Milk

[last days of gerry the elephant]

I can't get enough of that typeface!

+1 for calling it a typeface.

[JG]

milk is good. its a biopic for sure, but a well crafted one at that. brolin was the standout, but all the performances were strong. emile hirsch can dance!

[samsong]

commercial and lovely, disturbingly relevant but hopeful nonetheless.  this is van sant at his most generous, and it's a joy.  absolutely loved it, my favorite of the year.

[MacGuffin]

Exclusive: Gus Van Sant Sheds Light on Milk
Source: Edward Douglas; ComingSoon

Gus Van Sant is certainly one of the more fascinating filmmakers of the last few decades, especially having directed the popular Oscar-winning film Good Will Hunting. He made a couple more high-profile films and then ultimately turned his back on Hollywood to focus more on experimental indie fare like 2003's Elephant, a haunting reenactment of the Columbine High School shootings.

After more than ten years, Van Sant's name is once again being bandied about amongst awards prognosticators for his new movie Milk, a stirring biopic starring Sean Penn as Harvey Milk, a 40-year-old gay man who moves to San Francisco and starts a grassroots movement among the gay residents of Castro Street. Harvey, a strong supporter of equal rights regardless of sexuality, is soon running for political office, trying to become the supervisor for District 5, and eventually becoming the first openly gay man to be voted into a public office.

Obviously, Sean Penn's performance, one that's likely to get him another Oscar nomination, is a big selling point for the movie, but Van Sant's ability to create a riveting film out of Dustin Lance Black's script will certainly get him renewed attention as a director. The ensemble cast includes James Franco and Diego Luna as two of Harvey's lovers during the eight years of his political career covered in the movie, while Josh Brolin plays Harvey's main political rival Dan White, whose professional jealousy contributed to Milk's untimely death in 1978.

ComingSoon.net got on the phone with Van Sant while he was doing the L.A. junket for the movie a few weeks back. As we learned, Van Sant is not exactly the most talkative filmmaker we've spoken to, generally getting less responsive as the interview progressed, so who knows what was going on at the other end of the phone line?

ComingSoon.net: Recently, you seem to have been going more towards the indie and experimental route. Was it just the material that got you back doing more a studio movie?
Gus Van Sant: Well, there wasn't anything in particular. I always wanted to make a film about Harvey, and this script just sort of appeared, and the script itself presented somewhat of a style, just by the way it was written, that didn't suggest... a lot of the films like "Gerry," "Elephant," "Last Days" and "Paranoid Park" were written in a certain way to be filmed in the way they were filmed. This was a pretty traditional 100-page script, like 120 scenes, and just by the virtue of the number of scenes, you start to have a pacing that's more convention.

CS: You did have your actors doing quite a lot of improv on some of your other films so was there room to do any of that here?
Van Sant: Yeah, we could have improv-ed and we did, a teeny bit, but I think the period and the political nature of the dialogue was confining in a way that the type of improv that would be occurring was hard to keep it within the period, unless you had a pretty good knowledge of the period politics. We did have daily papers that pertained to the day, but in the end, we were just lucky to get the stuff filmed that we needed to present the screenplay. We didn't really go off into areas like that so much on this film.

CS: I assume Dustin did a lot of the legwork and research on the script beforehand, so did you do any research on Harvey Milk yourself or go back to the '84 documentary? What was your process when you came on board?
Van Sant: Well, I'd been involved in a project in 1993 that was Oliver Stone directing and he decided not to direct it. That's really where I heard about the project, through Rob Epstein, who had made "The Times of Harvey Milk." At that time, then yeah, there was a lot of study and I lived with Cleve Jones, and I met some of the people that were the real characters and lived close enough to the Castro to sort of soak up its energy. It was '93, so it was a lot different than it is now. It's actually changed in those ten years quite a bit, the Castro itself, in the last fifteen years. There are condos, there's families, a lot of straight people. It's not the same. Even in '93, it had a little bit more of a connection to '78. I mean, it was devastated by the AIDS epidemic, but the research I did was all the way through the last ten or so years.

CS: I don't know how old you are, but I know you've moved around a lot in your life. Back in the '70s when Harvey Milk was making waves in San Francisco, was it felt wherever you were and were you aware of what was going on there? What was your connection to him before getting interested in making a movie in '93?
Van Sant: I had seen the documentary, "The Times of Harvey Milk," I think that was my sole information. I haven't read Randy Schultz's book, although that predated the documentary. I knew some things about Harvey. I first heard about him when he was shot. I didn't know about him when he was running for supervisor. I didn't live in San Francisco, I lived in L.A., and I wasn't an out gay kid. I was not really connected to the gay community, and was just unaware.

CS: At what point did Sean Penn get involved? Was he circling around the project over the last 15 years wanting to do it?
Van Sant: I had talked to him in the '90s about playing Harvey, in '98 I think I talked to him about it, but then it wasn't until now that I was actually making the film, so we brought up the idea again. Now he's more the right age.

CS: It feels like a lighter role for him, mainly since he's playing a character who loved life, so what made you think of him originally?
Van Sant: Yeah, I've always just thought he was a really amazing actor. I didn't really have those ideas of whether or not he could play a happy-go-lucky character or not. I guess... (long pause) Yeah, it was something people do comment on it, like some of the things they haven't seen Sean do before.

CS: He's done comedy, maybe not so much recently, but we do know he has good timing.
Van Sant: Yeah, I mean like Jeff Spicolli was a very comedic character in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" and yeah, he was very happy character.

CS: I guess we haven't really seen Sean play a real person, which is definitely a challenge for an actor, to take on the mannerisms and speech patterns, and I was curious whether that process was something he did on his own or something that came out of rehearsals?
Van Sant: I think it was sort of him studying footage that he had of Harvey, and he worked in New York at his grandfather's bakery, so he sort of knew a New York accent. He sort of synthesized all these things together into his character. I wasn't like sitting there as part of it.

CS: You've worked with cinematographer Harris Savides in the past few years, and here you also work with Danny Elfman, who you hadn't worked with in a while. Can you talk about shooting this film different from your other movies? What was the decision to go with those two guys who come from different periods of your career?
Van Sant: Well, Harris I've been working with in this decade a lot. I hadn't worked with Danny since "Good Will Hunting" I guess, but he's a friend of mine, and I've been in touch with him.

CS: But working with Harris on this, did you want to want him shoot it differently than the way you'd been working with him on previous movies or did you want to bring some of the stuff you'd done into this environment?
Van Sant: I think each project, you have basically so many options when you start. You can continue what you've been doing or you can start over and create something new. Depending on what the initial concept is, I usually try to do something that somehow relates to what that concept is. In this case, we had a script. The concept was actually a screenplay, it wasn't just a one-sentence concept. It was more of a whole hundred pages, so we did talk about lots of different things and we tried out a lot of different things, and we ended up with what you see. It wasn't meant to be super-conventional, but I think we ended up there because of having a less-conventional idea not work out and we fell back into what we thought of as like "The Godfather" or something.

CS: If I hadn't seen Danny Elfman's name on the credits, I might not have known he composed the score, so what sort of direction did you give him for this compared to what you've done with him before?
Van Sant: Well, I wanted him to be kind of crazy, but it's a relatively conventional score I think. He sort of feels it out and he plays stuff for me and I'm a little bit part of that process, but I usually defer to him, because it's a huge artistic effort. It's sort of like Sean building his character, they're both very intense artists. They can only interpret it their own way. They can't straddle what you want and what they want.

CS: I'm sure you've been talking about this all day but the timing of the movie and the relevance to what's going on in California with Prop 8 is amazing. You started making the movie well before that came about, so do you think it's just a coincidence? Is California very different today or is it going back to the times of Milk?
Van Sant: I think it's different. I think that the issue of Prop. 8 is a setback, sort of like the repeal of Dade County law in our movie, but the setback is one of the more final laws I think in equality, which doesn't make it any less of a law or less important, but it's not as devastating as firing all gay teachers. It's more like in the game, like the final yardage.

CS: But these being different times, do you think society is more open to a movie like this compared to five years ago or ten years ago? Harvey Milk was an amazing man, but do you think his story is more relevant now than back when you first wanted to make the movie?
Van Sant: Yeah, I think it's a great portrait of a grassroots political campaign that has in effect changed his community and that people can do it, too, like regular shopowners.

CS: We haven't really seen anyone like Harvey recently, in terms of openly gay politicians running for office, so do you think Harvey Milk really made a difference?
Van Sant: I don't know about that either. I don't know why. Sam Addams is our new gay mayor in Portland, there's one.

CS: What would you like people to get out of this movie, besides learning about Harvey Milk's life?
Van Sant: I guess just that the birth of a politician story. That's the hope they will find that interesting.

CS: How do you feel about being back in the Oscar race with this movie for the first time since "Good Will Hunting"?
Van Sant: It's kind of cool, it's nice.

CS: Is "The Electric Kool-Aid Test" something you're doing next, something that Dustin's also writing, and are you going to take a similar approach to that?
Van Sant: I don't know. I mean, he's just starting to write it. I haven't seen it yet.

CS: Have you been in touch with Alex Gibney, who's doing a documentary on that same premise?
Van Sant: I have. I've had dinner with him.

CS: Are you guys going to try and work together to maintain consistency between the movies?
Van Sant: It's not about consistency. We're not working together but we're communicating with each other. Yeah, I'm curious as to what he'll do. He has all the bus movie footage.

CS: Have you seen that at least?
Van Sant: I've seen different versions of that, yeah.

[last days of gerry the elephant]

This is like my most anticipated film of 2008 and it kills me to have to wait for it a few days more. I respect the brief reviews so far, they do confirm my idea of what it's like, I'm rather pleased and excited.

[MacGuffin]

It's the right time to tell Harvey Milk's story, and Gus Van Sant is the right man to do it
After years of starts and stops, the director, screenwriter Dustin Lance Black and Sean Penn bring the San Francisco politician's story to the screen.
By Rachel Abramowitz; Los Angeles Times

Long before making "Milk," the film due Wednesday about the life and death of openly gay San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk, director Gus Van Sant imagined a scene in which the voluble, charismatic Milk was dressed as Ronald McDonald. In that version, Dan White, a fellow city supervisor who shot and killed Milk and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone in 1978, was deep in a "sugar-infused rage" and "envisioned himself as the Twinkie sheriff and he shot Mayor McCheese, and Harvey was Ronald McDonald."

Van Sant laughingly calls this his Charlie Kaufman take on Milk's story -- though, perhaps it's the sad nature of reality that White claimed during his trial that junk food had fueled his behavior -- the infamous "Twinkie defense."

"I offered it to both Sean Penn and Tom Cruise but I was really inept as a producer," says Van Sant, who says he then just sat and waited for them to call him back. And waited. And waited. And never followed up. "I completely dropped the ball from the very first and it sort of washed into a sea of however many offers they get every day."

That was in the mid-'90s. It's a decade later, the afternoon of the Los Angeles premiere of "Milk," the more straightforward telling of the story that Van Sant made. Dressed in baggy jeans and a blue top, the 56-year-old director is sitting on the deck of his modernist, unpretentious Los Feliz home, fielding phone calls about what he calls "the wedding," i.e. that night's gala. His parents are here and the more traditional-looking Gus Van Sant Sr. is reading by the swimming pool.

Few American directors have a body of work as varied and idiosyncratic as Van Sant's, which includes his early poignant looks at drug users and street kids ("Drugstore Cowboy" and "My Own Private Idaho"), a shot-by-shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho," elliptical visions of Kurt Cobain's final days ("Last Days") and the Oscar-winning, feel-good drama "Good Will Hunting." In person, Van Sant seems gentle, with a nonjudgmental air, a distinct adherence to live-and-let-live. His features are rounded, his dark hair limp and his eyes seem to pop out like a cartoon character.

As a gay director with an empathy for the marginalized, it's probably not surprising that Van Sant has been offered -- and toyed with -- various incarnations of the Milk story, from an early effort spearheaded by Oliver Stone that Van Sant abandoned over script differences to the Ronald McDonald version he wrote himself, to the latest incarnation, the one he made with a script by Dustin Lance Black and starring Penn as Milk. Black's script hews closely to the politics of the story, eschewing for instance a more psychological take that would perhaps plumb the narrative of Milk's life from birth to grave, or a more sociological, party-like vision that would feature the raucous Castro scene complete with wild bath houses, which Van Sant notes might have been "pretty alarming . . . you know, thousands of men on the street picking each other up and having sex every night in sex clubs and drugs and all." Even the "Twinkie defense" and White's subsequent sentencing to seven years in prison are relegated to the end credits because, simply enough, Milk was dead by then.

Telling the story

While politics shape the narrative, "Milk" doesn't play like a standard heroic-man biopic, in part because of Milk's flamboyant demeanor, but also because of what seems to be Van Sant's true passion -- the band of outsiders and the bonds among those on the margins who choose to make their own families.

For those who've ever assembled in a living room to fight apartheid, nuclear weapons, for women's liberation, for civil rights or any social cause, Milk offers an acid flashback to what it's like to live on that grass-roots mojo, the intoxicating mixture of idealism, fraternity and implied otherness. The mouthy, charismatic Milk, played by an unusually vulnerable and accessible Penn, is fomenting the movement and riding the crest of group yearning. He tends to his flock, portrayed on screen by such winning actors as James Franco (as his longtime lover), Diego Luna, Emile Hirsch and Alison Pill, as his lesbian campaign manager.

"Milk" has turned out to be unexpectedly topical as the culture wars over homosexuality have had a flare-up. The last bit of "Milk" is devoted to the supervisor's successful crusade against Prop. 6, a California ballot measure in 1978 that would have banned gay teachers from the public schools. Thirty years later, Prop. 8, revising the California constitution to ban gay marriage, recently passed. But on a more optimistic, level, "Milk" reflects the grass-roots flavor of Obama-mania. Like president-elect Barack Obama, Milk used personal narratives to make political statements, encouraging his comrades to come out. He also trumpeted hope, giving speeches in which he declared, "I know that you cannot live on hope alone, but without it, life is not worth living."

Milk also challenged the conventions of what was acceptable in politics. "He was really idealistic," says Van Sant, who adds that Milk said things that even his supporters just dreamed of thinking, such as "We can be in office. We're gay and we're out and we can run for office."

There's a moment in the film when Milk discards all his hippie accouterments -- the jeans, the ponytail, beard and general scruffiness -- and emerges newly shorn, in a dingy-brown three-piece suit, new armor necessary to gain mainstream political allies.

Like Milk, there appear to be two Gus Van Sants, at least aesthetically. One is dreamy and experimental, elliptical and, to some, meandering, as if the director has single-handedly championed the American slow-film movement, with long, long takes. Those films include four recent ones: "Gerry," "Last Days," "Elephant" and "Paranoid Park." The other Van Sant makes films with more conventional Hollywood narratives, like "To Die For," "Drugstore Cowboy" and "Good Will Hunting."

Bruce Cohen, who produced "Milk" along with his producing partner Dan Jinks and Michael London, thinks that "Milk" combines the two Guses -- "it has the epic sweep of a political saga" but the "authenticity" of his more experimental work. "You feel you're actually experiencing the story rather than watching the film."

Van Sant doesn't really explain his poles of filmmaking except to say that the scripts demand different executions. In the case of "Milk," Van Sant says, he's not a particularly political person. Milk wasn't "like the guiding light of my life." During Milk's heyday in the '70s, Van Sant wasn't out of the closet, just living behind the Beverly Hills Hotel in Los Angeles, working for comic director Ken Shapiro (who made "The Groove Tube"). "I was like a hetero guy . . . not a very successful hetero," says Van Sant, who moved to New York in the early '80s, and at some point started "to just not live a heterosexual life."

Paths come together

The whole gay rights movement, he says, "was, well, it changed a lot of people's lives." "Mala Noche," Van Sant's first feature film, in 1985, focused on a skid-row convenience store clerk's love for a Latino migrant worker. Gay motifs also run through two other Van Sant films: "My Own Private Idaho," his most personal film, about male street hustlers, that's loosely inspired by Shakespeare's "Henry IV," Part 1, and "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues." Still, he says, "I haven't done the 'Ozzie and Harriet' of gay stories. Middle-class gay couples. People that live just like straight people except they're gay. I haven't done that story."

Unlike Van Sant, scriptwriter Black is much like one of the young people whom Milk used to talk about, gay youths who called him out of the blue and told him they could go on living because of the example he set. Raised in Texas as a devout Mormon who knew never to tell anyone of his gay feelings, Black was ultimately set on the path to openness when his new stepfather moved the family to a military base near San Francisco. In a local theater program, Black met a gay director who told him the story of Milk, "this out gay man who was celebrated and embraced by his community, all these things that were really shocking to me. It also makes you feel like there's a little bit of hope and a little bit of light there."

After Black graduated from UCLA film school, a friend who knew of his passion for Milk introduced him to Cleve Jones, a member of Milk's original inner circle. With Jones' help, Black, then a staff writer on the HBO TV series " Big Love," spent weekends for three years researching the script by tracking down and interviewing Milk's friends and colleagues. Jones also reintroduced Black to Van Sant -- they had met in 2001 -- and Van Sant quickly agreed to direct.

Black sat at Van Sant's side during the entire San Francisco filming. "Gus really empowers the people around him," Black says. "He lets people explore what they want to explore."

Indeed, one of the hallmarks of a Van Sant film is an unexpected intimacy that seems to arise from the DNA of his creative vision. Van Sant says the vulnerability coming from the actors is "just what they think I'm thinking when I'm looking at them. I just act like the camera doesn't really matter. I don't really care if they don't say the words that are in the script. I welcome their input and that sometimes makes them really happy and excited and they might do things that aren't necessarily things that they would do. You just have to watch," explains the director, "like actually be patient enough to watch. When the take is done, they'll look right at you and if you're looking over somewhere else, they know that you're not really watching . . . and they can lose heart. They're sensitive."

[matt35mm]

I liked the film quite a bit.  The story was fascinating.  I wish there had been a bit more breathing room, though, as the movie has so much information to give you over 2 hours--and even then it doesn't feel like quite enough because I wanted to know more about Dan White and wanted to see more of each relationship... so personally I think I would have liked it more if it had an extra half hour to take some time and give more info, but it's a good film as it is.

It was nice to see San Francisco again.  I know a couple of people who dressed in 70s clothes and was part of the crowd scenes in front of City Hall.

[Gamblour.]

TRAILER:

http://www.apple.com/trailers/focus_features/milk/hd/

Man, that trailer is AWESOME. I had no idea what to expect from the film, but damn. Very well edited, pie in the face was funny/bizarre placement. Font is wonderful. Josh Brolin looks great, seems to be a huge prick. Didn't recognize Emile Hirsch. Very excited suddenly.

This was funny to reread because Josh Brolin was great and I still didn't recognize Emile Hirsch. Those two were definitely the best part of the film for me.

I feel like the the story itself and the time period were both so interesting that all the film had to do was meet it, and in some ways I don't know if it did. The repetition of that clip at the end, and if you've seen it you know what I mean, was so unnecessary. No audience member needed that, we all remembered it. I thought that was a poor choice. A lot of the scene geography was distracting, never could get my feet on the ground. And James Franco, I can see why the gave him a nod for Pineapple Express and not this. He didn't really meet everyone else.

Don't get me wrong, the film is definitely good, I just wish it had been great.

[Big Owl]

Dunno what to think of Penns accent it sounds a little over the top. I don't remember it being so camp or even childlike in the doc.

Disappointed to hear that about Franco.... i was hoping this might be a somewhat of new departure for him.

[Big Owl]

I must clarify that i've only seen the trailer.

[ᾦɐļᵲʊʂ]

Most clarifications work better as an edit.

[jtm]

 

Most clarifications work better as an edit.

god i hate these internet/message board rules.

people should be able to leave a comment, and if they have something to add later, feel free to add it. why do you give a shit if they make another post to add it?!?! seriously?!?! who gives a shit??? 

and i know a lot of you give a shit. i just want to know why. why do double posts bother you? and i don't mean to sound like a dick. it's actually kind of funny to me... i just want some clarification... why do you give a shit??? is it wasting bandwidth or something??

[modage]

I keep forgetting that I don't like biopics. Though Harvey Milk's life is fascinating and inspiring, it doesn't make a great narrative film. Better to fictionalize real people/events to make the best film than try to do justice to someones life. Biopics have too much time to cover, too many facts to adhere to and results are always unsatisfying.

[john]

This managed to be conventional without being uninspired. I think it's the conventions that it follows are what seem to irk a lot of people I know and, presumably, people here on the board. It's painting with broad strokes to make sure to hit all the important moments which is going to annoy any viewer with a critical eye.

But it's the smaller, more intimate moments that Gus Van Sant and Sean Penn truly succeed at. Brolin manages to contribute a performance that is humane and, intentionally, clumsy. His Dan White is inarticulate, earnest, and seething in every scene.

I know it's a stretch to compare this film to Brokeback Mountain... though I won't be the first. Both films try to reach a wider audience and articulate a pretty simple message regarding compassion and universal love. But Brokeback seemed to put every emotion under a microscope,making everything seem maudlin and overcooked. Milk, however, succeeds in it's sincerity.

Also, Savides work on this film is predictably excellent.

[RegularKarate]

Most clarifications work better as an edit.

god i hate these internet/message board rules....why do you give a shit???

I don't give a shit, but a better question might be "why does it seem like you only ever post to complain lately?"