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Gus Van Sant - Last Days
By Daniel Robert Epstein
Sep 2, 2005
Gus Van Sant has made many films which have become touchstones for generations such as Drugstore Cowboy, Good Will Hunting and Elephant. His latest one, Last Days, tackles the early 90’s by doing a fictional story of the last three days of Kurt Cobain’s life. The Cobain-like character [played by Michael Pitt] wanders around his desolate property inviting in Mormons and salesmen to say whatever they want to him while he grunts. The various supporting characters drift in and out of the film almost like dreams. Last Days chronicles the story of a man who has everything but is very depressed.
Check out the official site for Last Days
Daniel Robert Epstein: When did you think of doing Last Days?
Gus Van Sant: I thought of doing it in 1994. First I was interested in doing something biographical about Kurt Cobain. I stopped working with that idea really fast because it started to seem like The Doors. At one point in 1992, I wanted to do the same thing except with dolls, because I was into dolls at that moment. You would be distanced enough that it would be interesting. Then I wrote about two pages and stopped.
DRE:
Was it similar to what director Todd Haynes did with Superstar: The Karen Carpenter story?
GVS:
I actually did ask Todd if he would mind if I used dolls and he said that lots of people before him used dolls. Then I thought I should do something not about Kurt, but about this other character. It would be interesting to do something about a time that didn’t exist and an unknown last couple of days as an idea.
DRE:
How did you go about writing the screenplay?
GVS:
It was based on really small things. What really happened to Kurt wasn’t that interesting. He was missing and then was found dead. Those last three days were really plain. He did simple things around his house. The first person I tried to cast was Holger Thaarup, who I saw in a short film festival. He was an actor in Thomas Vinterberg’s The Boy Who Walked Backwards. I visited with him and met Vinterberg in 1995. Then a couple of years later I dropped the idea and didn’t get around to doing it. Then I met Mike Pitt when he was 17 and he looked a lot like Holger. I said I wanted to do this story about this rock star walking around his house. Mike was on board and six years went by.
DRE:
Does commercial success mean much to you right now?
GVS:
I’m not sure if it does now or has before. I don’t think I’ve ever calculated anything. For me, calculations end up making you do something you don’t want to do in the first place and you could lose anyway.
DRE:
Would you characterize a lot of your movies as slow?
GVS:
Well, slow enough so that certain things happen that don’t necessarily happen when things are faster. It’s just a way to get around a style in which we’re sort of used to looking at things really quickly. Once we see it, we know it and off to the next thing, whether it’s a steaming cup of coffee that somebody has just poured in a restaurant, or the lead character or whatever. You don’t ever really get a chance to look at what that thing is. It’s sort of like shorthand. In order to construct a story, you’re not really pondering what you’re looking at. This film is just a way to do it in a little bit of a different way, so you’re allowed to think other things.
DRE:
How did you cast the minor characters of Last Days, such as the Yellow Pages salesman and the Mormons?
GVS:
Well the Yellow Pages salesman was a real Yellow Pages salesman and the two Mormon guys were from Aberdeen, Washington. They looked like Mormons. We didn’t know that they would be Mormons right off the bat but as we rehearsed, we thought that would be good.
DRE:
Did writing the severe depression of Blake’s character affect you at all while you were writing the script?
GVS:
I think it does work on you in different ways. You do sort of feel the film, but it wasn’t too terrible. I thought of him as someone who may have been frustrated and angry, but he was trying to carve out some space for himself. I don’t think it was anything he hadn’t dealt with before, but he was maybe making assumptions. At one second in his life he decided to pull the trigger, but once he did that he couldn’t get back.
DRE:
How did you structure the story?
GVS:
Originally there were three different stories, sort of like Elephant. One of the stories was the detective, another story was the character Asia [Argento] played and the third story was Blake’s character. The other characters, even in the writing stages, weren’t holding up, so I kind of abbreviated those guys. We shot more footage than what was in the film and even further abbreviated those guys. We tended to want to be more with the central character in Blake. In Elephant, the kids had equal footing. In this film, it is more about this one guy, so it started to morph into something it wasn’t originally designed to be.
DRE:
Do you feel Last Days dispels any of the rock star clichés?
GVS:
I think it sort of supports it. It’s saying that the cliché is real. The cliché being, if you give someone what they want, they’ll go off the deep end. I guess that’s part of cliché. A cliché could also be Arnold Schwarzenegger running for public office. That’s a positive cliché.
DRE:
Has the rest of Nirvana or Courtney Love responded to Last Days?
GVS:
They haven’t seen it, but I offered it to Krist Novoselic and Courtney Love because I know them. I explained it to them. For me, I want them to see it because I like the film. I understand that this is a huge, traumatic thing in their life and they had their own relationship to Kurt. They really don’t need to see a movie by somebody else that’s outside of that. You also don’t want to dwell on it because it’s such a tragedy.
DRE:
Do your films relate to any of your own past experiences?
GVS:
In Elephant, I could very much relate to my past high school experiences. I went to a pretty big high school. It wasn’t so much Columbine itself; it was just the whole idea of the things that made up Columbine, which I think everyone experienced even if you went to a small high school. In Last Days, I think it’s about someone who is trying to get away from his own life or responsibility. Things are overtaking him in his last days, and I think I can relate to that and others can as well. Maybe it’s a long and overdrawn version of going home in a bad mood, but it’s sort of an epic version of that. You sort of wake up the next morning and everything’s okay, but when you first get home it’s not okay at all. It’s that sort of thing that’s going on in Gerry. I very much related to that, just because I’ve been lost a couple of times in the desert.
DRE:
Are you happy with the Criterion Collection release of My Own Private Idaho?
GVS:
I helped work on it. It’s really good, I’m really impressed.
DRE:
Criterion implements a lot of extra footage in their DVD releases. Do you usually have a lot of extra material in your films?
DRE:
We don’t really shoot a lot of other material. I know that’s what they like to do. Elephant didn’t really have much. In Last Days there are other people doing similar things to what Blake is doing. Asia takes a bath; Nicole wakes up. The Mormon boys go on for like a ten minutes.
DRE:
Is there a reason you make so many films about young people?
GVS:
I don’t really know how to answer that, except the movies that weren’t about young people didn’t get financed and the ones that were, did. It’s a pretty graceful time in person’s life so I’m attracted to that side of it. It’s also an unknown time, everyone’s most volatile time and most important time of growing. If we were asked what our favorite music was, it would be something we were listening to at 18. There’s something about that time that we just don’t grow out of.
DRE:
You have made music videos in the past. Do you plan on directing them again?
GVS:
I’ve tried to avoid music videos. I started to feel I didn’t have the freedom to do what I wanted to do. I was under the impression that they were easier to make than commercials, but commercials might, in some ways, be easier. In music videos, the band’s the product and the product talks and thinks. If you’re selling something like Ivory liquid, at least the product itself doesn’t talk to you. The people around it do, but with the band it’s really difficult.
DRE:
So do you plan on directing commercials again?
GVS:
No, I haven’t really done those either. I’ve been offered them, but I avoid them. It’s easier to work on stuff I really want to get done.
DRE:
What are you doing next?
GVS:
I’m adapting The Time Traveler’s Wife [written by Audrey Niffenegger]. It’s a good book.
DRE:
What drew you to The Time Traveler’s Wife?
GVS:
Well I’ve just started so I don’t know what I can say, except that I’m attempting it. It’s just an interesting point of view of a classic love story. The time travel is interesting compared to the literal time I’ve used in my films.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
Gus Van Sant has made many films which have become touchstones for generations such as Drugstore Cowboy, Good Will Hunting and Elephant. His latest one, Last Days, tackles the early 90’s by doing a fictional story of the last three days of Kurt Cobain’s life. The Cobain-like character [played by Michael Pitt] wanders around his desolate property inviting in Mormons and salesmen to say whatever they want to him while he grunts. The various supporting characters drift in and out of the film almost like dreams. Last Days chronicles the story of a man who has everything but is very depressed.
Check out the official site for Last Days
Daniel Robert Epstein: When did you think of doing Last Days?
Gus Van Sant: I thought of doing it in 1994. First I was interested in doing something biographical about Kurt Cobain. I stopped working with that idea really fast because it started to seem like The Doors. At one point in 1992, I wanted to do the same thing except with dolls, because I was into dolls at that moment. You would be distanced enough that it would be interesting. Then I wrote about two pages and stopped.
DRE:
Was it similar to what director Todd Haynes did with Superstar: The Karen Carpenter story?
GVS:
I actually did ask Todd if he would mind if I used dolls and he said that lots of people before him used dolls. Then I thought I should do something not about Kurt, but about this other character. It would be interesting to do something about a time that didn’t exist and an unknown last couple of days as an idea.
DRE:
How did you go about writing the screenplay?
GVS:
It was based on really small things. What really happened to Kurt wasn’t that interesting. He was missing and then was found dead. Those last three days were really plain. He did simple things around his house. The first person I tried to cast was Holger Thaarup, who I saw in a short film festival. He was an actor in Thomas Vinterberg’s The Boy Who Walked Backwards. I visited with him and met Vinterberg in 1995. Then a couple of years later I dropped the idea and didn’t get around to doing it. Then I met Mike Pitt when he was 17 and he looked a lot like Holger. I said I wanted to do this story about this rock star walking around his house. Mike was on board and six years went by.
DRE:
Does commercial success mean much to you right now?
GVS:
I’m not sure if it does now or has before. I don’t think I’ve ever calculated anything. For me, calculations end up making you do something you don’t want to do in the first place and you could lose anyway.
DRE:
Would you characterize a lot of your movies as slow?
GVS:
Well, slow enough so that certain things happen that don’t necessarily happen when things are faster. It’s just a way to get around a style in which we’re sort of used to looking at things really quickly. Once we see it, we know it and off to the next thing, whether it’s a steaming cup of coffee that somebody has just poured in a restaurant, or the lead character or whatever. You don’t ever really get a chance to look at what that thing is. It’s sort of like shorthand. In order to construct a story, you’re not really pondering what you’re looking at. This film is just a way to do it in a little bit of a different way, so you’re allowed to think other things.
DRE:
How did you cast the minor characters of Last Days, such as the Yellow Pages salesman and the Mormons?
GVS:
Well the Yellow Pages salesman was a real Yellow Pages salesman and the two Mormon guys were from Aberdeen, Washington. They looked like Mormons. We didn’t know that they would be Mormons right off the bat but as we rehearsed, we thought that would be good.
DRE:
Did writing the severe depression of Blake’s character affect you at all while you were writing the script?
GVS:
I think it does work on you in different ways. You do sort of feel the film, but it wasn’t too terrible. I thought of him as someone who may have been frustrated and angry, but he was trying to carve out some space for himself. I don’t think it was anything he hadn’t dealt with before, but he was maybe making assumptions. At one second in his life he decided to pull the trigger, but once he did that he couldn’t get back.
DRE:
How did you structure the story?
GVS:
Originally there were three different stories, sort of like Elephant. One of the stories was the detective, another story was the character Asia [Argento] played and the third story was Blake’s character. The other characters, even in the writing stages, weren’t holding up, so I kind of abbreviated those guys. We shot more footage than what was in the film and even further abbreviated those guys. We tended to want to be more with the central character in Blake. In Elephant, the kids had equal footing. In this film, it is more about this one guy, so it started to morph into something it wasn’t originally designed to be.
DRE:
Do you feel Last Days dispels any of the rock star clichés?
GVS:
I think it sort of supports it. It’s saying that the cliché is real. The cliché being, if you give someone what they want, they’ll go off the deep end. I guess that’s part of cliché. A cliché could also be Arnold Schwarzenegger running for public office. That’s a positive cliché.
DRE:
Has the rest of Nirvana or Courtney Love responded to Last Days?
GVS:
They haven’t seen it, but I offered it to Krist Novoselic and Courtney Love because I know them. I explained it to them. For me, I want them to see it because I like the film. I understand that this is a huge, traumatic thing in their life and they had their own relationship to Kurt. They really don’t need to see a movie by somebody else that’s outside of that. You also don’t want to dwell on it because it’s such a tragedy.
DRE:
Do your films relate to any of your own past experiences?
GVS:
In Elephant, I could very much relate to my past high school experiences. I went to a pretty big high school. It wasn’t so much Columbine itself; it was just the whole idea of the things that made up Columbine, which I think everyone experienced even if you went to a small high school. In Last Days, I think it’s about someone who is trying to get away from his own life or responsibility. Things are overtaking him in his last days, and I think I can relate to that and others can as well. Maybe it’s a long and overdrawn version of going home in a bad mood, but it’s sort of an epic version of that. You sort of wake up the next morning and everything’s okay, but when you first get home it’s not okay at all. It’s that sort of thing that’s going on in Gerry. I very much related to that, just because I’ve been lost a couple of times in the desert.
DRE:
Are you happy with the Criterion Collection release of My Own Private Idaho?
GVS:
I helped work on it. It’s really good, I’m really impressed.
DRE:
Criterion implements a lot of extra footage in their DVD releases. Do you usually have a lot of extra material in your films?
DRE:
We don’t really shoot a lot of other material. I know that’s what they like to do. Elephant didn’t really have much. In Last Days there are other people doing similar things to what Blake is doing. Asia takes a bath; Nicole wakes up. The Mormon boys go on for like a ten minutes.
DRE:
Is there a reason you make so many films about young people?
GVS:
I don’t really know how to answer that, except the movies that weren’t about young people didn’t get financed and the ones that were, did. It’s a pretty graceful time in person’s life so I’m attracted to that side of it. It’s also an unknown time, everyone’s most volatile time and most important time of growing. If we were asked what our favorite music was, it would be something we were listening to at 18. There’s something about that time that we just don’t grow out of.
DRE:
You have made music videos in the past. Do you plan on directing them again?
GVS:
I’ve tried to avoid music videos. I started to feel I didn’t have the freedom to do what I wanted to do. I was under the impression that they were easier to make than commercials, but commercials might, in some ways, be easier. In music videos, the band’s the product and the product talks and thinks. If you’re selling something like Ivory liquid, at least the product itself doesn’t talk to you. The people around it do, but with the band it’s really difficult.
DRE:
So do you plan on directing commercials again?
GVS:
No, I haven’t really done those either. I’ve been offered them, but I avoid them. It’s easier to work on stuff I really want to get done.
DRE:
What are you doing next?
GVS:
I’m adapting The Time Traveler’s Wife [written by Audrey Niffenegger]. It’s a good book.
DRE:
What drew you to The Time Traveler’s Wife?
GVS:
Well I’ve just started so I don’t know what I can say, except that I’m attempting it. It’s just an interesting point of view of a classic love story. The time travel is interesting compared to the literal time I’ve used in my films.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
