Piece by Piece

How Gus Van Sant put Elephant together.

Interview by Sam Adams

It’s the middle of the Toronto Film Festival, and I’m interviewing Gus Van Sant in a hotel bar his publicists have commandeered for the afternoon. A steady trickle of people moves along the back, and at one point several of Elephant’s teenage cast members return from a photo shoot. Spying them across the room, Van Sant gets their attention and engages in a conversation that wouldn’t be out of place in the halls of the film’s high school. His half of it goes something like this: "Hey -- what’re you guys doing? Yeah? Oh nothing, just doing an interview. OK, so I’ll see you guys later."

Given his preternatural connection with young actors, it seems almost unthinkable that Van Sant has never made a movie set in a high school. It's not for lack of trying. Back in 1980, five years before his first feature, Van Sant wrote a script for a high-school movie and sent it off to Hollywood. The script reader came back with two comments. One was that "there wasn't really a market for this kind of movie." As for the other, "They said they thought that the writer couldn't figure out if he was in the movie or if he was writing objectively about high school, which I think is accurate about my movies in general."

That blurring of the line is characteristic of Elephant, where actors keep their own first names, and Van Sant jettisoned a screenplay by novelist J.T. Leroy in favor of a largely improvised "scene-play" based on situations from the actors' real lives. Like last year's Gerry, the resulting film departs radically from Van Sant's increasingly mainstream work, but with an even greater sense of purpose.

Like Gerry, Elephant drew inspiration from Béla Tarr's Stntangí, which replays the same hour from six different characters' points of view, more or less in real time. The 81-minute Elephant is much more compact, but it follows the same principal of following different characters as they interact and separate. "It became like a map, almost," Van Sant says. "If you look at it in a more ordinary way, you might have the intersections as the film -- you'd have the office scene, the hallway scene, the football scene, the car scene -- but you wouldn't see the connection between them. You'd see a character leave a scene and enter another one, but you wouldn't actually see him walk all the way, so you'd see the actual connection."

In a sense Elephant is all about connections, the desire to make them and the impossibility of doing so. Though set and shot in Van Sant's native Portland, Ore., the film's story bears obvious, even blatant, resemblances to the Columbine massacre, which leads to the obvious question: Why did Van Sant set out to make a Columbine movie that wasn't about Columbine? In part, it's because Van Sant was as fascinated by the tragedy's media coverage as by the event itself. While the film circles back on the instants before two gun-toting killers burst into the school, mimicking the journalistic impulse to find out what went wrong, it's also all too aware of the ultimate futility of that enterprise. "I started to less and less trust biography, because you can't get all the way there," Van Sant says. "You're misrepresenting it. If you're really showing people named Dylan and Eric, and you're saying this is Columbine High School, there's no way to do it, unless you're actually with them, showing the real people. You'll always get stuff wrong."

Infuriating the movie's detractors, the film offers no easy explanation for Columbine, and further treats its killers as evenhandedly as their victims. While it offers no excuses, Elephant shows how the killers are crippled by their isolation, desperate to connect, even at gunpoint. (Van Sant has them kiss before they start shooting, but he's avidly denied any intent to identify them as gay, pointing out their admission that neither has ever kissed anyone before.) "It was important to show that they were all kids, and they all had human qualities. Even the ones that had gone insane, or on a path of self-destruction, were part of the group. They were at one time like the other kids. It was important to feel the humanness in all of them."