CINEMA

& MOVIES ACTIVITY

Gus Van Sant, Gus Greene Van Sant,
Jr.
(born July 24, 1952, Louisville,
Kentucky, U.S.), American film director and
writer, known for focusing on marginalized
and isolated characters.
The son of a traveling businessman
and a housewife, Van Sant lived an itinerant
childhood. He began making amateur films in
high school, and he later studied film at the
Rhode Island School of Design (B.A., 1975).
His early releases were short films, notably
The Discipline of D.E. (1982), an adaptation
of a William S. Burroughs short story. Mala
Noche (1985), his first feature-length film,
centres on a drugstore clerk obsessed with
a young Mexican immigrant. The theme of homosexual love apparent in the
story would manifest with varying degrees of sensitivity in many of Van
Sants later films.
Van Sant next wrote and directed Drugstore Cowboy (1989), which
starred Matt Dillon as the leader of a group of heroin addicts who rob to
finance their habits; the film was a commercial and critical success.
Good Will Hunting (1997) brought Van Sant to a wider audience with
its moving portrait of a young mathematical genius struggling to achieve
his potential. The film, written by and starring Matt Damon and Ben
Affleck, earned Van Sant an Academy Award nomination. He continued to
gravitate toward populist fare, directing a remake of Alfred Hitchcocks
1960 thriller Psycho (1998) and Finding Forrester (2000), about a reclusive
writer (played by Sean Connery) mentoring an African American teenager.
Van Sant then directed a trilogy of films focusing on death. The
first in the series, Gerry (2002), which was conceived by and starred
Damon and Casey Affleck, comprises largely improvised scenes of two men
lost in a desert. In Elephant (2003) Van Sant brought the topical lens of
school shootings, choosing to highlight the isolation of adolescence rather
than the violence itself. He similarly concentrated on the theme of
alienation in Last Days (2005), this time creating an impressionistic, mainly
silent chronicle of the days before the suicide of a rock star resembling
Kurt Cobain.
His latest movie is The Sea of Trees, which is running for the
Official Selection of the Cannes Festival film (2015). Matthew
McConaughey plays Arthur, a man who has lost his way in life and treks
into the thick forest at the foot of Mount Fuji looking for existential
answers. Sounds right up the philosophical alley of Rust Cohle in True
Detective. They are very different projects and characters yet they are
both poetic, McConaughey tells EW. I say another title for this film is

CINEMA & MOVIES ACTIVITY

Youve got to go through annihilation to get to salvation. Its one hell of
a survival story.
Gus Van Sant is directing
currently
shooting
in
rural
Massachusetts and then Japan
and it costars Ken Watanabe
(above, standing) and Naomi
Watts. McConaughey says Gus
Van Sant is the right man for the
material. Gus is a wonderful
voyeur and a really gentle soul of
a man. Hes got the right
sensibility for a film like this. He
listens and considers any ideas
that I throw at him and I
undeniably trust the direction he
gives me, he says. Hes a lot of
fun to create with.
McConaughey also has a
prediction for how audiences will react after seeing The Sea of Trees.
Everyone is going to leave the theater and have their own walk and talk
through the parking lot to muse about its meanings, what it was about and
what it wasnt, what was real and what was a dream.

Plot: A story about an American man who travels to the

"Suicide Forest" (Aokigahara forest) to kill himself at the base
of Mount Fuji in Japan, the site of numerous suicides. There he
encounters a Japanese man, who wants to kill himself as well
and then both men begin a journey of self-reflection and
survival.
1. Watch some of the trailers of his movies and try to understand what
they are about.

CINEMA & MOVIES ACTIVITY

1. 1

Paris, je taime (2006)
( )

( )

( )

1. Look at the movie covers. What do they

have in common?
2. Have you watched the movies? If yes, try
to remember what they are about.
3. Match the movies with the correct plots.
a. A

janitor at M.I.T., has a gift for

mathematics, but needs help from a
psychologist to find direction in his life.

b. Through the neighborhoods of a famous city,

love is disguised, revealed, imitated, sucked

dry, reinvented and awakened.

Milk (2008)
( )

c. The story of a man and his struggles as an

American gay activist who fought for gay

rights and became California's first openly
gay elected official.

Good Will Hunting

(1997)
( )

CINEMA & MOVIES ACTIVITY