Salon | Books: Gus Van Sant

T A B L E+T A L K
What were the last 5 books you read? List, compare and contrast in the Books section of Table Talk.

R E C E N T L Y
Edmund White
By Daniel Reitz
(10/15/97)
Caleb Carr
By Dwight Garner
(10/04/97)
Arundhati Roy
By Reena Jana
(09/30/97)
J.G. Ballard
By Richard Kadrey and Suzanne Stefanac
(09/02/97)
Tom Clancy
By John Donnelly
(06/04/97)
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INTERVIEW ARCHIVE

R E V I E W S

A Calendar of Wisdom
By Leo Tolstoy
A book of daily affirmations, from the great writer, featuring snippets from Shakespeare, Lao Tsu, Ruskin, the Talmud, the Dhammapada, Socrates, Jefferson and others.
(10/24/97)

S A L O N
R E C O M M E N D S

A list of staff favorites, updated weekly

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Pink

I N+T H E___
"Pink"
Director Gus Van Sant leaves the film dimension to explore the possibilities of writing and his own grief over the death of River Phoenix.

BY CYNTHIA JOYCE | gus Van Sant -- filmmaker, music video producer, photographer, musician, clothes designer and, now, novelist -- seems a little uncomfortable as he slouches over the podium to read from his first book, "Pink." The book, with its experimental typefaces and thinly veiled references to real-life characters (the main character is an industrial filmmaker named "Spunky" who's in love with a handsome young River Phoenix-like actor named "Felix"), is occasionally profound but difficult in places, and Van Sant seems to be having a hard time reading it aloud. Peering over his Elvis Costello-style glasses, he scans the faces in the crowd at this San Francisco bookstore and interrupts himself: "I think I'll answer some questions now -- I can get back to this later."
It's a generous gesture that reveals the respect Van Sant holds for his audiences -- and proves that in person, as with his films, he's much more interested in engaging people than he is in indulging them.
One of the first questions he's asked is about the last scene of the film "My Own Private Idaho," when Mike, a street hustler (played by Phoenix), is lying passed out on the highway and is picked up by someone who happens to be driving by.
"Who was it that picked up River Phoenix at the end of the film?" a woman wants to know.
Van Sant says that he intentionally left it ambiguous: "I was hoping that the viewer would project themselves into the film and decide for themselves who it was."
Not satisfied with this response, the woman persists. "OK, then. Who picked him up in your version?"
"In my version?" he says, obviously amused. "In my version, I pick him up."
After the book signing, Van Sant took a few minutes to talk with Salon about how Phoenix's death inspired his investigation into other dimensions (i.e., "the pink"), his fear of selling out and why he wants art to be more like food.
Was writing a novel very different from the process of writing a screenplay?
Yes, writing the book was much more fun. Screenwriting is like a road map -- you read it as you're going, you're looking at the finished thing as you're working on it. One thing you don't ever do when working on a film is go to a place unless you're shooting, and even then you're not really experiencing the place. When you're writing a book, you can go to this place -- even if it's Paris, France -- while you're still sitting at your desk. I talked to other writers about this, and they were like, "Yeah, of course." But I thought it was an amazing thing.
Someone asked if you were going to make a documentary of River Phoenix's life, and you responded that this, "Pink," was it. Is that true?
Well, yes, it is. This book is very much influenced by River. It's a documentary of my life and existence through him. The reason I don't like to say that is that a lot of the stuff, you could say, is a reaction to his death. The impetus of me writing is him dying. But the book is not about that, so I don't like to bring that up.
The book seems like it is about much more than that, until the part where the Phoenix-like character, "Felix," dies in a very similar way. At that point you start taking very specific scenes from Phoenix's life and inserting them in less than subtle ways -- he dies in front of a nightclub, his brother was there, and so on. If you were concerned about the comparison, why didn't you make an effort to mask it?
I don't feel like masking that sort of inspiration for the book. The book could be about anyone dying. It's really about a character that's grieving. It's not necessarily even grieving, it's just that you can't figure out what happens, you know, where you go when you die. So everything is centered around that investigation. It's hard to talk about the book in terms of real people, because then it becomes this other thing, like, "Who are the real people?" and "What happened to the real people?" And that's not really the intention of the book. It's more about what happens to people as opposed to what happens to those people.
You did a similar thing with "My Own Private Idaho," inserting certain scenes almost verbatim from "Henry IV." Was Shakespeare also a big influence on you?
No, not at all. Falstaff is, and I really came to know that character through the Orson Welles film "Chimes at Midnight," which had those characters and the story of Prince Hal. On the whole, though, Shakespeare -- as a writer and as a poet -- is just amazingly fascinating. But I'm not very far into Shakespeare. I'd like to be. Even with the few plays that I do know, like "Henry IV" Parts I and II, I can keep reading those. There's a lot there. There's always new information to reveal itself.

N E X T+P A G E+| "Two men can't actually love each other."