Gus Van Sant (1952 - )
Related: My Own Private Idaho (1991) - gay cinema
My Own Private Idaho (1991) - Gus Van Sant [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Biography
Gus Van Sant Jr. (born July 24, 1952 in Louisville, Kentucky) is an American film director, photographer, musician and author. He has appeared in a cameo on screen in Kevin Smith's Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, and began as a commercial director in the Pacific Northwest.
Van Sant was nominated for a Best Director Academy Award in 1998 for Good Will Hunting, and won Best Director and Palme d'Or at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival for his film Elephant. He has written the screenplays for most of his early movies as well as a novel "Pink" ISBN 0385493533. A book of his photography has also been published called "108 Portraits" ISBN 0944092225. Some of the movies he has written and/or directed include an adaptation of Tom Robbins' novel Even Cowgirls get the Blues, which featured a truly one-of-a-kind cast (Keanu Reeves, Roseanne, Angie Dickenson, Uma Thurman and cameos by William S Burroughs and a then-unknown Heather Graham, among others) and My Own Private Idaho, also starring Keanu Reeves as well as the late River Phoenix.
He has released two CDs entitled "Gus van Sant" and "18 Songs About Golf". He currently lives in Portland, Oregon. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gus_Van_Sant [Mar 2005]
My Own Private Idaho (1991) - Gus Van Sant
My Own Private Idaho (1991) is a film written and directed by Gus Van Sant, loosely based on Shakespeare's Henry IV, part 1. The film follows two street hustlers (River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves) as they embark on a journey of personal discovery that takes them to Idaho and then to Italy. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Own_Private_Idaho [Mar 2005]
Drugstore Cowboy (1989) - Gus Van Sant
Gus Van Sant made his name with this offbeat story of a small group of drug addicts who heist pharmacies to feed their habit. Matt Dillon completely broke with his juvenile persona as Bob, the grungy ringleader and jittery mastermind of a junkie crew. With his frustrated wife Dianne (Kelly Lynch), his loyal partner, the easygoing Rick (James Le Gros), and Rick's juvenile girlfriend Nadine (Heather Graham in an early role), Bob plots ingenious heists and spends the rest of his days sitting around the house getting high. When the heat becomes too intense in Portland, the quartet hits the road for small-town drug stores and hospitals, but when their luck runs out it does so in grand fashion. Set in the Pacific Northwest of 1971, Van Sant so effortlessly re-creates the period that you'd think the film was a time capsule--except for the attitude. Van Sant refuses to moralize and lines his sympathies behind his characters. They're no heroes, but Van Sant can't cast them as villains either. His low-key direction concentrates on the flavor of day-to-day life for a crew of junkies living from fix to fix. Even his drug imagery is inventively placid, a dreamy set of floating visions that suggests their own disembodied states. James Remar costars as the dogged police detective Gentry and cult author William S. Burroughs makes a memorable appearance as the aging junkie Tom the Priest. --Sean Axmaker for amazon.com
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