Gus Van Sant: interview

Ben Walters talks to Gus Van Sant about shooting, casting and soundtracking his new film 'Paranoid Park'.

You chose non-professional actors from an open casting call for ‘Paranoid Park’, as you did with ‘Elephant’.
It’s because they’re set in high schools. I always thought teenagers are youthful enough that they’ve pretended recently; it wasn’t so long ago that they were playing war or trying to be Rambo. It’s play-acting. We tried it for ‘Last Days’ but those characters were rock ’n’ rollers in their mid-twenties, and none of those people would come to our casting calls, so we ended up casting our friends. If you put up posters around town for high-school kids, high-school kids will come. If you’re casting politicians, you can’t put up posters and have politicians come down. Also, with reality shows and ‘American Idol’, non-professionals don’t feel they’re excluded like they might have 20 years ago.

Most of your films are about lost boys of one kind or another.
They usually have male characters, lost boys, but often it’s ad hoc families that are interesting to me. Because I didn’t have brothers, I was always interested in the kids down the street that had four brothers in their family, so I became one of them – but it was not my family.
I’ve always been attracted to temporary families. They tend to be lost characters.

How did you and Chris Doyle develop the look of the film?
I’d worked together with Chris before on ‘Psycho’, but we didn’t get very crazy there – we pretty much tried to copy [Hitchcock’s movie]. So this was our opportunity to do something else. One of Chris’s films that I liked was ‘Fallen Angels’ [directed by Wong Kar-Wai], which used a wide lens. I knew that skateboarders often use a really wide lens [for skate movies] ’cos that way you won’t miss the action, so I tried talking him into shooting like that. But he had an aversion to directly quoting one of his films, so we kept going into what the story was asking us to do, what I wanted to do and what his choices were. He made a detailed breakdown of the script, about four notebooks long. Most of the time we’re just shooting a human being doing something; we’re very fascinated as audience members with ourselves. So it comes down to environments: coffee shops, country roads, fields.

The music and sound design are also important in giving us access to Alex’s headspace. Did you put much planning into that?
No, that came later. We were thinking about location sound during shooting, but not the music or sound design at all.

The music does a lot of work, though – sometimes it even replaces the dialogue. It feels like Alex is listening to his iPod.
Actually, a lot of the music came from listening to iTunes while we were editing. My assistant editor is sort of a musicologist so we would listen to different things from this massive inventory of his music. Shuffle was usually on and I would say, ‘What is this song? That works really good right here’, and we’d drag it over into Final Cut Pro [the film editing application].

There’s a moment of violence in the film that is very disturbing, to us as well as to Alex.
It was different in the book; I had the idea this would be an interesting graphic. The accident is the thing he’s keeping secret, but what you’re thinking about maybe as you watch it is your secret, or the thing you couldn’t tell anyone when you were that age. You’re forced to become an adult by keeping things in your own mind.

‘Paranoid Park’ is out on December 26.

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