Gus Van Sant born 23 July 1952Gus Van Sant Jr. (Louisville, Kentucky) is an American Academy Award-nominated film director, photographer, musician, and author. He currently lives in Portland, Oregon.
His early career was devoted to directing television commercials in the Pacific Northwest. Openly gay, he has dealt unflinchingly with homosexual and other marginalised subcultures without being particularly concerned about providing positive role models.
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His filmography as writer and director includes an adaptation of Tom Robbins' novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1993), which features a diverse cast (Keanu Reeves, Roseanne Barr, Uma Thurman, and k.d. lang, with cameos by William S. Burroughs and Heather Graham, among others); and My Own Private Idaho (1991), also starring Reeves as well as the late River Phoenix.He is perhaps best known for directing Good Will Hunting (1997).
The unprecedented success of Good Will Hunting allowed Van Sant to pursue whatever project his heart desired, which ended up being an unusually faithful remake of the Alfred Hitchcock classic Psycho. As opposed to reinterpreting the 1960 film, however, Van Sant opted to recreate the film shot-for-shot, in colour, with a cast of young Hollywood A-listers. His decision was met with equal parts curiosity, skepticism, and derision from industry insiders and outsiders alike, and the finished result met with a similar reception. If not exactly a failure, it wasn't much of a triumph, either.
Van Sant fared somewhat better with 2000's Finding Forrester, a drama about a high-school student from the Bronx who becomes unlikely friends with a crusty, reclusive author (Sean Connery).
In any event, Van Sant—longing to return to more-intimate production methods—decided to leave behind big-budget studio filmmaking for his next two features Gerry (2002) and the Columbine-themed Elephant (2003), which unexpectedly won the Palme d'Or and a Best Director award for Van Sant at Cannes.
In 2005, Van Sant released Last Days, the final component of what he refers to as his 'Death Trilogy', (the other parts being Gerry and Elephant). It is a fictionalised account of what happened to Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain in the days leading up to his death.
Van Sant's most recent film is something of a return to the mainstream. Released in 2008, the feature film Milk is a biopic of openly gay San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk, who was assassinated in 1978, played by Sean Penn. The film was released to much acclaim and earned numerous accolades from film critics and guilds. Ultimately, it received eight Oscar nominations at the 81st Academy Awards, including Best Picture, winning two for Best Actor in a Leading Role for Penn and Best Original Screenplay for writer Dustin Lance Black. Van Sant was nominated for Best Director.
As an actor, Van Sant has appeared in a cameo on screen in Kevin Smith's Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back playing himself. In the movie, he is counting wads of money which was made during Good Will Hunting. As an added joke, they were filming a fake sequel to the movie, called 'Good Will Hunting 2: Hunting Season'.
He has written the screenplays for most of his early movies, and has written one novel, Pink. A book of his photography has also been published called 108 Portraits. He also makes the occasional music video and has released two albums in his own right.