'Will' power

Sean Connery and Gus Van Sant

Does Gus Van Sant mind the comparisons between Finding Forrester and his Oscar-winning 1997 hit, Good Will Hunting?

"No, it's on the poster," he says with a laugh. "Which wasn't my idea. And that's not meant to compare them, but it suggests something -- that if you liked Good Will Hunting, you'll like this movie. I think that would probably work. Like The Shawshank Redemption and then The Green Mile? They were both by Stephen King, both directed by the same guy, and both in the '30s. So do you think that if you liked The Shawshank Redemption, you might have liked The Green Mile? Anyway, I didn't really mind the idea of putting `From the Director of Good Will Hunting' on there because I thought it made sense, whereas when they released a novel I wrote called Pink, they wanted to put, you know, `By the Director of Good Will Hunting' on it, and I thought that was steering people in the wrong direction."

Some might think that Van Sant himself has been steered in the wrong direction of popular pablum, that he should return to the funky marginality explored in his experimental Pink, a fictionalized look at the making of My Own Private Idaho (1991) and his obsession with the film's star, River Phoenix, and subsequent grief and guilt over the actor's death by overdose.

Van Sant is not offended by the suggestion that he may have sold out somewhat, but he is reflective. "I think that when I was starting out and was making my first three films, Mala Noche [1985], Drugstore Cowboy [1989], and My Own Private Idaho, before I went into another arena, which was Even Cowgirls Get the Blues [1993] and then To Die For [1995], which don't really connect to my own genres, and I'm now into this, aside from Psycho [1999], into this Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester area. When I was making the other films, I felt like I was always under the impression that if you made a film audience-friendly or more of something they would expect to see on the screen when they go in, something that is uplifting and positive, that it's an easier way to go than to be making something that's not like that. But I had no proof, and making Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester were, aside from other things, a way to challenge myself and see if I was in fact right, or if it was just sour grapes, and me saying, oh, those movies are easier to make. And I was just challenging myself to see if they were in fact easier to make.

"Well, they are easier. They're easier to draw a larger audience. If you look at Drugstore Cowboy as a successful rendition of that story, technically, you know, if it's a good movie, though limited perhaps by the characters and the events in the movie, but you compare that with Good Will Hunting, which, technically, is also done dramatically well, I think what you have is a movie that's made $10 million as opposed to $140 million, and I think that discrepancy is because of general audience appeal. Which was the theory that's being proven true. I guess Finding Forrester is another way to test that theory, to see whether that actually is true."

Speaking of theories and experiments to test them: what about his Psycho, which aroused the wrath of critics and the indifference of viewers, not to mention costing Universal Pictures $20 million. Was this one experiment that blew up in his face?

"No, no," says Van Sant enigmatically. "I think it's aging quite nicely."
-- P.K.

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