Mavericks by Gerald Peary;

Author:Gerald Peary;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780813197968
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Cinema Verity

At the Toronto Film Festival, I asked Gus Van Sant whether Elephant, a fictional behind-the-scenes at a Columbine-like massacre, was shaped, as was Gerry, by the cinema of the Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr. “He continues to be an influence,” the filmmaker said. “The overlapping of moments, the repeats, repeats, in Tarr’s Satan’s Tango inform part of this film. His long pieces of film are still inspirations, but also the works of Tarkovsky, Jancsó,1 and Sokurov.2

“The origin of the project was way back, when Columbine was happening. I had an idea to do a mainstream TV program, a more traditional, straight-ahead drama about the real kids. Harmony Korine was going to write a screenplay. I pitched it around LA but nobody could entertain doing a movie because of sanctions against violence. Until Colin Callender told me we could do Elephant for HBO Films.

“We don’t usually in film get to work in 1:33, the television format, and also that of 16mm films projected in schools. Harris [Savides,3 the cinematographer] and I were very excited about that. I decided to continue with the way Gerry was put together: a film that didn’t have a hard script and could change every day. We started out using a very wide 8mm lens like Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange [1971], but that didn’t work. It was too distorted an image. Following all these characters with a camera [in long, long takes] is something that evolved that we liked, but we don’t know why. One of my favorite shots is holding on the back of [teenager] Alex Frost’s head while he plays the piano. We were going to hire a Seattle jazz musician to compose music. But one day during the shoot, Alex was playing piano in the high school cafeteria. Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ was one piece he’d learned, so we used that for the film.”

Was Michael Moore an influence? “We’d watched Bowling for Columbine [2002] before shooting. It’s brilliant. I’m a big Michael Moore fan, glad we have him. But lots of incidents in my film come from information about what actually happened at Columbine. When Alex drinks from a cup in the cafeteria, that’s from a Columbine surveillance film.”

Did Van Sant want an audience to feel emotionally connected to the people in his film? “It’s not that I don’t want you involved in the characters, but I want you involved by watching them, an observation, the way documentarian Frederick Wiseman sits back and lets things occur. We could have invented a more traditional psychological narrative. I have my ideas why Columbine happened, but that’s not this film. I wanted a poetic impression rather than dictating an answer. I wanted to include the audience’s thoughts.”

Away from its high modernism,4 Elephant got what from popular culture? Van Sant mentioned video games. “I didn’t know anything about them, but people kept saying, ‘It’s those games that cause violence,’ so I started watching them. And playing them. I played Tomb Raider until I was obsessed with it. It calls for an interactive imagination, and there are some intellectual sides to some other games.

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