Elephant
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Three Interviews with Gus Van Sant About his Long-Take, Béla Tarr-Influenced “Death Trilogy”
With a Gus Van Sant retrospective currently playing at New York’s Metrograph Cinema until July 12, we’ve reposted the three interviews we did with the director for his celebrated “death trilogy.” Comprised of Gerry, Elephant and Last Days, these three films — all based on actual news reports, dealing with mortality and shot in a long-take style influenced by directors such as Béla Tarr and Chantal Akerman — constitute one of cinema’s most audacious, radical and rewarding change-ups from a director who has had at least one foot in mainstream cinema. All three films are part of the Metrograph series, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 5, 2018 -
“Agitating the Information”: Director Gus Van Sant on his Long-Take Columbine Drama, Elephant
The following interview was originally published in our Fall, 2003 print edition. When I first interviewed Gus Van Sant, he had just finished editing his feature Gerry and was preparing to launch it at the Sundance Film Festival. A radical left turn from the two studio films, Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester, that preceded it, Gerry mixed together movie stars (Matt Damon and Casey Affleck), the “long-take” style of such filmmakers as Béla Tarr and Chantal Akerman and a simple yet metaphorically rich scenario taken from the news headlines. Working without a formal script but with the remarkable director […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 5, 2018 -
Happiness is Overrated: A New Book Examines the Arthouse Sub-genre, “the Feel-Bad Film”
This summer I have brutalized myself with one challenging theater drama after another, and I have been utterly enriched by the truthful and uncompromising bleakness of these experiences. Stephen Karam’s Tony-award winning The Humans is a play about a family that comes together in a crummy New York City apartment to share secrets of infidelity, sickness, aging, unemployment and just overall sadness. It ends not with a resounding “chin up” march into sunlight but with a cinematic, dialogue-free, horrific sequence that plunges us even deeper into the dark than when it started. Watching the play in a crowded theater is […]
by Mike S. Ryan on Oct 20, 2016 -
Festival Beat: Doclisboa and CPH:DOX
Doclisboa by Pamela Cohn “I can’t trust my own memories, and neither should the audience.” — filmmaker Naeem Mohaiemen, The Young Man Was trilogy A robust and wide-ranging sidebar program at a festival draws on the conventions of the multivolume novel, or the cantos of a long poem, varied portraits refracting off a narrative throughline. Stories both epic and quotidian dovetail and, as a result, iconoclastic interventions and disruptions atomise historical temporality. What’s left behind when the so-called terrorist no longer identifies, or is identified, as such? Or is dead? Or never existed in the first place? Traces of a progression […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 20, 2016 -
Carol Sound Designer Leslie Shatz
It’s the middle of the week and I’m walking with sound designer Leslie Shatz from 34th Street toward Times Square. Manhattan’s mayhem is a fusion of random crowds and even more random noises. Leslie abruptly asks me to keep quiet for a few moments while he takes out his phone and starts recording the sounds of the street. I realize that he is in search of new ideas. “You can shut your eyes, but you cannot shut your ears,” he says. “Sound is always a tool you can use in interesting and different ways.” Sound designer Leslie Shatz, winner of a rare […]
by Sasha Korbut on Oct 28, 2015 -
SHAWN KU, “BEAUTIFUL BOY”
It’s been a dozen years since the Columbine tragedy and almost a half decade since the Virginia Tech shooting, but random outbursts of violence by troubled young male students with easy access to weaponry are still among the most troubling topics that our society is struggling to come to grips with. Less self consciously arty than say an Elephant or We Need to Talk About Kevin, Shawn Ku‘s Beautiful Boy tells the story of Bill and Kate, (Michael Sheen and Maria Bello), a relatively comfortable suburban couple who have entered middle age content but relatively uninspired. First and foremost a […]
by Brandon Harris on Jun 1, 2011 -
TORONTO: ON ELEPHANTS, VIOLINS AND TATTOOS: AN INTERVIEW WITH DOUGLAS GORDON
Have you ever seen an elephant lie down? This question provoked Scottish artist Douglas Gordon to create Play Dead; Real Time, a giant, startling multiple projection depicting just that. Timeline, a beautiful Gordon exhibition the Museum of Modern Art in 2007 that included the piece, was a triumph not only with art enthusiasts but with cinephiles as well, and Gordon regularly walks the line between these two worlds. In addition to his successful art career and installation pieces, he has made two feature films: Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006) and a new work, k.364 A Journey by Train (2010). […]
by Livia Bloom Ingram on Sep 14, 2010
