Also this issue:

The Vanishing Genius
Where has Fassbinder been for the last 20 years?
-Sam Adams

No Time to Cry
Philip Seymour Hoffman on the tough task of playing a grieving man who won’t grieve.
-Sam Adams

Screen Picks
-Sam Adams

February 27-March 5, 2003

movies

Wide Open Spaces

Gerry-atrics: Casey Affleck (background) and Matt Damon soak in the sun.

How Gus Van Sant rigged Gerry.

by Sam Adams

³I don't necessarily choose things because they're gonna connect," says Gus Van Sant. He's talking about the reaction to his new movie Gerry, which represents a dramatic break with the Hollywood films he's been doing for the last 10 years. But he could just as easily be talking about the movie itself, which follows two men (Matt Damon and Casey Affleck) who get lost in the desert and find themselves wandering farther and farther from civilization. Inspired by the long-take school of European art cinema -- particularly Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman and Béla Tarr's Sátántangó -- Gerry is, like Van Sant's conversation, full of pauses and hesitations, long moments where nothing happens at all.

Van Sant paints the film's creation as series of spontaneous decisions, made without a script and with money he'd gotten for "an unspecified project. It was just the three of us [Van Sant, Damon and Affleck] sitting around talking about doing a project together, and a story Matt told about these kids that got lost. I just said, ŒI've got some money; let's go do this. It's you two guys, the desert -- we'll just throw ourselves out there.'"

In fact, he says, the film's elongated structure came later, after Affleck encouraged him to shoot on film instead of digital video, and after they got a look at the desert's endless landscape. That's when Van Sant thought of applying ideas he'd been having about bucking the conventions of cinematic structure, which, he says, owe more to literature and theater than to film itself. "By the time we were shooting, I had the idea of letting things go on for longer than they normally would, I think just because of the realities of that situation -- the realities that movies sort of stay away from. [In most movies,] it's all just shorthand until we get to the dialogue, and then the dialogue can be like five minutes long, and you wouldn't question that. Instead, [in Gerry,] we have the establishing shot of the car [run] five minutes, and the dialogue [run] 30 seconds."

It's not that Van Sant is out to smash the system all of a sudden, but he's fascinated by the way we've become so used to a certain kind of storytelling. "I think we really just accept those rhythms as the way it's done, and as soon as you start to play with them, there's a shift in either perception, or just [the audience's] happiness." The way conventional movies are designed, he says, "the audience is manipulated by the film to the extent it's bad if they have a thought, because it means they're drifting -- if they think independently, they might get up and go get popcorn or something."

The film's characters refer to each other as "Gerry," but they use the word as a verb as well: "I'm sorry I gerried everything up." The unusual slang (which also includes the word "scoutabout") comes from Affleck and Damon, Van Sant says, a sort of "private code" employed by them and their old Cambridge buddies. "At the premiere, one of them was talking to Casey, and I was like, ŒYou guys are doing it! You're doing the thing! And I can't understand a word you're saying.'"

Gerry opens Friday at Ritz East. See Sam Adams' review on p. 28.