It’s fitting that the most readily identifiable motif in Van Sant’s movies—from his debut, Mala Noche (1985), to My Own Private Idaho to Elephant —is shots of clouds passing in the wind. This is a director who follows his whims—and whose ability to put his finger on why he does what he does sometimes falters accordingly. Contemplative, mildly aloof and occasionally staring into space when we spoke at the most recent Toronto International Film Festival, Van Sant still considers himself open to making any kind of film. “I just went into a smaller budget, and I stayed in there for the last four films,” he says. “But like seasons, [different kinds of films] come and go. I don’t usually stick to one thing anyway. But the last four films were definitely all very similar budgets, $3 million each.”

The first three of those constituted the death trilogy: the abstract, Beckett-like Gerry; the Columbine-inspired Elephant; and the faux–Kurt Cobain biopic Last Days. He cites seeing Béla Tarr’s seven-and-a-half hour epic Sátántangó (1994) as the major turning point in his career—the movie inspired his shift back toward independents and directly influenced the techniques he used on the death trilogy. (Filmed in a series of lengthy tracking shots—gliding, uninterrupted camera moves—Tarr’s film concerns the fate of a Hungarian town after the fall of Communism.) Only a director as detached as Van Sant could fudge the number of times he’s seen a daylong movie. “I think I’ve seen it, like, three or four times,” he says. “I think I actually have a copy of it on a kind of QuickTime. Béla would flip out if he heard that.”

Tarr’s influence plays out in Paranoid Park, which employs more of the long takes that Van Sant borrowed in his last three films. But as he quickly points out, the dialogue in Paranoid is more conventional than in Elephant or Last Days; oddly, he describes it as “Shakespearean” in our interview. Clearly a teen film in genre-terms, Paranoid is based on an epistolary young-adult novel by Blake Nelson. The narrative follows a skateboarder named Alex (Gabe Nevins) whose attempt to “hop” a train ends tragically when a passing locomotive cuts a pursuing security guard in half. Police suspect foul play. With divorcing parents, a gossipy girlfriend (Taylor Momsen) and friends he won’t confide in, Alex allows loneliness and paranoia to consume his life after the incident.

LIGHT MOTIF It’s lonely being a train-hopping skate rat in Paranoid Park.

What’s extraordinary about Van Sant’s movie is that it captures Alex’s psychology in cinematic terms—as in Elephant, the character’s isolation is conveyed through slow-motion, time-lapse photography, subtle shifts in lens focus and an eclectic, sometimes jarring mix of ambient noise and pop music by Van Sant’s frequent sound designer, Leslie Shatz. Paranoid Park quietly subverts the conventions of high-school films: The investigating officer (Daniel Liu) is more avuncular than threatening to the law-skirting teens; racked with guilt, Alex couldn’t care less about girls. (Indeed, his defloration barely rouses him from his chronic stupor.) Acknowledging his mainstream past, Van Sant employs Elliott Smith’s plaintive song “Angeles,” also prominently featured in Good Will Hunting, at a climactic moment. It ranked as the most cathartic scene in any movie at the Toronto fest.

“Somebody said, ‘Oh, you can’t use that song.’ My sound designer said that it was a bad move,” Van Sant says. “I couldn’t help it…. It’s really sort of just inventing your own score.” Van Sant cites other directors—Wes Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, even Stanley Kubrick—who have built soundtracks out of existing music. Without an original score, Paranoid Park seizes on Nino Rota’s alternately anxious and comic music for Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits and Amarcord, which Van Sant used almost as a lark. “All the recordings that I have were in [my] computer and recordings that I have at home, which is sort of the way I’ve always found music to put in the movie,” he says.

Van Sant allows his movies to evolve in the making, refusing to wed himself to a particular strategy until late in the game. “Even on the first day, you can start changing things,” he says. “There’s no reason to make a decision until you’re actually doing it.” Gerry, for example, began as a digressive conversation piece modeled on John Cassavetes’s films and instead became a minimalist landscape movie, in which Matt Damon and Casey Affleck, both playing characters named Gerry, wander mazelike, hypnotically beautiful terrain. “Gerry was kind of arrived at in a process,” Van Sant explains. “It was all the way up until the first shooting day that we decided we were going in a certain direction. Things were changing as we went. And it usually does that, at least the way I shoot my films.”

In keeping with his commitment to spontaneity, Van Sant hired nonprofessional actors for Paranoid (as he did on Elephant), reportedly recruiting them through MySpace. In the press notes, he’s quoted as saying that MySpace “is how all casting agencies should go about casting high schoolers.” But Van Sant suggests that quote was taken selectively to plug MySpace. “I don’t think I’ve said that. The press notes are probably wrong,” he says. “I think MySpace is such a buzzword—it’s like, wow, MySpace. But I don’t even know how MySpace works…. [The casting agency] did put an ad in MySpace. They also put an ad in The Oregonian …[but] The Oregonian isn’t as exciting as MySpace. It’s kind of a runaway misconception.” A flyer lured first-time actor Nevins, who’s nonetheless utterly credible in every scene, to a Paranoid Park casting call.

SHAGGY DUDE STORY Van Sant, left, reviews on-set playbacks with members of the Paranoid cast.

Another of Van Sant’s gambits in Paranoid: using two cinematographers—Christopher Doyle, whom Van Sant also worked with on Psycho, and the relatively unknown Rain Kathy Li. It’s an approach he also employed on Idaho and his 1993 flop Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.

Two cinematographers working on one film is a rarity in Hollywood, where no one likes to share credit. Then again, Van Sant has always distrusted the movie industry—a suspicion that formed, at least in retrospect, the impetus for one of his biggest failures, a remake (starring Vince Vaughn) of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 classic Psycho.

“[Movie producers] often said that, even back in the ’80s, the films we really like to make…are sequels to our interesting pieces, like Bourne Ultimatum,” he says. “The funny thing about it is that you can’t have a sequel unless you have the original, which is the thing that really hurts Hollywood… It’s almost like saying, ‘If we could just print money, we’d rather do that.’… [Remaking Psycho] was a harebrained idea of how to give [Hollywood] what it wanted.”

Van Sant regards the Psycho experiment as a curiosity—neither a success nor a failure, although it was a bomb in financial terms, grossing only $21 million domestically. “I don’t know when last I saw [my] Psycho, but when I saw it last it was really different from the original Psycho, even though we were trying to make it the same,” he says. “I think you could do it. The possibility still haunts me,” he adds with a laugh, “I still want to try again.”

Van Sant’s next project returns him to the relative mainstream. He’s in production on Milk, a biopic of assassinated gay-rights activist and San Francisco city supervisor Harvey Milk, starring Sean Penn. When we spoke, he wasn’t sure whether it would be an extension of the style of his previous films or something completely different. “I can’t tell because we haven’t started working on it, but the style was already kind of changing with Paranoid Park,” he says. “There are certain things that I have in mind, but until we really start working on it, I don’t know.”

Spoken like a true independent.

Paranoid Park opens Friday 14.