Pioneers of Queer Cinema: Mala Noche | Gus Van Sant

hello uh my name again is lucas hildebrand it's my pleasure to moderate uh the q a following mala noche um i want to just begin by thanking um kj and may for programming this amazing series and for the invitation for us to be here tonight um i'm sure that gus needs no introduction because you're all here uh but i'm going to introduce him anyway so if you'll bear with me for just a moment and then we'll bring gus to the stage so you've just seen the debut feature by writer director gus van sant mala noche from here he went on to make numerous essential films that have defined recent american cinema including drugstore cowboy my own private idaho to die for good will hunting jerry elephant milk don't worry he won't get far on foot among numerous others his films goodwill hunting and milk were both nominated for best director and best picture at the academy awards he was also the first to debut fashion ford menswear on the red carpet at the oscars the year of goodwill hunting which made a impression on gay little me uh his film elephant won the palm door and best director at the khan film festival he has also won numerous other awards from the berlinale the independent spirit awards national society of film critics new york film critic circle and the razzie awards and as a queer we consider this last award as much an honor as any other he has also earned an outfest lifetime achievement award um he has worked across scales and styles at once embodying american independent cinema at the moment of its cultural breakthrough and then becoming even more radical in his style with a swerve with jerry elephant and last days as indie cinema became increasingly conventional although his aesthetic adapts from feature to feature a sensibility carries through i also credit him with revealing to the world that nicole kidman is actually a great actress with to die for so thank you gus for that uh i love nicole uh his films are queer not simply because they sometimes include gay or gay-ish characters but because they are films that so often look to outlaws rebels hustlers and social outsiders his films are also often rooted in the placeness of portland and the pacific northwest as well as the attention to class and street life within these urban areas as well as the open road in my own life my interest in cinema is co-terminus with his career and drugstore cowboy in particular was a formative film for me that i watched dozens of times on the vhs that i bought used from the video store in my hometown it was an epiphany for me at the time and it still holds up remarkably well i just watched it again yesterday i still [ __ ] love that movie uh and i only much later saw mala mala noche my own private idaho was iconically what queerness looked like to me at the time uh jerry stunned me with its audacity of form and its swerve in terms of style uh and a friend and i road tripped to san francisco to see milk in the castro theater to feel its history and we were rewarded with an amazing film so i would like to bring to the stage gus van sant who i'm deeply honored to be in conversation with this evening [Applause] thank you thank you so i'd like to begin uh the conversation situating this film but also your your sort of relationship to the category of queer cinema given the framing of this series so so this film you said was you started shooting in 83 you finished in 85 which actually makes it contemporaneous with films like jim jarmisch's stranger than paradise and down by law and sort of part of that independent american cinema movement it was actually several years before new curse cinema would be named in a particular way so i was wondering just to begin what does the term queer cinema even mean to you uh and do you actually think your films are queer cinema um you know i want them to be [Music] because those guys are great um but i think it was uh i mean as a label um especially new queer cinema i mean queer cinema or even the word queer was coming along like in the mid 80s um so i think i just was pre this particular film predated it i mean i went to um sundance with um a rough cut of my own private idaho um with me and i showed it in a hotel room and it was the year that um we gave i was one of the judges and we gave todd haynes the the award um and i think it was the next year 92 when there was the um kind of um group grouping of um some of the uh queers uh cinema makers the great ones like tom calen and gregoraki todd haynes uh derek jarman was there um and and queer cinema or gay cinema was taking over or really like you know welcomed at sundance and they were kind of becoming larger and larger so that was kind of the to me that nuclear cinema was was those guys and they were newer than i was they were younger than i was um and i missed that year that you know they all went went together to to there was a conference and a little um talk about about what they were doing um yeah so did you ever feel like you were part of a movement within these films or you just felt like you were always actually when they were when they were really sort of standing and like having their um their moment i thought yes this is like a um it's a movement but um i think i was i was there were people around um bill sherwood had made parting glances um i did enter this film in at sundance and it was refused because the reasoning was in 1985 um the parting glances and desert hearts were both playing so they were kind of getting gay friendly maybe um it would have been included in 91 or something like that but they would have made room for it but um didn't make it and but um yeah well i think this i mean it obviously this is a very different film from party glances or does it hearts um yeah and it's not for sure and affirming representation right in a particular way of gay and lesbian people and i think in a way it's a statement for the series to open with this film uh to say that christina isn't necessarily about positive images or affirming images right yeah yeah for sure yeah so i was wondering if you could speak more about um your interest in in making this particular film so this is based upon um the the writings or even diary and poetry of walt curtis the three main characters are all real people um so what was it that drew you to him as a figure or to his writing and made you wanted to make this into a movie um i was my friend eric edwards who's the director of photography um and we'd worked together on today for um mainly and had done a lot of things you know when we were younger went to school together at rhode island school design and um he had met a person named penny allen who lived in the corbett neighborhood of portland oregon which was kind of a a new arts neighborhood a hippie neighborhood a kind of um avant-garde neighborhood newly avant-garde neighborhood um and uh old houses that were people were renting or trying to buy and um she wanted to make a film about using a cedar grant which was at that time um like kind of a stimulus grant for people that didn't qualify for welfare so she found a way to kind of fund this film through the government and um and uh she assembled her friends walt being one of them he was he was like he was the lead character in the film it's called property it was about a group of friends trying to get together and buy their neighborhood so they didn't have to pay rent they didn't have to like um sort of get left out and uh and the assemblage of friends were very were varied um while being only one of the variations um and um there was a drummer from the holy model rounders richard uh richard not drummer um piano player and uh a queer activist was in in the in the in the grouping uh there was a um sort of elegant um prostitute a woman who was like um lola who was part of the group um there was a um anti-war activist who was part of the assemblage of of characters and so penny i i uh was asked to come up to do sound but also accompany eric and like sort of putting the lights up and sort of handling the tech side of it so i was the sound guy and penny as a way to introduce walt she said um this is a book walt wrote and this is who he is and it was malinoche and i was reading it and sort of keeping it hidden in my room because it was so like um out there scandalous and sort of shocking and um and even though it was like eric's house that i was staying at um and um that was that was it the film came out it was it was it was a great project it still exists somewhere maybe on youtube um but um i had i made a film a short film with um during that period 19 um and then made a feature called alice in hollywood which was set on hollywood boulevard about a girl who comes to be an actress but she kind of ends up a little more destitute than she wanted to be and um it sort of was um i was kind of too close to it and it was too i had written the script and so i was thinking of trying to um do something different and i had been to that festival that i was mentioning the gay house festival at the vista theater and i thought well walt's book certainly is like the most like shocking possibility um and i thought um and it was also a gay story and it was it was um it sort of had something about it you know like um i knew that part of portland well enough that that i knew um it could be something that i could accomplish you know without having a lot of money and um so i kind of made that my next film and uh it was really like a shot in the dark it was it was made um sort of on the run with um a lot of friends and you know collaborators and people that that led us they would let us shoot in their stores of their apartments and we were talking uh before the screening a little bit about waltz and you said he's you know he's he's a working class street poet he's very rough um and and the words in the film are his but he's actually a little bit softened uh in terms of you cast someone who's look a little bit more likeable and walt was a little older a little more um kind of more of a character he's in the film he's he's sometimes like seen in the film um balding but yeah he came from oregon city just south of portland um and had grown up in the 50s um worked in a um there's a lot of vlogging mills down there worked in a mill cut off his finger with the saw played um and was a poet a sort of romantic uh um very um you know um like to drink a lot like to wander the streets of portland and just meet people on the street and talk their air off or talk to them um and you know he also worked in this shop um who a friend of his george to juliotas um his older brother owned the store that he was working in this wasn't the real store they had kind of a nicer looking store this is our kind of makeshift uh grocery store and um it was right on 6th street which is like in the middle of skid road as well called it um in old town in portland and uh you know these were people that he really met and he really you know um developed this fascination with johnny and there was the car and so he wrote it all down in malinochi and uh um he he was um he's still he's still alive he's still in portland still writing poetry and writing um fiction there was a few other books that he'd written as well as malinoche that were kind of based on sort of similar things like people that lived on the streets and people that he knew don't worry he won't get far on foot was another character that lived in northwest portland same area that actually like would buy a liquor from walt when he worked at this other shop which was a had more liquor in it um so he knew callahan they kind of like you know all together these characters and the the my own private idaho kids are like just down the street um so they were all sort of coming from the same place but walt was uh was a kind of amazing character yes so the film is obviously from walt's point of view and in his words but um but both uh johnny and papas are such interesting characters as well so i'm wondering if you could tell us more about those guys how they end up in portland sort of how you cast those those roles and look how do you sort of flesh out these characters who are in a complicated relationship uh with wall where sort of he he is fetishizing them their relationship is transactional but they also don't do anything they don't want to do and sort of they push back at certain moments they have a degree of agency but also sort of their their sort of the sort of political and social and immigration issues that have placed them in a particular way in this in this moment and in the city so i wonder if you could just talk more about sort of how they come to be there and their relationship within this film yeah i think well uh johnny and pepper in particular were um i think spending the winter in portland um instead of risking going across the border and back again because they wanted to work the next season so november i think um the season stopped and they were trying to make it to april and so they were kind of had nothing to do and they were like getting in trouble on the street um when walt walt met them um so they're basically seasonal laborers who are there sort of in between the seasons yeah and it was 1975 in portland that he wrote about um we shot in 83 and four but um he's writing about a time when um the um farm laborers would from mexico would come and live in the in the town and um buses would come to old town and pick people up to go work on the outside by the time we made the movie um i think there were much more solid neighborhoods outside of town that were um mexican-american and mexican neighborhoods that had you know um you know a theater group and we went out there to try and to try and cast some of the characters um i think there was one uh young actor in particular who would have been good for johnny that i think like politically the the story was about characters that were not really um hadn't really um become um part of legally uh living the legalities of living in portland and he felt like because of his family that he wouldn't be representing the you know the new um their new situation in hillsborough like the town that they lived in so i think politically it was a little bit out there and for some some of those those characters also the the people that really were working um in farms uh were making a lot of money compared to what we we were being able to like pay people um so that those guys were out also they were very like they kind of liked the idea of being in a movie but they the the sex was not so bad either except to film it like to be to have it be part of a story it was a little bit um too much for them um so the the the two guys playing the roles of johnny and pepper it took a long time to cast them um johnny came via a an ad that we had in the oregonian and he was native american um and he um he was really like a um beaverton like middle class kid um and then uh pepper was played by ray monge and he was suggested by katherine dunn the author who wrote a boxing daily boxing column um which was interesting um in itself uh but um i was she was really close to walt and she was very like um supportive of the project and she said you know she you should go to the nott street boxing gym because some of the latino um boxers you know may be really great in your film and i was like won't they just like punch me out and she said no no no these guys are very you know like they fight for um you know for their livelihoods so that they're all they're not very they're not aggressive and so i met pepper he was a coach there for um some of the younger the really young boxers and his boxers would fight andy minsker's boxers andy minsker was a boxer in portland so ray was a boxer and he he just dug it he also worked at a gay club um on the side so can you talk a bit about so when you completed the film um what was what was his initial life like in terms of getting it into festivals trying to get it distributed sort of what kind of circulation did it have in its original moment um well there wasn't we we i went to berlin first it was my kind of um exciting um sort of experience with this film and uh there were a lot of buyers it was a great place to um try and try and find somebody that would uh be able to distribute it and um rosa von prongheim took me out and like didn't introduce me to like we went into the like the buyers like area and he introduced me to like 15 people in a row and all the people that i was able to show it to and communicate with um were sort of on the fence some sometimes they were interested but it never sold and i think it um remained unsold um probably for 20 years you know or 10 years um before even after like i remember trying to sell it around the time i was making psycho in 97 and i was close but eventually um mk2 this is an mk2 print they bought it in france after they were after elephant so it was pretty recently that this was um finally seeing something npr uh showed it at the time that it was made in los angeles and new york for a number of showings which is kind of great um okay i'm sure we have a lot of questions in the audience and we have a couple of um people with microphones if people have questions so please raise your hand if you have a question uh but then wait for the microphone because we are actually doing a recording so do we have any questions in the audience okay front row yes uh wait for the microphone okay here we go go ahead yeah can you talk a little bit about the beautiful 35 millimeter uh cinematography and how it was shot and what film stocks if you yeah um yeah that was like a big um kind of um question you know going into making i had shot the previous film alice in hollywood on uh color 16 millimeter and um making this one i wanted to be a little bit more i wanted to i guess um have something that would be a little more stylish which black and white always is but then there's always the problem of it being being uh like less valuable to distributors so i just forward that problem and um shot on 16 millimeter plus x mostly plus plus x and then when the light was it was too dim we were going up to like uh tri-x and 4x sometimes but a lot of it's plus x and then that with that 16 was later when i made a little bit of money on it i was able to blow it up um to 35. so it's also thank you it's all 16. do we have another question okay hi so i was wondering if you could speak from about your leap from indie filmmaking to more mainstream filmmaking did your uh process of how you um develop your films change and do you still shoot in the same way you shot you know back then i was wondering if you can just like touch on that um yeah that's a great question um um this particular film unlike the previous film that i'd made um i i used my own money i i was working in new york city in advertising and saving the money it took me like two years to save 20 dollars to to afford it and so during that like two year period which was sort of the dance atteria mud club period of new york i didn't go out so much like the others did i saved my money didn't buy cocaine and uh um uh and meanwhile with my free time um not working i was storyboarding it so i had these like very elaborate storyboards that i actually used um day by day i i had you know like everything mapped out and i was able to shoot very fast because our um our crew was just three people it was a sound person pat baum who was also the member a member of the drummer for the neo boys which is a is now well-known portland um band and was well known then as well um um and john campbell the cinematographer and me so we could i could just say okay stand there and like i could assemble the storyboard very fast i could shoot it very fast um and with the film at berlin and here specifically here at the la lesbian gay film festival is that what it was called okay um um which i was kind of resisting because the frame line the i became very close to frame line and frame line was san francisco versus like la and i i thought i was an oregonian and i was kind of an idiot when it came to like show business so um i just said i don't want to go to la but then i was really talked into it and because of that um my a roommate um or a person i was staying with in los angeles was uh somebody that i'd met in berlin and he had an agent that he gave a tape to and so i all of a sudden had an agent which was kind of against my will but also like he was getting me meetings and things and i was trying to sell them on like um you know modernized shakespeare script which ended up to be idaho but um drugstore cowboy um was something that i had as a manuscript and then i adapted it into a screenplay because they weren't able to read a manuscript the people that i was talking to at studios and then we won a um or it was given a prize by the la film critics for best independent experimental film and if you left off the experimental part it was the best independent film of the year and um so i called my agent i was in oregon and and said um do you know that we went we won this prize maybe i'll send a friend to get it and he was like are you kidding you know this is fantastic and i was like do you think i should come down and he was like yes come down and we'll send you out and he he really pushed drugstore cowboy right at that moment um and that was sort of my entry right there and drugstore cowboy i had the meeting with the uh with the people at avenue pictures and they were just they admit the the head of it had made because of the spider woman at island and he created his own company kerry brokaw and was sitting in a meeting and i had asked tom waits to play the lead in drugstore cowboy and he said he would do it so in the meeting he asked me how much i i thought it would cost and i said a half a million dollars and he said okay we won't have to worry about that because they were in the business making four million dollar movies and when i said i had tan weights he was like well he's in one of our other movies you know you know wasn't he wasn't impressed um which i thought was crazy and um but the i think the the real trial by fire was the shooting of you know a four million dollar movie compared to this movie was um i could shoot 90 setups a day with in malinoche and drugstore cowboy was 13 setups a day and i had made us the same storyboard i was completely unable to follow the storyboard because of the the crew bob yeoman who's now shooting wes anderson's movies um was the dp it was just super slow the crew was a huge 80 people crew and lighting everything you know it was it was incredible so um i just changed my um style of shooting by you know rehearsing first shooting you know choosing angles after the rehearsal so it was a completely rethinking and not particularly easy it turned out well but it was almost like dicey okay i think we have time for one more question okay there we go hi gus um i got a question about the lighting in the film there's lots of blackness in it uh and i imagine back then you don't have digital so you can't do a quick playback and see what it looks like on the fly was that ever nerve-wracking and how was it uh lighting on a budget back then um it was sort of a choice to do it like that um there were i was sort of in i was influenced by um eraserhead which is very dark um and also sometimes eraserhead would have well they would use spotlights um interestingly sometimes there would be a light on the wall and there'd be a spotlight spotlighting the light on the wall um and i really liked the way that looked so i bought or i rented two spotlights and we had a little um lighting kit like a lowell light kit which i think had three three 1000 watt lights with stands and then we maybe had a couple clip-ons so we um we sort of were unable to a lot of times we were using just available lights if it was light bulbs in a hallway say like the hallway he's walking down in the hotel um i think we would change the light bulbs so they were more powerful so we had some light bulbs with this but it was dark pop probably because um i was thinking about that tonight watching it because we just didn't have lights and we we were we were sort of welcoming the darkness since the title was malinoche and then we thought you know i think evaluated each shot you know are we getting what we want but it was kind of amazing how it's like a lot and a lot of it is in silhouette um which is kind of great but and i guess we thought that's what we were doing i can't remember that far back i don't think it was a mistake but um sometimes we just we we thought oh well if it goes dark it'll go dark downtown for instance when we're on the street running around at night was i'm not sure if we knew until we got the film back what would happen yeah um so i want to close with just one final question which is so you watch the film again tonight so i'm wondering if you see it differently now then you saw it at the time and sort of what feels different what actually feels the same to you um well at the time it was i took me a long time to edit i was editing on rewinds with a movie scope and like a sound reader if you guys even know what that is um it's like there was even no no there wasn't even an upright editing machine or a flatbed it was just your you're cranking it and you know and however fast you crank it is how fast the film's going um and i was using you know scotch tape instead of editing tape to cut corners which is not advised um because it gets gooey later um and i was showing it to my friends i was showing the rough cut to my friends and it really looked like um my friends would say something like well it's a movie i guess and i just had not a whole lot of confidence and i thought okay this is i did my best and i really like sort of tried to make everything fit together and in the final print it looked a lot better than the you know wonky we would show the actual work print through a kind of dual system um thing and also i would i transferred it to video so i could show it like at somebody's house and i was showing people sometimes to raise a little bit more money to finish it and it wasn't until um the actual premiere where doug who played johnny hid in the um projection booth and looked out was afraid to come down into the audience and i was almost the same way it was i was like thinking this is just the only time that will be seen and then people sort of stuck around in the lobby and talked and they seemed energetic and so i thought oh well maybe it has like an actual life so tonight i thought maybe i sort of had that same feeling of like oh my god it's like you know you know some some things i could see the mistakes well i feel like at this time there had not been a film like that looked like this or was like this and i think it's still true like it still feels like nothing else that i've seen so thank you for sharing your film with us this evening um we're going to take a brief intermission uh so you can go to the restroom grab a sip of water um and i strongly recommend coming back for sue friedrich's hide and seek it's a fantastic film um so thank you again to gus thank you [Applause]