By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Enigmas and populism: more of van Sant's plans
David Weissman, codirector of The Cockettes talks to fellow Portland director Gus van Sant about enigmas and big-budget movies: “Enigmatic is probably pretty true. I guess enigmatic would just mean hard to read. But if I say something like, “I want to make a movie about these street hustlers in Portland, Oregon,” and I’m talking to somebody that just got out of merchandising who’s working at Sony as a junior executive, they just go, like, “Uh-huh,” and I become enigmatic just because what I’m saying is too off their charts, not because I’m really enigmatic. Sometimes people just think you’re enigmatic because you’re not a Republican Christian and they’re not understanding your ideas.” Would van Sant make another Good Will Hunting? “When I made those films, I had read this essay by Jamake Highwater. He had drawn this wild timeline of art and artists. How in Greek times images on vases were not about the artist per se but about representing things that would be understood by the whole community. And then, through the centuries, art started to be relegated to represent biblical stuff, and eventually it gave way to portraits of people that were wealthy enough to afford the portraits, and so the subjects became the rich guys. That gave way to artists making pictures about commoners and then making their own expressionist creations. Until eventually you reached a time where the artist’s name was the only thing – whatever you were looking at was more about the name then it was about the representation… Good Will Hunting [was] an example of populist art. Like it was made to be recognized by the general population, and one of the reasons that I made it was just reading this [essay]. The same with Forester. So, yeah. It still appeals to me.”
