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Filmmaker Gus Van Sant, a past winner of the Filmmaker on the Edge Award from the Provincetown International Film Festival, will open this year’s festival with his latest film, “Last Days.” |
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Chasing Nirvana
Gus Van Sant’s ‘Last Days’ is first up at film festival
By Ann Wood & Kaimi Rose Lum
Banner Staff
A man stumbles through the woods, tripping on sticks, sliding down muddy hills, sometimes mumbling. Dirty shaggy hair hangs covering his face. A blue bracelet from a drug treatment clinic is stuck around his bony wrist. At night he builds a fire to keep warm. It’s Blake (Michael Pitt), a falling star, returning home. And all he reminds you of is Seattle grunge icon Kurt Cobain, who shot himself in the head in 1994, after his band Nirvana changed the look and sound of rock ‘n’ roll. No one’s quite sure how Cobain spent those last days of his 27 years, but filmmaker Gus Van Sant has an idea.
Van Sant, who was the Provincetown International Film Festival Filmmaker on the Edge in 2002, is back with the festival’s opening selection, “Last Days,” which makes its East Coast premiere here. It shows at 6 p.m. Wednesday, June 15, at Provincetown Town Hall, 260 Commercial St., Provincetown. It will show again at 1:45 p.m. Saturday, June 18, at New Arts Cinemas Screen 1, 214 Commercial St., Provincetown. Tickets can be purchased online at ptowntix.com or by calling (508) 487-9793.
The film is about the loss of time rather than a biographical story, Van Sant says, adding that Blake is a character who “stands in” for Cobain. The idea for the film came to him about a year after Cobain’s suicide.
“I guess because it was sort of a regional tragedy, and back when it happened I thought of doing something,” Van Sant says by phone from his Portland, Ore., home. At that time, he says, everyone in the Northwest art scene at least knew of each other. Cobain was a big film buff, and Van Sant met him a few times.
“So when I met him, I think it was, I mean, he was really, really quiet,” he says, adding that the heroin-addicted musician was uncharacteristically clear-eyed. “I think it was a moment when he had gotten out of rehab.”
Cobain helped Van Sant and a group raise money to fight “an anti-gay thing” in Portland, and Nirvana performed a concert for it — urged by Cobain’s controversial wife, actress-musician Courtney Love. (“Last Days” refers to Blake’s wife Blackie, who sends a P.I. out to find her husband, calls excessively, and is deemed by three rock-star-users as “herself.”)
Van Sant says when he first met Cobain, he had his trademark long hair cut short and this “wide-open” expression on his face, like a baby who was seeing everything brand new.
“I think it was because he was clean,” he laughs.
But Blake is not clean in “Last Days” — and clean isn’t something Van Sant usually films anyhow. Van Sant won critical acclaim with his 1989 film “Drugstore Cowboy,” which is about drug addicts (Matt Dillon, Kelly Lynch) who break into pharmacies to support their habit, and he received more raves with 1991’s “My Own Private Idaho,” which chronicles the experience of two drug-using young hustlers (River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves). Van Sant’s made many more films, including “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” (1993), “To Die For” (1995), “Good Will Hunting” (1997), “Finding Forrester” (2000) and “Gerry” (2002), among others. He made history with “Elephant” (John Robinson, Alex Frost), which in 2003 was the first film ever to win both best director and the Palme D’Or at Festival De Cannes.
The idea of making a film based on the last days of Cobain’s life was, Van Sant says, just “one of those ideas on paper,” he jotted down. He first thought of doing the film with dolls, changed his mind, and tried to begin production about four years ago.
“We always wanted to do it without, you know, a real script. So that was a project. It held it up,” Van Sant says, adding that he almost made it instead of “Elephant,” but changed his mind and did that one first.
Van Sant originally didn’t think of actor Michael Pitt, now 24, as the Cobain stand-in when he met him back in 1999.
“He was a lot younger. I, at one time, had wanted to cast a 14-year-old [actor from] Denmark to play [Blake, but] by the time we made the movie a number of years went by, Mike grew out his hair [to see] if he looked like [Cobain],” Van Sant says.
And he does. It’s almost startling to see him, and it raises the question of what Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon, who knew Cobain in real life and plays a bit role as a radio producer in the film, felt playing against Pitt. Sonic Youth guitarist-singer Thurston Moore, Gordon’s husband, was the film’s musical consultant, for which Pitt wrote and performs a couple of Nirvana-like songs.
“I was assuming that I wouldn’t be able to afford or get Nirvana songs,” Van Sant says. “I guess I didn’t want to sort of like put a lot of music in it. And in the end, it’s Mike’s stuff.”
But with Pitt looking so much like Cobain and the script following what really could have happened on Cobain’s last days, what might be the reaction of those who don’t know anything about Nirvana?
“I haven’t shown it to anyone who knows absolutely nothing about him,” Van Sant says. “I mean, some people who don’t really know that much … they relate to it in a different way. [They see the film] as just kind of more like the way the story is by itself, and a person who is certainly unwinding and trying to get away.”
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In the Arts
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Jun 9th, 2005