Gus Van Sant has produced and directed
a number of highly regarded films in recent
years. He is perhaps best known for directing
Good Will Hunting, while my personal favourite
of his films has to be My own Private Idaho.
His latest film, Paranoid Park, is set in
and around the famous Portland skatepark,
and follows the story of a skateboarder who
accidentally kills a security guard, chooses
to keep quiet, and then has to live day in
day out with the guilt. It is interesting
to see a director of this status turn his
attention towards skateboarding as a basis
for his film, and more notably, turn to myspace
to recruit his actors. This is what Gus has
to say...
Why did you adapt Blake Nelson's novel? It was a story set in Portland, which
I always like, it was about an amateur skateboarder,
and this was also interesting. It was also
about a particularly stifling predicament,
which was also an interesting thing in the
story.
Did you change the structure of the narrative? I played with the story structure
a lot. There are not many parts of the movie
that are not from the book, but structurally
it is quite manipulated.
Why did you choose to recruit your actors
via a MySpace page? I think this is how all casting agencies
would go about casting high schoolers, especially
now when MySpace is so prevalent. So we were
like the others, just trying to figure out
ways to get the word out to non professional
people to play in the film.
Why did you decide to shoot both in Super
8 and 35mm? Because the medium of skate film
is super 8, and also video tape, and since
we were using a little of this in our film,
we shot some additional skate footage with
super 8. It is a lot harder to hold a larger
camera while you are riding a skateboard,
this is one of the reasons. Also 35 is a medium
that is too expensive for skate shooters to
be using. Then the rest of our film is made
in 35mm, the medium of choice for me.
Choosing Chris Doyle may have appeared surprising,
following your last three movies which depended
a lot on stable frames.
...Why did you choose him? Chris is known for a very fast flying
and free cinematography. Not known for what
would be called stable frames. But I think
maybe that is because of the Wong Kar Wai
period of the nineties. When he first started
to shoot with Kar Wai, they were quite stable,
when they composed the framing, but got really
loose as the films became less conservative.
I did try and push Chris into non stable territory,
and wide angle territory, also because of
these later Kar Wai films that I had seen,
particularly FALLEN ANGELS. But Chris was
a bit wary, saying "Well, we don't want
to repeat ourselves." So what we have
here is a new piece created by us, that at
times is unstable, as concerns the tripod,
its handheld, but only sometimes. It has a
lot of different styles in it. There is a
lot of slow motion, which I also encouraged,
and came from some of my knowledge of later
Kar Wai films. But Chris also, has made among
other things, LADY IN THE WATER which has
very stable framing. The skate world, however,
is not known for stable framing, because that
world is on wheels.
I heard that some sequences, notably in Super
8, were to be longer at first. There is also
a lot of work on the sound. What has post-production
consisted of? No, I think that the super 8 sequences
were about the same as in the film, maybe
a few more skate sequences. The sounds, detailed
as they may be, are mostly soundscapes by
Sound/Music composers. The stuff that we have
done as sound manipulators is pretty simple,
but the soundscapes, largely by Ethan Rose,
are quite complicated. It is sometimes the
equivalent of us playing records along with
the movie - but the music is made of less
traditional music. The post production was
not that intensive and occurred over a couple
of weeks. Leslie Shatz is the sound designer.
Paranoid Park is out in select cinemas from
26th December.
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