Paranoid Park

[picolas]

this movie was doomed the moment van sant decided to go with the lead guy. i can almost understand why he did from a couple of scenes but otherwise that decision fucked the majority of the movie. a little bit more later..

[last days of gerry the elephant]

Ah the poster is so nice, as usually the case with Van Sant's pictures. Well, aside from Gerry that is.

[modage]

i didnt mind it but i went in with low/no expectations.  it was way better than gerry but way less good than elephant.  but hearing van sant at the q&a afterwards helped me give the film a little more credit because he does not at all sound like a pretentious prick that i might imagine.  if he did, i would probably hate it too. 

[matt35mm]

it was way better than gerry but way less good than elephant.

How do you imagine someone who loved Gerry and didn't really feel anything for Elephant would like this film?  Maybe that's impossible to answer, but I figured I'd ask anyway.

[last days of gerry the elephant]

Very good question Matt, I'm with you on that.

Also;

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?playlistId=265667511&s=143442&i=265667514

[MacGuffin]

Gus Van Sant on His Failed Attempt to Kill Ben Affleck
Source: NY Mag

Director Gus Van Sant's films have traversed the cinematic map, from the expressionistic gay-desire drama Mala Noche (out on DVD this week) to Hollywood fare like Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester to the Palme d'Or–winning school-massacre drama Elephant. His latest movie, Paranoid Park, which just debuted at the New York Film Festival, tells the story of a young skateboarder who becomes involved in a murder that occurs near the titular Portland skate park. We caught up with Van Sant over an afternoon martini at Harry's New York Bar during his recent jaunt through the city.

Paranoid Park is based on a young-adult novel. What drew you to the book?
Some years ago, I bought Blake Nelson's book Rock Star Superstar, and I got intrigued by his other books, which were all young-adult novels. Then I found out that previously he had been a young angry poet in Portland, where there's a big poetry scene. Walt Curtis, who wrote the book Mala Noche was based on, was the Allen Ginsberg of that scene, and Blake had been the heir to his throne. Anyway, I became intrigued about making a film of Rock Star Superstar but didn't really do anything about it. Then Blake sent me the galleys of Paranoid Park, which had a very different story but was more cohesive. It took about a day to write the script and a day to edit it.

In the film, the kids kind of laugh at the cop for referring to "the skateboarding community," but it seems to me this is a key theme in your films — the way people form communities and surrogate families.
I'm just intuitively drawn to those stories. But, yeah, I've noticed it. All the films have that. [Thinks.] Like, every single one. I'm trying to think of ones that don't.

Even Psycho kind of has it.
Yeah. Even Psycho has it. Well, Elephant...

It's kind of a defining absence in Elephant.
Yeah. Ad hoc families are definitely one of my main themes.

How much do you improvise on set?
It's sort of a combination, and it often depends on the actors. For example, in My Own Private Idaho, River [Phoenix] improvised a lot. I've run into a few actors who either felt uncomfortable improvising or who felt they should honor the writer. Even when the writer is me. I'll tell them, "You have my permission," but somehow that still doesn't matter.

Has your style of working with actors changed over the years?
No. I pretty much treat everybody like a non-actor. At least, I think I do. You'd have to ask them. I want them to be just themselves. You can work with ordinary people that way. With actors, you try and get them to be looser and more natural, to let themselves bleed through. Like, I sometimes think of Brando in Last Tango in Paris. That must have been a very, very difficult process for him, because Brando's the ultimate actor.

Brando said he felt raped.
He didn't talk to Bertolucci for a long time after that. But at the same time, he gave one of his most brilliant performances in that film.

I've heard your last three films — Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days — referred to as a Trilogy of Death. Was that your idea?
Yes, and I've referred to it that way. Death is a plot device in my other films, like Drugstore Cowboy or Idaho or To Die For. Good Will Hunting didn't have a death, but I tried to put one in. I tried to kill Chuckie [Ben Affleck's character]. There was actually a wake scene and everything. But I think it was getting to be too much my movie, and they decided to go back to what they had before. But in all these cases, death was just a device — it wasn't really the specter of death. The later films were conceived of as meditations on death: death by misadventure in Gerry, death by another person in Elephant, and death by your own hand in Last Days.

What prompted all that?
Probably just middle age. [Laughs.]

[pete]

Chris Doyle replies to the question from an audience on how he and van sant would dare to make a movie about skateboarding when they're not part of the world.

on teen art.

[Pubrick]

Chris Doyle replies to the question from an audience on how he and van sant would dare to make a movie about skateboarding when they're not part of the world.

what a stupid question. so filmmakers can only make movies about filmmaking? that's all he needed to say. or another reply would be "how dare you ask a question about filmmaking when you're not part of that world." what the FUCK. and like the typical worst example of americans, the idiot skater just keeps talking even tho he has nothing to say and no point to make, he just wants to hear his own voice "hey everyone look at me! i'm talking to someone!" for more on this refer to Monty Python's Meaning of Life: Part VII.

on teen art.

he's really chinese isn't he.. he even said engrish. that's awesome. i'm not making fun of him. we he grabs the mic there should ALWAYS be some paparazzo on hand to record his ramblings. is he still an alcoholic?

[ElPandaRoyal]

It's very nice, and in some ways my favorite movie of his. Van Sant yalked about how the book had a kind of noir approach to it, and he tried to make it like that but it evolved into something different, and clearly more personal. In some ways, it's like a deconstruction of noir, but I don't even want to go there, this movie has to be felt, like all his recent ones since Gerry (like 'em or not). He takes his time with great shots, with great music (a lot of stuff from Fellini movies in here) and with intimate scenes with his characters, leaving the story where it should be, a more secondary level, but still keeping us (or me at least) interested. The only think that bothered me sometimes was the acting by some of the supporters - the lead, on the other hand, I thought it was a great choice. Very fine movie indeed...

[last days of gerry the elephant]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdK4ut4QLsU&feature=related

Trailer

[MacGuffin]

Trailer here.

[MacGuffin]

Back in Portland, the Latest Outsider Has a Skateboard
By BLAKE NELSON; New York Times

"CRIME AND PUNISHMENT" on skateboards — that was one of the early tag lines floating around the production of "Paranoid Park," the new film by Gus Van Sant. Based on a novel by Blake Nelson, the story follows a teenage skateboarder in Portland, Ore., who accidentally kills a security guard and is then left to ponder his guilt in a void of suburban amorality.

"Paranoid Park," which opens Friday, is the latest in a series of lower-budget "art-house" films for Mr. Van Sant, 55. It follows "Elephant" (2003) and "Last Days" (2005), which also explored mortality and angst among the young. These recent films, with their visual elegance and unorthodox narrative styles, have divided critics, but have also cemented Mr. Van Sant's reputation as an American auteur.

Mr. Nelson recently visited Mr. Van Sant in San Francisco where he is filming a biopic about Harvey Milk, the openly gay San Francisco supervisor, and interviewed him about the genesis of his newest film, Portland as muse, the benefits of filmmaking on the cheap and why teenagers make good subjects for film.

Q. How did "Paranoid Park" come about?

A. At the time I was trying to get money to do a film, but it was falling apart. And then I read your book, and I was like, we should just do this. I wrote it quickly, in two days. I outlined the parts I wanted, wrote it out script style, transposing in some ways, not even rewriting. I would take the descriptions and make those scene headings, and then I would take the dialogue and make it dialogue. It was almost like Xeroxing the story. Then I shifted it around and got rid of some of the parts.

Q. Did you feel an affinity to the skate world as a subculture?

A. I had been a skateboarder in the '60s, which was a long time ago, but I didn't think that it was so much different. I worked on a film, "Skateboard," in 1978, so I met the skaters of that time. That type of culture almost gets like gang culture or surf culture, territorial. I didn't think it connected with the characters in the "Paranoid" story. They go to a skate park where the hard-core skaters are, but the real lifer skate people were only an inspiration to your characters.

Q. How did the narrative side of your work evolve?

A. I wrote stories in junior high English class. By then a person is influenced by all the TV shows and movies they've seen. So you have pretty advanced — at least mediawise — storytelling ideas. Things I wrote were like Alfred Hitchcock's scary stories for young people. Later, in high school, I made a film about a brother and sister who leave the city because they think it's a bad place. It had a weak psychological idea behind it. It wasn't dramatically realized because I didn't know how to do a scene because I was in art class. I wasn't in drama class. I still don't know how to do a traditional scene. I can make it up. But I've learned to rely on my own deficiencies to create what I think of as a story. And having gone through a period where I was into stories that weren't strictly stories, like James Joyce or Samuel Beckett, things that were austere enough so the story was reduced to a very simple idea, almost like a word. In "Waiting for Godot," the story is "waiting," and then all the other stuff is infused into the waiting part.

Q. Do you have one story you always return to?

A. For me it's outsiders living their life. Watching the outsiders live their life. Not necessarily having them triumph or anything.

Q. You've shot so many films in Portland, it feels like an important element in your work. Before you moved there in high school, what did you think Portland was going to be?

A. Dirt roads and stop signs. I didn't know there was a city there. There was a name. I guess I could have looked it up in the World Book. My first image was it would be like Bozeman, Mont. Then when I got there I was like, oh, there's a city there.

Q. What was it like when you first got there?

A. There was a '70s hippie culture, and I guess I felt aligned with that.

Q. What's it like now?

A. The things I learned when I first moved there are the same things that make it interesting today. It's not a big enough city that people really move to or move out of. It gets more cosmopolitan every decade. It's still its own universe. It's a frontier town. And even with an influx of people that have come from the outside, it still retains a small-town existence. Like Boise, Idaho, where the people that are there, they were born there, and they will die there.

Q. Does the gray climate of Portland affect you in any way? I think of Elliott Smith or Raymond Carver; many artists that come out of that area seem to have a built-in gloom factor.

A. I think a person's darkness or lightness factor is their own point of view. I don't think Elliott Smith thought of his songs as dark. Kurt Cobain, his songs were pretty dark. Angst-ridden. And booming. And loud. Later, while working on the movie ["Last Days"], I realized that their songs really sounded like falling trees and chain saws. I don't know if it was an accident or what. They lived in a lumber town. They were using a sound that was relevant to them.

Q. "Elephant" and "Paranoid Park" are your two films about teenage characters. Was there some special approach you used?

A. They were real teenagers. From Portland.

Q. What do you think of teenagers?

A. There's always something new going on with them. They're sort of the creators of the new. If there's something that you see or understand that's going on right now with them, two years later there's some new thing. There's a new generation that's arrived. They're connected to the other generations.

Q. What did you imagine you'd end up being when you were 16 years old?

A. At that time I was painting, so I thought I'd be a painter.

Q. How did you imagine yourself dressed?

A. I thought I'd be wearing a suit. I thought when you were an adult, that's what you wore.

Q. Were there people you looked up to as you came up?

A. Kubrick was a good model. He had an autonomy I've never had but that one desire. He organized things a certain way. And he had a good relationship with Warner Brothers. He was their class act.

Q. I sense you enjoy the small crews and the minimal filmmaking of these recent films.

A. I was really getting into making movies that were unencumbered by rules. Different filmmakers do it different ways. My way was to make something for cheap. It's a good deal for people to give me $3 million for a movie. So they don't have a lot of requirements. If I was looking for $30 million, then they need more requirements. They need movie stars, and they need backup for their money. The drawback is, when they spend small amounts of money, the studios don't tend to release the movie very wide since they don't have that much at stake. Which is O.K. because the films can fend for themselves and be seen by word of mouth.

[john]

So, aside from it's current theatrical release, I just saw a commercial for this on DirecTV - where it's available for pay-per-view.

I'm not torrent-inclined, but if it's available on pay-per-view, I'm sure there's a-torrent-a-plenty.

So, if theater, pay-per-view and unscrupulous download aren't your favor - apparently, you can wait a month and a half for it's DVD release.

Good news all around for anyone who does have an interest in seeing this. I really do, but I've already skipped two advanced screenings, and didn't pay-per-view it at my folk's house when I had the chance... which I guess shows how eager I really am.

[MacGuffin]

Gus Van Sant: Another dip into the mainstream
With his new movie 'Paranoid Park,' the director says he's veering away from the free-form filmmaking of his recent 'death trilogy.'
By Sam Adams, Los Angeles Times

THE most arresting image in Gus Van Sant's "Paranoid Park" is that of a man cut in two by a passing train, his severed torso crawling across gravel.

Van Sant's career has been marked by a similar, if less painful, split. 

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, films such as "Drugstore Cowboy" and "My Own Private Idaho" won Van Sant praise for their dreamily transgressive depictions of transient life. But after the critical and commercial drubbing of his pansexual picaresque "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues," he morphed into a successful director of mildly edgy mainstream fare, culminating with nine Oscar nominations and two wins for 1997's "Good Will Hunting."

Then, with 2002's "Gerry," Van Sant took a sudden swerve toward the avant-garde, favoring long tracking shots, nonlinear chronology and soundtracks laced with disorienting musique concrete. The films that followed restored his critical reputation, with "Elephant" taking the coveted Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2003.

His latest project, "Paranoid Park," which premiered at the festival last year and which IFC Films is set to open in limited release here Friday, retains the languorous rhythms of its recent predecessors. But unlike the largely improvised films that preceded it, "Park" was shot with a conventional script, adapted from Blake Nelson's novel about a teen skateboarder (Gabe Nevins) whose trip to the wrong side of the tracks has fatal results.

Van Sant himself views "Paranoid Park" as a transitional film, moving him once again toward the mainstream. The director is currently shooting "Milk," a biography of openly gay San Francisco City Supervisor Harvey Milk, who was gunned down by a disgruntled ex-supervisor in 1978. The biopic, due to open through Focus Features next year, stars Sean Penn as the title character, with a supporting cast featuring the likes of Emile Hirsch, Josh Brolin and James Franco. It is almost certain to guarantee him safe passage back into the realm of the commercial.

"It's the end of a certain way I was making films," he says, during a break from the "Milk" shoot.

Like the so-called death trilogy of "Gerry," "Last Days" and "Elephant," "Paranoid Park" is a study in youthful disengagement. Christopher Doyle's camera drifts over the concrete mounds of the titular skate park like a low-flying helicopter, or a vision of adolescent liberation. He shoots Nevins drifting through school hallways in ultra-slow motion, or with a shallow depth of field that reduces the background to an indistinct blur. Leslie Shatz's sound design surrounds the movie's protagonist with a wash of foreign noise, as if he is never quite present in the world around him.

Shatz, who has known Van Sant since the "Drugstore Cowboy" days, says the approach Van Sant introduced with "Gerry," favoring wordless scenes and improvised dialogue, was "a total departure. He just felt, 'Well, why do I need a script?' It's not that he wants to improvise, Cassavetes-style. He feels the film is its own essence, and the script maybe forces you into going one direction or another, when he would rather be spontaneous and figure it out on the spot."

From the beginning, Van Sant has worked to keep his crews small and flexible. "He likes to move fast," says cinematographer Harris Savides, who first worked with Van Sant on 2000's "Finding Forrester." "He doesn't want the filmmaking to get in the way of the film."

Logic, Van Sant says, can only take you so far. He draws an analogy between directing and playing chess, pointing out that in order for computers to beat human players, they first had to be taught to reason intuitively. "There's a huge number of chess moves, possibilities of meaning and interpretation," he says, "too many to go in there intellectually and discuss each one. You're more doing it by your gut feeling and hope that your gut feeling is attuned to what your ideas were when you were first discussing the film."

Gutsy decisions

VAN Sant often leaves his collaborators to their own devices. But Shatz says he can also be firmly resolute when something strikes him the wrong way. "He's very intuitive, but he's also very decisive. There's only one reason for anything, which is what his gut tells him."

The filmmaker's distrust of neat explanations is woven into the fabric of his recent work. The films in the death trilogy are all drawn from real events, but the situations don't quite match up. While "Elephant" is transparently inspired by the Columbine massacre, its teen killers are never named. The news reports at the end of "Last Days" are drawn from the coverage of Kurt Cobain's death, but the doomed rock star who shambles wordlessly around a secluded house is named Blake, after the poet William Blake. "Paranoid Park's" story is fictional, but the movie is similarly reluctant to link cause and effect.

"It was kind of a reaction to that preconception that fiction has no business investigating anything, that it's only for our amusement," Van Sant says. "I think that we've grown up enough with journalism to see that it's as fictitious as a Tennessee Williams play, and maybe not as investigative as a Tennessee Williams play."

Van Sant often blurred the line between fiction and reportage. "My Own Private Idaho" breaks away from its protagonists to interview real-life rent boys, and "To Die For" is loosely based on the case of a New Hampshire schoolteacher who conspired with her teenage lover to murder her husband. But with "Milk," Van Sant is obliged to tell a true story without changing the names.

"You can never really get there," Van Sant says, referring to the truth. "So you might as well have an analogy rather than a biographical depiction. But that was never really the way this movie was conceived."

Although he has been trying to film Harvey Milk's story for many years, Van Sant seems ambivalent about returning to a more conventional way of working. "It's a cast of well-known actors, and the script is more conventional in the way it goes about telling a story."

Although Van Sant says he is dutifully replicating the political aspects of Dustin Lance Black's script, what energizes him is re-creating the texture of gay life in 1970s San Francisco. "One of the most exciting things is the creation of a gay class of people, from nothing, or from a subclass that was below the surface," he says.

"Milk" also deals with the creation of an ad hoc family, formed in this case around Harvey Milk's camera shop. "It's about this new group that's formed on Castro Street, making up their own rules."

With a larger budget and name cast, Van Sant is under more watchful eyes and consequently more pressure than he has been in years. But he is sticking to his stripped-down methods as best he can.

"We're bringing some of the things we've grown to love on these last few movies to this party," Savides says. "Sometimes we find it's not working. And sometimes it works."

[MacGuffin]

Big fan of Van Sant's "Death Trilogy," but just couldn't get into this one. Where those films were so compelling to me, here everything felt so disconnected. Some subpar acting didn't help either. Van Sant's techniques are on display here (nice use of dropping out dialogue for use of music, etc), but just didn't elevate the story.