Gus Van Sant

Gus Green Van Sant Jr. (born July 24, 1952) is an American film director, producer, photographer, and musician who has earned acclaim as an independent filmmaker.

His films typically deal with themes of marginalized subcultures, in particular homosexuality.

Van Sant is considered one of the most prominent auteurs of the New Queer Cinema movement.

His early career was devoted to directing television commercials in the Pacific Northwest.

Van Sant's artistic leanings took him to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1970, where his introduction to various avant-garde directors inspired him to change his major from painting to cinema.

After spending time in Europe, Van Sant went to Los Angeles in 1976.

He secured a job as a production assistant to filmmaker Ken Shapiro, with whom he developed a few ideas, none of which came to fruition.

In 1981, Van Sant made Alice in Hollywood, a film about a naïve young actress who goes to Hollywood and abandons her ideals.

It was never released.

During this period, Van Sant began to spend time observing the denizens of the more down-and-out sections of Hollywood Boulevard.

He became fascinated by the existence of this marginalized section of L.A.'s population, especially in context with the more ordinary, prosperous world that surrounded them.

Van Sant would repeatedly focus his work on those existing on society's fringes, making his feature film directorial debut Mala Noche.

It was made two years after Van Sant went to New York to work in an advertising agency.

He saved $20,000 during his tenure there, enabling him to finance the majority of his tale of doomed love between a gay liquor store clerk and a Mexican immigrant.

The film, which was taken from Portland street writer Walt Curtis' semi-autobiographical novella, featured some of the director's hallmarks, notably an unfulfilled romanticism, a dry sense of the absurd, and the refusal to treat homosexuality as something deserving of judgment.

Unlike many gay filmmakers, Van Sant—who had long been openly gay—declined to use same-sex relationships as fodder for overtly political statements, although such relationships would frequently appear in his films.

Shot in black-and-white, the film earned Van Sant almost overnight acclaim on the festival circuit, with the Los Angeles Times naming it the year's best independent film.

The film's success attracted Hollywood interest, and Van Sant was briefly courted by Universal; the courtship ended after Van Sant pitched a series of project ideas (including what would become Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho) that the studio declined to take interest in.

Van Sant returned to Portland, Oregon, where he set up house and began giving life to the ideas rejected by Universal.

He directed Drugstore Cowboy about four drug addicts robbing pharmacies to support their habit.

The film met with great critical success and revived the career of Matt Dillon.

He made his feature-length cinematic directorial debut with Mala Noche (1985).

His second feature, Drugstore Cowboy (1989), was highly acclaimed, and earned him screenwriting awards from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and New York Film Critics Circle and the award for Best Director from the National Society of Film Critics.

His next film, My Own Private Idaho (1991), was similarly praised, as were the black comedy To Die For (1995), the drama Good Will Hunting (1997), and the biographical film Milk (2008); for the latter two, Van Sant was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director and both films received Best Picture nominations.

Drugstore Cowboy's exploration of the lives of those living on society's outer fringes, as well as its Portland setting, were mirrored in Van Sant's next effort, the similarly acclaimed My Own Private Idaho (1991).

Only with the success of Cowboy was Van Sant now given license to make Idaho (a film he had originally pitched that was knocked back several times because the studios deemed the script 'too risky').

New Line Cinema now gave Van Sant the green light, and he went on a mission to get the Idaho script into the hands of River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves, his preferred choice for the two young leads.

After months of struggle with agents and managers over the content of the script, Van Sant finally secured Phoenix and Reeves, who played the roles of Mike Waters and Scott Favor, respectively.

Though most of Van Sant's other films received favorable reviews, such as Finding Forrester (2000) and Paranoid Park (2007), some of his efforts, such as the art house production Last Days (2005) and the environmental drama Promised Land (2012), have received more mixed reviews from critics, while his adaptation of Tom Robbins's Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1993), his 1998 remake of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, and The Sea of Trees (2015), were critical and commercial failures.

Van Sant wrote the screenplays for several of his earlier works, and is the author of a novel, Pink.

A book of his photography, 108 Portraits, has been published, and he has released two musical albums.

He is gay and lives in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles, California.

Van Sant was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, the son of Betty (née Seay) and Gus Green Van Sant Sr; Gus's father was a clothing manufacturer and traveling salesman, who rapidly worked his way into middle class prosperity, holding executive marketing positions that included being president of the White Stag Manufacturing Company's Apparel Operation.

As a result of his father's job, the family moved continually during Van Sant's childhood.

His paternal family is of partial Dutch origin; the name "Van Sant" is derived from the Dutch name "Van Zandt".

In 2003, Van Sant's film based on the Columbine High School massacre, Elephant, won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

Van Sant also received the festival's Best Director Award that same year, making him one of only two filmmakers—the other being Joel Coen—to win both accolades at the festival in the same year.

The earliest Van Zandt arrived in the New Netherland area in the early 17th century, around what is now New York City.

Van Sant is an alumnus of Darien High School in Darien, Connecticut, and The Catlin Gabel School in Portland, Oregon.

One constant in the director's early years was his interest in visual arts (namely, painting and Super-8 filmmaking); while still in school he began making semi-autobiographical shorts costing between 30 and 50 dollars.