Gus Van Sant: Milk

Gus Van Sant es uno de los mas preciados directores de Hollywood. Ganador de un oscar con Good Will Hunting y la realizacón en los últimos años de dramas independientes como Los Ultimos Dias y Elefant. Despues de 10 años Van Sant vuelvo otra vez en la carrera de hollywood en su nuevo film Milk, la controversial biografia de Sean Penn as Harvey Milk, un hombre de 40 años homosexual, que se mudo a San Francisco y comenzo un movimiento a favor de los residentes gay en la Calle Castro; que al instante esta corriendo hacia un cargo politico.

Obviamente la interpretación de Sean Penn le dará otra nominacion a la entrega de los oscars. El resto del elenco incluye a James Franco y Diego Luna, como dos de los amantes que tuvo el protagonista durante su campaña politica.

A continuación les dejo una entrevista en ingles al director:

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.

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 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.