There was a time, around Last Days' Cannes debut, when Gus Van Sant downplayed the similarity between Blake, the scraggly blond rock star at the center of his elegiac new movie, and Kurt Cobain — even though a full-screen credit admits the film was "inspired in part" by the events leading up to Cobain's death. But either months of interviews have worn down his resistance or the mental gymnastics of switching back and forth between his indisputably Cobain-esque hero and his real-life model have taken their toll. Whatever distinction once existed has blurred or simply dissolved: As Van Sant talks about the movie, Blake and Cobain are interchangeably referred to as simply "he." "I was in Toronto when he died," Van Sant recalls before either of us has mentioned Cobain's name.

There's no point in pussyfooting around Last Days' rock-death subject, but Last Days is Van Sant's Cobain movie the way Elephant was his meditation on Columbine. The filmmaker went to great lengths to lay out an accurate map of Cobain's last three days: where he went, who he saw. Having done that, Van Sant says, "I didn't worry about the timing any more. I kind of made it work the way I wanted it to work." Like Elephant and Gerry, with which it has been lumped in a young-death trilogy, Last Days begins with objective evidence and proceeds to question its value, and, ultimately, its truth. "When I listened to people that I ran into" instead of relying on media reports, "it would conflict with what the map said," Van Sant recalls. "So sometimes I just sorta changed it. The imagination took over."

Appropriately for a trilogy in which time often doubles back on itself, Van Sant points out that the closing installment was actually conceived first. As Van Sant was editing To Die For (which gibes in subject matter if not style) in the wake of Cobain's death, he began to write, "just piecing something together. It was very meditative, just literally what I imagined it might have been like. Not that much happening." Although the original version of the film, which was to feature a 16-year-old Danish actor wandering around Van Sant's house, never came together, it was clearly in Van Sant's mind when he began to shoot Gerry (which, in retrospect, looks like a test run for the movies that followed). "It wasn't really in the cards to make [Gerry] the way it turned out," Van Sant explains. "It was something we did on the set, something I kind of conjured up. So, really, those [earlier] films borrowed from Last Days."

Although there was "a moment" when Van Sant considered doing Last Days as a straight-up biopic, he says the form of the movie underwent little change from its inception. "It was always the idea: Where did he go? What did he see? I imagined it was probably just him," Van Sant says. "It was not a giant ending, but a small one."