Gus Van Sant Filmography

Milk

Crew: Director

Actors: Sean Penn, Emile Hirsch, Josh Brolin, Diego Luna, James Franco

Synopsis: Director Gus Van Sant brings the real-life tale of Harvey Milk, the slain gay activist and politician, to the big screen, care of Focus Features and actor Sean Penn, who plays the title role. Dustin Lance Black provides the script, with Groundswell Productions handling the financing duties. Josh Read More

Paranoid Park

Crew: Director, Editor, Screenwriter

Actors: Gabe Nevins, Taylor Momsen, Jake Miller, Dan Liu, Lauren McKinney, Scott Green

Synopsis: A teenage skateboarder has a run-in with a security guard that results in the man's death. Confused, fearful, and evasive, the teen wanders the streets of Portland as his life takes a turn for the worse in director Gus Van Sant's screen adaptation of author Blake Nelson's grim coming-of-age tome. Read More

Paris, je t'aime

Crew: Director

Synopsis: Twenty acclaimed filmmakers from around the world look at love in the City of Lights in this omnibus feature. Paris Je T'aime features eighteen short stories, each set in a different part of Paris and each featuring a different cast and director (two segments were produced by two filmmakers in Read More

Wild Tigers I Have Known

Crew: Executive Producer

Actors: Malcolm Stumpf, Patrick White, Max Paradise, Fairuza Balk, Kim Dickens

Synopsis: A soft-spoken, thirteen-year old dreamer enters into a tentative friendship with a decidedly older and more popular boy in director Cam Archer's compassionate coming of age drama. Logan is an adolescent boy who just doesn't seem to fit in. Though the majority of the kids in his school view Logan Read More

To Each His Own Cinema

Crew: Director

Synopsis: At the time of its production, To Each His Own Cinema represented the latest arrival in a tidal wave of internationally oriented omnibus films, with no official relation between them but all produced within a few years of one another. Few could claim a roster of talent comparable to this one Read More

Fabulous! The Story of Queer Cinema

Actors: Todd Haynes, Ang Lee, Jennie Livingston, Heather Matarazzo, John Cameron Mitchell

Synopsis: Gay, lesbian, and transgender filmmakers, actors, and critics explore the history of queer cinema in this made-for-cable documentary. Eschewing any overarching narration, co-directors Lesli Klainberg and Lisa Ades illustrate archival footage and film clips with dozens of interviews. They also Read More

Marais

Crew: Director, Screenwriter

Actors: Marianne Faithfull, Elias McConnell, Gaspard Ulliel

Synopsis: Best known for such films as My Own Private Idaho and Good Will Hunting, director Gus Van Sant contributed this short film to the anthology Paris, Je T'Aime. It concerns a young gay man who senses an immediate soul-to-soul connection with a boy he encounters in a Parisian picture-framing shop Read More

Wanderlust

Last Days

Crew: Director, Editor, Screenwriter

Actors: Michael Pitt, Lukas Haas, Asia Argento, Scott Patrick Green, Nicole Vicius

Synopsis: Filmmaker Gus Van Sant wrote and directed this meditation on stardom and its costs, inspired in part by the life and death of rock musician Kurt Cobain. Blake (Michael Pitt) is the leader of an influential alternative rock band who has unexpectedly won a large degree of fame and fortune. Depressed Read More

Tarnation

Crew: Executive Producer

Actors: Jonathan Caouette, Renee LeBlanc

Synopsis: In the making since the director was 11-years-old and completed on a reported budget of about 200 dollars, Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation is an experimental and self-reflective mix of documentary and fiction. Bringing together a collection of home movies, family photos, answering machine messages Read More

Elephant

Crew: Director, Editor, Screenwriter

Actors: Alex Frost, Eric Deulen, John Robinson, Elias McConnell, Jordan Taylor

Synopsis: Director Gus Van Sant returned to the low-key style of his early independent efforts with this semi-improvised exploration of how violence makes its way into a typical American high school. Eric (Eric Deulen) and Alex (Alex Frost) are two close friends who are students in a well-to-do suburb of Read More

Gerry

Crew: Director, Screenwriter

Actors: Casey Affleck, Matt Damon

Synopsis: Gus Van Sant returned to his roots in experimental filmmaking with this offbeat feature, whose dialogue was entirely improvised by its two person cast. Two men named Gerry (played by Matt Damon and Casey Affleck) are driving through the desert regions of Death Valley, traveling towards an unknown Read More

Speedway Junky

Crew: Executive Producer

Actors: Jesse Bradford, Jordan Brower, Jonathan Taylor Thomas, Daryl Hannah, Tiffani-Amber Thiessen

Synopsis: In this gritty drama executive-produced by Gus Van Sant, a teenaged would-be stock-car driver gets more than he bargained for when he makes a pit stop in Las Vegas to earn a little cash. Almost as soon as he arrives in the city, high-school dropout Johnny (Jesse Bradford) finds himself victimized Read More

Finding Forrester

Crew: Director

Actors: Sean Connery, Rob Brown, F. Murray Abraham, Anna Paquin, Busta Rhymes

Synopsis: In the spirit of his Oscar-winning Good Will Hunting, Gus Van Sant directs this tale of the unlikely bond that develops between an aging, reclusive novelist named Forrester (Sean Connery) -- who hasn't written anything since winning a Pulitzer Prize decades earlier -- and Jamal (Rob Brown), a Read More

Psycho

Crew: Director, Producer

Actors: Vince Vaughn, Anne Heche, Julianne Moore, Viggo Mortensen, William H. Macy

Synopsis: Independent film director Gus Van Sant attempts a first in American film history: a shot-by-shot remake of the classic 1960 Alfred Hitchcock film Psycho. With a few minor, modern-day changes (including filming it in color), his version is essentially the same film with a different cast and the Read More

Good Will Hunting

Crew: Director

Actors: Matt Damon, Robin Williams, Ben Affleck, Minnie Driver, Stellan Skarsgård

Synopsis: Matt Damon and Ben Affleck co-scripted and star in this drama, set in Boston and Cambridge, about rebellious 20-year-old MIT janitor Will Hunting (Damon), gifted with a photographic memory, who hangs out with his South Boston bar buddies, his best friend Chuckie (Affleck), and his affluent British Read More

Kids

Crew: Executive Producer

Actors: Leo Fitzpatrick, Justin Pierce, Chloë Sevigny, Sarah Henderson, Rosario Dawson

Synopsis: Kids offers a bleak, unblinking view of a group of vacuous, thoughtless New York City teens in their ceaseless quest for sex, drugs, and trouble. The film primarily follows Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick), who, having just realized the conquest of his latest virgin, brags that by day's end he will claim Read More

To Die For

Crew: Director

Actors: Nicole Kidman, Matt Dillon, Joaquin Phoenix, Casey Affleck, Illeana Douglas, Alison Folland

Synopsis: The price of fame is murder -- or at least it is in the mind of one woman in New Hampshire. Suzanne Stone (Nicole Kidman) has spent most of her life wanting to be famous; she's attractive, speaks well, and imagines herself to be intelligent ("imagines" is the key word here), so she has set her Read More

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Crew: Director, Producer, Screenwriter

Actors: Uma Thurman, John Hurt, Rain Phoenix, Noriyuki "Pat" Morita, Lorraine Bracco

Synopsis: Writer/director Gus Van Sant's early bid for big-time commercial success -- a success he didn't manage to achieve until Good Will Hunting -- is based on Tom Robbins' 1976 feminist bestseller. Uma Thurman plays Sissy Hankshaw, a woman born with very large thumbs. After her parents (Grace Zabriskie Read More

My Own Private Idaho

Crew: Director, Producer, Screenwriter

Actors: River Phoenix, Keanu Reeves, James Russo, William Richert, Rodney Harvey

Synopsis: Gus Van Sant's dreamtime riff on Shakespeare's "Henry IV, Parts I and II" features River Phoenix as Mike Waters, a narcoleptic male hustler who is first seen drifting on a stretch of highway in Idaho. Mike shifts from Seattle to Portland, where he has taken up with Scott Favor (Keanu Reeves), who Read More

Drugstore Cowboy

Crew: Director, Screenwriter

Actors: Matt Dillon, Kelly Lynch, James LeGros, Heather Graham, James Remar

Synopsis: The operative word in Drugstore Cowboy is "drug". Matt Dillon plays the leader of a group of dopeheads who wander around the country robbing pharmacies to feed their habits. Dillon's chums include doltish James Le Gros and teen-age junkie Heather Graham; also along for the ride is Dillon's wife Kelly Lynch Read More

Buried Treasures, Vol. 1: The Directors

Crew: Director

Mala Noche

Crew: Director, Editor, Producer, Screenwriter

Actors: Tim Streeter, Doug Cooeyate, Ray Monge

Synopsis: The debut film of director Gus Van Sant, this independent, low-budget comedy-drama based on an autobiographical novel by Walt Curtis was produced on black-and-white 16 mm film for only $25,000. Tim Streeter stars as Walt, the manager of a seedy liquor store in Portland, OR. Walt, who is gay, has Read More