Paranoid Park opens this
Friday, March 7

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