Shooting without answers

By Andre Chautard

Oct. 19, 2003 12 AM PT

Special to The Times

Gus VAN SANT has made acclaimed films about thieving junkies (“Drugstore Cowboy”), young male hustlers (“My Own Private Idaho”) and one ice-cold, fame-seeking murderess (“To Die For”), but he knew that dramatizing a Columbine-like school shooting would cross a line with some filmgoers.

“An event like [Columbine] is so grotesque that the taste level of doing a dramatic piece on something like that is brought into question because of the way we think of drama itself,” Van Sant says. “We think of it as entertainment, and I’ve never really thought of it as strictly entertainment.”

The news media reported the 1999 Columbine attack in grisly detail and commentators rushed to assign blame. The shooters’ faces adorned the cover of Time magazine. Last year’s controversial Oscar-winning documentary, “Bowling for Columbine,” even included surveillance footage of the shooting from inside the high school.

Van Sant says his new film, “Elephant,” is “not so much a cry against journalistic practices, but if journalistic practices allow this, then why not dramatic practices?” The techniques, he notes, are often similar.

“Elephant” quietly observes, from multiple points of view, several students who cross paths in the hallways of a suburban American high school on a seemingly normal weekday that culminates in a massacre. It’s a provocative film that resolutely refuses to preach, an approach that has frustrated and even angered some of its audience.

Never shy about being provocative, the jury at the Cannes Film Festival in May certainly wasn’t put off; it awarded both the Palme d’Or and the best director prizes to “Elephant,” a surprise to most festival handicappers in the wake of the film’s mixed post-screening buzz and high-profile trashings by American critics. (The film opens in Los Angeles and New York on Friday.)

Van Sant, who was Oscar-nominated for directing the sleeper box-office hit “Good Will Hunting,” has weathered bad reviews before, especially for “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” and his audacious but widely panned shot-by-shot color remake of “Psycho” in 1998. Following that with the mildly received “Finding Forrester,” Van Sant seemingly solidified the transition from indie adventurousness to studio mainstream, which some early fans saw as selling out.

But then Van Sant switched gears again, leaping toward the avant-garde with the experimental (and little-seen) “Gerry,” released this year, and now “Elephant,” which was cast with real students; both films were low-budget and mostly improvised.

“I had been through lots of different styles of filmmaking,” says the soft-spoken Van Sant, 51, sitting poolside at a trendy Beverly Hills hotel, huddled in a black corduroy “Psycho” crew jacket and nursing a bad cough. “I wanted to do anything that just didn’t bespeak of a style that I thought was something that belonged in another century, a historic style, a style that had outgrown itself and became repetitive.”

“Gus is the same to me from when we were doing the bigger films to this film,” says “Elephant” producer Dany Wolf, who has worked with the director since “Psycho.” “I know the films are different, but he’s very true to his creative instincts, and I think he has come back to what he likes and prefers.”

The art-school-educated Van Sant, whose other creative endeavors included painting, music, writing and photography, is working on another improvisational, experimental film to shoot next year. He’s “getting to do what he wants, and I think what we’re getting to see with ‘Gerry’ and with ‘Elephant’ is a very pure, unfiltered director’s vision,” Wolf says.

Originally, Van Sant conceived of “Elephant” as a relatively immediate response to Columbine, a TV movie to air the month after the attack that would be a psychological examination of two boys who commit a school shooting, whether the shooting was shown or not. He approached an executive he knew at the USA cable network but quickly found that the subject was too volatile; the executives of the broadcast networks were meeting that week with then-President Clinton about violence on television.

Van Sant later discussed the idea with Diane Keaton, with whom he shares an agent, and she suggested HBO. Colin Callender, president of HBO Films, was enthusiastic but interested not in a factual re-creation of Columbine but an approximation of the event, the way Alan Clarke’s 1989 BBC film “Elephant” portrayed the futility of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland.

“We had been [pitched] in the early days certain Columbine movies that seemed to me to be slightly ambulance-chasing,” Callender says. But “a filmmaker of Gus’ stature, who had over the years so insightfully explored youth culture in different sorts of ways, the idea that he would take this on in an interesting and unusual way, frankly, defines the sort of film that we want to make.”

Van Sant asked “Gummo” director Harmony Korine, who had told Van Sant that Clarke’s “Elephant” was his favorite film, to write a script, but Korine became focused on other work and never finished a draft. So Van Sant turned to cult author J.T. LeRoy, whose novel “Sarah” Van Sant was adapting into a screenplay. LeRoy wrote a script titled “Tommy Gun” that connected fictional vignettes of high school students’ lives -- bullying, gym class, a classroom discussion of violence in schools -- all witnessed by Tommy, a scrawny 14-year-old who carried a gun around school inside a book. At the end, whether Tommy would actually shoot anyone was left ambiguous.

However, Van Sant, invigorated by the unorthodox methods he employed in making “Gerry,” decided that if he were to make a film dealing with Columbine, he wanted to shoot without a screenplay, in black and white (although he ultimately opted to film “Elephant” in color) and with nonprofessional actors in Portland, Ore., where he lives.

“Things changed for Gus when he did ‘Gerry,’ ” says Keaton, noting that he didn’t want scripts anymore. (She executive-produced “Elephant” with partner Bill Robinson through their company, Blue Relief.) Van Sant was afraid to lay out his conditions to his producers and HBO, but LeRoy ran interference and Callender, to Van Sant’s surprise, approved. Vestiges of LeRoy’s script remain in “Elephant,” and the author, who was kept involved in the film, is credited as an associate producer.

Callender says there wasn’t a plan to whether “Elephant” would premiere on HBO or first be distributed theatrically, but a decision to do the latter was firmed at Cannes and “Elephant” is being released as part of HBO’s distribution deal with Time Warner sibling Fine Line Features.

No easy answers

Inspired by LeRoy’s script, Van Sant decided to expand his focus to the lives of the shooters’ classmates and their problems. He also decided against offering any concrete psychological motivations for the shooting because, in the several years since Columbine, he realized many of the explanations given were insufficient.

“I think it would have just been a little passion play about two kids that get mixed up and have a death wish and attack their fellow students,” he says. “I didn’t think that that was going to help anything.” Van Sant alludes in the film to a litany of possible influences on the shooters -- bullying, video games, the Internet, access to guns, homosexuality, Hitler, Satan, parental absence, television -- without committing to any of them. Instead, he wants the audience to review their own opinions about Columbine’s causes.

“Elephant,” Van Sant says, is more like a poem about Columbine than a detective story. The film’s refraining from giving answers drew reprobation from American film critics in Cannes, especially those from L.A.

The scathing Variety review called “Elephant” “gross and exploitative” and “pointless at best and irresponsible at worst,” while in this newspaper Kenneth Turan wrote that the Cannes jury had confused “artful vacuousness with genuine art.” Van Sant says he isn’t surprised by the critical reception since he was jettisoning theatrical conventions most moviegoers assume a film is supposed to have. “I think that [critics] have their viewpoints and their viewpoints are valid. Really, the film is meant to be looked at and commented on. It’s not meant to be commented on particularly favorably.”

“Elephant’s” dialogue was mostly improvised by high schoolers who played themselves or characters close to themselves, with most using their real first names on screen; Van Sant wanted to place viewers “in this verisimilitude of high school,” he says. (There were only three professional actors, including Timothy Bottoms, who were cast to play the adult roles.)

The film was shot on a $3.5-million budget over 20 days last November in a recently decommissioned high school in Portland, where an open casting call attracted thousands of students. Van Sant sat in on casting director Mali Finn’s sessions, where she interviewed the teenagers about their real-life struggles.

“She’ll find very quickly something that might be upsetting the person she’s talking to,” he says, “and those interviews tended to have lots of different things that we were making our film about.”

Van Sant held improvisation sessions to find out which students could act and then wrote the story around the cast he selected, incorporating what he remembered reading and hearing about Columbine and other school shootings, as well as taking inspiration from his friends’ and his own high school experiences.

Who would play them?

The difficult part was casting the shooters, Alex and Eric. “The kids that I cast claimed that they could easily imagine carrying through an attack on their fellow students. They hated school so much,” Van Sant says.

“I think imagining it is a lot different than doing it. I think we all probably have moments where you say, ‘I want to kill them.’ But it’s an imagination, it’s not reality. And the difference between what really happened and the imagining it is where the gray area lies.”

Clarke’s “Elephant” was titled after the proverbial elephant in the living room, but when Van Sant decided to name his film after Clarke’s, he thought the title referred to the Buddhist parable about a group of blind men who each touch a different part of an elephant, each concluding it’s something different since none sees the whole. It was an apt metaphor for the way our society tends to look for a single answer to a problem, Van Sant says.

“I think in our country -- and I’m one of them too -- I always think that there’s causes for things. In other cultures, they have words for somebody who runs amok; they just go crazy. And in our culture, we don’t allow that.

“People don’t just go crazy. There’s a reason why. Which I’m not positive there actually [is] ....I don’t see any of the reporting really aiming at these kids just snapped, because I guess it’s too abstract. Because people don’t understand what insanity is, so they push it aside and they say, ‘Well, that doesn’t exist because we don’t understand it.’ ”

Van Sant pauses. “This is a lot different than the stuff I was talking about yesterday,” he says, when he spoke to interviewers further about societal and peer pressures.”There’s so many different hypotheses.”

Whatever answers he may have today, Van Sant says, “I might realize by the end of the month that it’s actually off-base.”