Berlin is yet another stop on the international publicity circuit American director Gus van Sant is pounding with his feature Good Will Hunting, here in competition. Nick Roddick - together with three of his colleagues - has a rather rushed encounter with him
Do you know what Gus van Sant's favourite film is - or, at any rate what it was, before he actually started making films? Go on, guess. I bet you never will. OK, I'll tell you. It was Ordinary People.
I pass this piece of information on right at the start because it is the only revelation produced in the eight minutes accorded to me and three other journalists with the director of Good Will Hunting after an extended trek through half a mile of featureless deep-pile corridors in the Inter-Conti.
It started out - for me and, doubtless, for my colleagues - as your regular interview slot: 20 minutes, half an hour, I don't remember. Then, all of sudden, it was down to 10 minutes. Finally, by the time everyone had sat down and introduced themselves and the lady in the middle had had to rephrase her complex but, as it finally turned out, rather interesting question three times, we were down to eight.
"It's the last interview of the day," said the publicist, pushing us in through the door at the beginning. Ask now, in other words, or forever spike your piece. Doubtless she said the same thing to the camera crew and interviewer she was pushing in through the door as she hustled us out again.But let's get back to Ordinary People. The subtext of those eight minutes is that 'ordinary people' is something Gus van Sant rather wants to be. I recall the interview in which someone asked John Waters whether he wasn't selling out with Hairspray. "I've been trying to sell out for years," responded Waters, "but no one was buying."
And indeed, van Sant's answer to the inevitable question about the conventional structure of Good Will Hunting seems almost to be saying: 'I've always been a conventional filmmaker. Haven't you noticed?'
"When I was younger," he says, returning to Redford's 1981 Oscar-winner, "I used to really love that film and I used the things I learned from Ordinary People and applied them to my filmmaking. It was something that I watched way before I made my first feature film. There was a certain tempo that that film had that I used to develop my ideas about story-telling. And, even though I was making these films about drug addicts in Drugstore Cowboy and street kids in My Own Private Idaho, I was still using the story structure of these other, more traditional films.
"So when I read Good Will Hunting, I saw this was very much like Ordinary People: it's got a guy who had a problem to investigate, something that he needed help with, and there was a psychologist helping him with that problem. So I was using these old interests and made something that was my original idea of my favourite type of movie, before I'd gone through all these other films. It was a way to go back to where I started."
"That's really interesting," says the lady next to me. "So…" But the rest of the sentence dies as she catches the eye of the publicist, who is staring at her and making cutting motions with her hand. My male German colleague, mercifully oblivious to such hints, manages to slip another question under the descending barrier.
"Are you going on in your next films with this favourite kind of movie?" he asks.
"Maybe. I'm not sure," says van Sant, who refuses to stop being interviewed. "Every time you consider a project, you are trying to satisfy a number of different things. Sometimes, it's just an image. You have an image of things that you want to have in a movie, or a story point you want to get at. Sometimes it's a subject that you're interested in, and here is a script that is set in that area. Sometimes, it's just sheerly the idea that you would never expect yourself to be involved in particular projects.
"Like I was thinking about doing this movie starring the group Hanson," he continues, "mostly because I'd never even considered doing anything like that before - mostly because it was a surprise to me as well.
"It's hard to predict, because there are a number of things that are up in the air, like money. I don't know which one will actually happen. I'm still doing this movie, publicity-wise, so I haven't really divorced myself from this project yet."
"So…" we all say in unison.
"That's it," says a voice from the door, leading at least one of us to wonder why, if van Sant is still doing this movie, publicity-wise, we, who are still doing this Festival, journalist-wise, are having such a hard time sharing in the experience. Don't get me wrong. I know all about schedules. And I have great sympathy with Gus van Sant as he jets around Europe on the Good Will Hunting circuit, with journalist after journalist starting the interview (as my German colleague did) by asking - no, not by asking, by saying: "This is the most conventional of your movies so far…"
But eight minutes…? Come on, guys. Let us do our jobs. It's better for all of us in the end.
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