It's the right time to tell Harvey Milk's story, and Gus Van Sant is the right man to do it
After years of starts and stops, the director, screenwriter Dustin Lance Black and Sean Penn bring the San Francisco politician's story to the screen.
Long before making "Milk," the film due Wednesday about the life and death of openly gay San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk, director Gus Van Sant imagined a scene in which the voluble, charismatic Milk was dressed as Ronald McDonald. In that version, Dan White, a fellow city supervisor who shot and killed Milk and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone in 1978, was deep in a "sugar-infused rage" and "envisioned himself as the Twinkie sheriff and he shot Mayor McCheese, and Harvey was Ronald McDonald."
Van Sant laughingly calls this his Charlie Kaufman take on Milk's story -- though, perhaps it's the sad nature of reality that White claimed during his trial that junk food had fueled his behavior -- the infamous "Twinkie defense."
"I offered it to both Sean Penn and Tom Cruise but I was really inept as a producer," says Van Sant, who says he then just sat and waited for them to call him back. And waited. And waited. And never followed up. "I completely dropped the ball from the very first and it sort of washed into a sea of however many offers they get every day."
That was in the mid-'90s. It's a decade later, the afternoon of the Los Angeles premiere of "Milk," the more straightforward telling of the story that Van Sant made. Dressed in baggy jeans and a blue top, the 56-year-old director is sitting on the deck of his modernist, unpretentious Los Feliz home, fielding phone calls about what he calls "the wedding," i.e. that night's gala. His parents are here and the more traditional-looking Gus Van Sant Sr. is reading by the swimming pool.
Few American directors have a body of work as varied and idiosyncratic as Van Sant's, which includes his early poignant looks at drug users and street kids ("Drugstore Cowboy" and "My Own Private Idaho"), a shot-by-shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho," elliptical visions of Kurt Cobain's final days ("Last Days") and the Oscar-winning, feel-good drama "Good Will Hunting." In person, Van Sant seems gentle, with a nonjudgmental air, a distinct adherence to live-and-let-live. His features are rounded, his dark hair limp and his eyes seem to pop out like a cartoon character.
- TOMORROW IN CALENDAR Jul 06, 1999
- Gus Van Sant, 'Milk' Dec 10, 2008
- Taking a run at president Oct 12, 2008
