by MATTHEW HAYS

In the late '80s and early '90s, filmmaker Gus Van Sant was held up as one of the bright lights of the dawning of what came to be known as the New Queer Cinema. With films like My Own Private Idaho and Drugstore Cowboy, Van Sant appeared to be writing his own private rule book, subtly reworking common themes and transgressing popular concepts of sexuality.

Over the past few years, he's gained a reputation as being a far more commercial director, adding crowdpleasers like Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester to his oeuvre.

Gerry sees Van Sant back in extremely unconventional waters, with the filmmaker taking huge risks in every direction. The film is unbelievably minimal and deceptively simple in description: two young men (Matt Damon and Casey Affleck) become stranded in the desert. They begin to walk, occasionally talking about the trail that they appear to be on. It soon seems that the two are lost, and must try to find their way back to their car or to civilization. There is a loose plot, but mainly this is a film about the rhythm of their trek through the unknown, captured in a stunning series of shots by cinematographer Harris Savides. The Mirror caught up with Van Sant at his Portland, Oregon, home.

Mirror: Your last couple of films have been characterized, I think fairly, as far more commercial. What pushed you in this direction?

Gus Van Sant: I don't know. Psycho wasn't so mainstream.

M: I guess so. But it was predicated on an extremely popular horror classic.

GVS: Yeah. I don't know, maybe it's the political climate. It's not so intentional though. I couldn't say exactly though. I don't really decide my projects so deliberately. I just think, 'Wow, this would be great.'

M: How did this idea come about particularly? Was it just you and Casey Affleck and Matt Damon shooting the shit?

GVS: Yeah, we were in a bar, thinking of something we could work on together. It was a story that was inspired by things we'd read in the papers about guys getting lost and also when we started talking about it, there were instances when I'd gotten lost in the wilderness. Matt had taken numerous hikes with his family so he sort of knew the type of thing that might have happened. Two guys seemed natural somehow. I had access to a way to fund it at the time. Since then, it fell out. But we found another source soon after.

M: What was the initial funding?

GVS: It was a company that had given me money to make whatever I wanted. They didn't need to see a script. It was just an undisclosed project for a million dollars. I had to use the money or else it was going to be taken back. But then the company went out of business. So we had to find other money. But we'd already started the process.

The dry look

M: The landscape becomes like a third character in the film. What led you to choose this particular desert terrain?

GVS: We always thought they'd be in the desert. It was Death Valley where we shot. It was one of the only deserts we could think of that would be perfect. We were in Argentina but it got too cold. It was the biggest but also the coolest looking. But we thought of the desert because of dehydration, as opposed to a forest.

M: How much of Gerry was improvised?

GVS: A lot. In a sense, the entire thing was improvised. There were times when we were organizing and writing some things, but it was designed as a project where improvisation could take over.

M: You cite Béla Tarr as a major influence…

GVS: I had seen Satantango a few years ago and I really liked it. It wasn't really at the outset what influenced Gerry but as we were making it, it began to be an influence. Once you start dealing with big landscapes and characters lost in landscapes I think it's natural that you end up going into that area. The sheer simplicity of a landscape and two characters within it. Just the act of hiking itself begins to bring out existential qualities. And you start play with that. I suppose real life does too, we just don't notice it. Even in the city - but once you get everything stripped down, out in the middle of nowhere, things start to have different meanings and different importances. Things people say or do become different.

M: There's a tremendous homoeroticism to your work, even in the films that have been more mainstream, like Good Will Hunting or Finding Forrester. Again, I find the relationship between Damon and Affleck quite homoerotic in Gerry, even though many of these characters are ostensibly heterosexual.

A queer Connery?

GVS: In Finding Forrester, Sean was supposed to be gay, though we didn't say that. He played it that way secretly, but we didn't say anything about it to the press. Sony was really afraid of us spinning it that way. It was there. There were drawings on his walls of geisha boys. We wanted to play it that way a little more but the brass at Sony were like, 'Just don't tell anybody!' Which we didn't. I suppose we understood, but I think that was an overreaction. It's about money. But that might sell more, really: Sean Connery playing a gay writer who befriends a black basketball player.

M: I had always heard rumours that Connery was homophobic, but he's not?

GVS: No, he's not homophobic. He's extremely macho. Which in certain cases, might bring out something that might be called homophobia. He has a lot of gay friends. But that doesn't mean that people can just kiss him on the mouth and not get punched. Some might find that homophobic, others might understand it as an invasion of space. But he was the one who had the idea to make the character gay.

M: I find a lot of Gerry homoerotic. These two heavenly creatures out in the desert.

GVS: There's something about friends, especially when they're young, the sexual relationship somehow exists, one way or another. Anywhere from 14–25, I think those overtones exist. Especially today, I think that there's a sexual relationship of some kind, whether it's acted out or not. They could be straight too. There's a certain consciousness about each other's beauty. I think that's going to exist. Are there any other movies where that situation exists, with two young men, where it doesn't come up? Maybe I'm looking at them differently.

M: It was Hanif Kureishi who said that Butch and Sundance were always dying to kiss each other.

GVS: That's a good example. They're always joking in that film about all sorts of things, saying that each other's cute and so on. It's there.

M: I'm more fascinated by the heterosexual subtext to Will & Grace. Aren't they more than just roommates?

GVS: Actually, I don't watch that show.

M: Finding Forrester and Good Will Hunting definitely feel as though they were intended to be uplifting films. They appear to be optimistic in tone, without any irony to undermine that tone. But Gerry feels so pessimistic and bleak. How much of this is a reflection of your own sense of life in America today?

GVS: If the Clinton era was about uplifting films, I don't think it was so much about the Clinton era being uplifting, I think it was the era was more liberal, and so the films became an answer. Films like Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho were more ordinary during the Clinton administration. I guess I switched to Good Will Hunting during the Clinton years as a reaction. When things are very conservative, I'm making things that aren't so conservative. When times are less conservative I'm making things that are so. I guess that's just my own artistic contrariness (laughs).

Gerry opens Friday, April 25 at the Cinéma du Parc

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