The kids are all right

Review: Paranoid Park

Van Sant, 55, grew up there. Although he was born in Kentucky, his ambitious salesman father was constantly on the move, washing up in Portland, where Gus went to school. Like most teenagers he soon fled, moving to New York in 1970 to study at the Rhode Island School of Design (David Byrne of Talking Heads was a fellow student), where he encountered the film work of such avant-garde pioneers as Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas.

But it's what he did next that helps explain the curious contradictions of his career. Van Sant has gone from mainstream Hollywood movies such as Finding Forrester and Good Will Hunting (for which he got an Oscar nomination and for which Matt Damon and Ben Affleck won Best Screenplay) to stream-of-consciousness tales of disaffected and generally gay youth. These include My Own Private Idaho and Elephant, his strange, not very likeable take on the Columbine massacre which won him a Palme d'Or at Cannes. After graduating from art school, instead of diving - like his artistically oriented contemporaries - into Greenwich Village at his most fervid, Van Sant went to Los Angeles.

Admittedly, he gravitated towards the seedier side of Hollywood Boulevard, but he eventually got into movies with Mala Noche, a dark story of a doomed love affair between a gay liquor store clerk and a Mexican immigrant. Looking back on it (it was recently released on DVD), it looks like essence of Van Sant; but it's actually based on a novel by a writer from Portland. And it was to Portland than Van Sant inevitably drifted back.

Paranoid Park is also based on a novel, by another local writer, Blake Nelson, and is set among the skateboarders who hang out under a freeway bridge in the city's Burnside Park. (The real Paranoid Park, explains Van Sant, is a downtown drug-dealing haunt but he liked the name.)

Alex, a 16-year-old high school student played by a blank-eyed angel called Gabe Nevins, moves between his divorced parents, hangs out at the park and is one of the skaters questioned by the police over the suspicious death of a railroad employee. The book, for all its youth-culture savviness, plays like a police procedural with teen-grunge details. But Van Sant plays around with the chronology.

"It's not really about the death," he says. "I don't know if it's saying death is on the mind of Americans."

It was more a question, he says, of what was going on in the mind of Alex.

The way the story was constructed, it would have needed a voiceover to get the story across - and Van Sant didn't want that. So he fragmented it. "The book is very different because it's very linear. By telling it out of order, you're reviewing all the elements up front to add suspense and anticipation by really knowing what was concerning the lead character."

Van Sant is fond of the idea of random images, resulting in films which are modern but at the same time rooted in a Seventies aesthetic, particularly William Burroughs's era-defining "cut-ups".

Paranoid Park is French-financed, the Hollywood part of Van Sant's career appearing to be on hold for the moment. "We do have independent financing in America," he admits, "but a lot of it is tied to studios, so if you make a small-budget movie you run the risk of going through their accounting system, which is not built for low budgets."

Van Sant's cameraman on Paranoid Park was Chris Doyle, another maverick who worked with him on his oddest film, the 1998 shot-by-shot recreation of Psycho. The tension between the director's randomness and Doyle's natural sense of lighting gives the film a surprisingly ethereal beauty, broken up by inserts of Super-8 footage, some of it shot by real skaters, some by a young Chinese American cinematographer and a Doyle protégée called Rain Kathy Li.

Van Sant likes to get inside a story and reimagine - which made his Columbine film controversial. "I relive events," he claims. "For instance, Elephant is my own reaction to representations in the press. For a journalist who is reporting an event to analyse why it happened has the same type of validity as a story-teller analysing it. And yet we story-tellers are banned from the scene because of our 'exploitational' nature."

And for all the grunge and the suffering, he sees his series of doomed youth movies, from Mala Noche through Elephant and Last Days (a fictional "reliving" of the death of Kurt Cobain) to Paranoid Park, as being essentially upbeat. That's because of its focus on youth, even if he gleefully admits he is excluded from the very process he shows.

"To me," he insists, "it's about development. Kids have to step apart from authority figures to create their own understanding, independent of the rules of their parents, which is why there has to be a distance. It's a natural selection - the job of their generation is to be able to reconfigure how things should work: without that reconfiguration, we would probably be doomed.

"For instance, if global warming flooded thousands of cities, they would be the ones who would reconfigure how things worked; it would be they who accepted the new world, and it would be us who would be pounding the roads and dying off, because our world would have been destroyed. It's nature's way of rebooting."

Van Sant seems a lot more contented than the last time I met him, which was after making Good Will Hunting for Harvey Weinstein; Van Sant's gentle obstinacy and Weinstein's bullish determination to reshape films must have made for an explosive combination.

Does he feel those days are over? Not really. "I mean, HBO was quite good when we worked with them [on Elephant and Last Days]. Focus Features or Paramount Vantage are new creations of independent existences, but I think it was a way for the big companies to absorb these smaller companies and in some ways get rid of them."

So is he happier now? Maybe. "I mean, I'm really happy with this movie. But if I seem happier as a person, it's probably just my age."

Paranoid Park is on release now.