“I was really following people like [Stanley Kubrick], doing what I wanted. And so it was really on the outside,” says Gus Van Sant of his seminal 1991 queer hustler film My Own Private Idaho.
While I’ve always been an admirer of Gus’ work, I’ve developed a whole new respect for his films and his entire journey as a director since interviewing him recently for The Messenger, which abruptly shut down on Jan. 31.
Although he's largely credited as part of 1992’s New Queer Cinema cohort, Gus notes that his directorial debut came a few years earlier with 1986’s Mala Noche. Even that was a second attempt at a debut after his initial outing Alice in Hollywood failed to launch upon completion, resulting in the director temporarily taking a job at his father’s shipping warehouse.
Based on Walt Curtis’ 1977 autobiographical novel, Mala Noche was a black-and-white, pre-Dogme movie about the author’s (Tim Streeter) infatuation with a young Mexican immigrant (Doug Cooeyate) while working at a Portland convenience store.
“The crew on Mala Noche was four people; it was me, a DP, an assistant and a sound person. And with the actors, we could all fit in a station wagon or a couple of cars,” he fondly recounts. “And the way we made it was so low-profile that it had all this amazing energy, like being in the real locations and grabbing people off the street and throwing them in front of the camera was something that would happen."
But Gus' 1989 sophomore feature Drugstore Cowboy — based on James Fogle's autobiography and starring Matt Dillon, Kelly Lynch, Heather Graham and William S. Burroughs — hoisted Gus to a new level in Hollywood.
"It was a lot of trucks parking on the street, and everything took a really long time to shoot. So Idaho was a little bit like me trying to go back to the Mala Noche side, which we weren't really able to do,” Gus explains.
After earning critical and commercial success with Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho debuted at the Venice International Film Festival in ‘91. It would be cited a year later in B. Ruby Rich’s influential Village Voice article “New Queer Cinema” — introducing a wave of LGBTQ filmmakers including the likes of Gregg Araki, Todd Haynes, Laurie Lynd, Christopher Munch and Tom Kalin.
“It's great to be one of those inspirations,” says Gus, explaining that his work has taken on “its own life, the films and the stories apart from the creator ... it's like a separate entity.”
Since finding his footing as a director, Gus has made several memorable titles, including To Die For, Good Will Hunting, Finding Forrester and Milk. Most recently, he joined “the Ryan Murphy world” as director of FX’s Feud: Capote vs. the Swans, the eight-episode second season in the biopic anthology series.
Although the lavish period piece seems worlds away from the guerilla filmmaking of Mala Noche, Gus continues to capture the beauty and tragedy of the human experience in a raw way. And while he might not be able to return to those simpler times as a filmmaker, his work continues to inspire.
Mala Noche is now streaming on Kanopy.