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Gus Van Sant
Director / Screenwriter / Editor / Producer
1952 - 
Born July 24, Louisville, Kentucky, USA
Key Production Country: USA
Key Genres: Drama, Psychological Drama, Road Movie, Gay & Lesbian Films
Key Collaborators: Harris Savides (Cinematographer), Curtiss Clayton (Editor), Casey Affleck (Leading Player/Screenwriter/Editor), Dany Wolf (Producer), John Campbell (Cinematographer), Eric Alan Edwards (Cinematographer), Danny Elfman (Composer), Missy Stewart (Production Designer), Matt Dillon (Leading Player), Matt Damon (Leading Player/Screenwriter/Editor)

Highly Recommended: Elephant (2003)*^
Recommended: Good Will Hunting (1997), Gerry (2001)^, Paranoid Park (2007)^, Milk (2008)^
Worth a Look: Mala Noche (1986), Drugstore Cowboy (1989), My Own Private Idaho (1991)*, To Die For (1995), Last Days (2004)^
Duds: Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1993), Psycho (1998)
* Listed in TSPDT's 1,000 Greatest Films section; ^ Listed in TSPDT's 21st Century's Most Acclaimed Films section.

Links: [ Amazon ] [ IMDB ] [ TCMDB ] [ All-Movie Guide ] [ Film Reference ] [ A Gus Van Sant Page ] [ About.com Interview ] [ Spliced Wire Interview (2003) ] [ Film Monthly Interview (2003) ] [ Gerald Peary Interview ] [ Green Cine Interview (2005) ] [ Reverse Shot Feature (2007) ] [ Guardian Article (2007) ] [ LA Weekly Interview (2008) ]
Books: [ Gus Van Sant: An Unauthorized Biography
 
Elephant (2003)Good Will Hunting (1997)Milk (2008)Gerry (2001)
 
     
  "Gus Van Sant’s support and patronage of Larry Clark and Harmony Korine clearly feeds back into his own cinema, resulting in Gerry (2002) and Elephant (2003), his return to independent productions about young men. Before Gerry, his career seemed to be evolving away from the independently themed films of Drugstore Cowboy (1989) and My Own Private Idaho (1991) and toward the studio productions of Good Will Hunting (1997) and Finding Forrester (2000). But Van Sant’s studio films are by no means artistic sellouts." - Steven Dillon (The Solaris Effect: Art & Artifice in Contemporary American Film, 2006)  
     
  "Directors often flip-flop between the demands of art and commerce, alternating personal projects with those that pay the bills. However, few of them have produced movies as violently and puzzlingly different as Gus Van Sant, prompting wry speculation in the press that their could, in fact, be two Gus Van Sants... If there is one thing that unites the two Van Sants, it is the pervasive sense of melancholic transience that is eloquently expressed in his trademark shots of clouds (in the perpetual motion of time-lapse photography), going nowhere fast." - Lloyd Hughes (The Rough Guide to Film, 2007)  
     
  "A director who is capable of crafting both deeply unconventional independent films and mainstream crowd-pleasers, Gus Van Sant has managed to carve an enviable niche for himself in Hollywood. Since debuting in 1985 with Mala Noche, Van Sant has become one of the premiere bards of dysfunction, populating his films with a parade of hustlers, junkies, psychopathic weather girls, homicidal teens, and troubled geniuses." - Rebecca Flint Marx (All-Movie Guide)  
     
  "Part of me believes in anonymous art. I got that from a writer named Jamake Highwater, who wrote about painting before the Renaissance. The way people related to art in, say, ancient Greece. How it was about the community for the community and not the self-expression of the artist. I thought of Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester as doing it for the people, and wanted to speak without the hindrance of my own style. I'm not sure if that's possible, but it was my rationale." - Gus Van Sant  
     
 
Please note that the rating given for this director (see top-right) is based only on the films we have seen (listed above). Films by this director that we haven't seen include The Discipline of D.E. (1982) and Finding Forrester (2000).
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"In the late 1980s, Gus Van Sant commenced establishing himself as one of America’s leading and most influential independent filmmakers. His films, often peopled with characters scuffling along on the fringes of American society, explore human feelings and frailties in often-understated fashion, and for the most part, Van Sant has proven himself a filmmaker with a deft touch... it was Drugstore Cowboy that established him as one of independent filmmaking’s most authoritative new voices. The film’s low-key tale of a pack of 1970s-era junkies in perpetual pursuit of drugs won near-unanimous accolades." - Kevin Hillstrom & Robe Edelman, International Dictionary of Film and Filmmakers

 
 
Top 250 Directors
21st Century Top 50
100 Essential Directors (Pop Matters)
Ranked 40th on The Guardian's 2004 List of the World's 40 Best Directors
Ranked 4tht on Film Comment's list of the 25 Best Directors of the Decade (2000-2009)
501 Movie Directors: A Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers
 
See Also
Gregg Araki
Larry Clark (external link)
Sofia Coppola
Alex Cox
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Todd Haynes
Jon Jost
Paul Morrissey
Jerry Schatzberg
John Schlesinger
Steven Soderbergh
Peter Weir
 
Gus Van Sant's Favourites
The Last of England (1988) Derek Jarman, The Palm Beach Story (1942) Preston Sturges, Sátántangó (1994) Béla Tarr, Sunrise (1927) F.W. Murnau, Synecdoche, New York (2008) Charlie Kaufman. Source: Newsweek (2008)
 
 
 
         
         

 

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