Filmmaker Gus Van Sant talks Milk, subversive Psycho remake and gay-rights history miniseries
As exhibition of American director’s artwork and photography opens in Paris alongside a retrospective of his films, he admits political gay films were ‘not normally something I would have gone to’
American filmmaker Gus Van Sant says he is “very excited” about what he hopes will be a landmark history of the gay rights movement he has just finished shooting for US television giant ABC.
The director of 2008 double Oscar-winner Milk – about Harvey Milk, the first openly gay person to be elected to public office in California – says he is all the happier about When We Rise because it was made for “a very conservative platform”.
The eight-hour mini-series written by Dustin Lance Black – who also scripted Milk – will follow the lives of three activists including Cleve Jones, the man behind the Aids Memorial Quilt that commemorates the lives of people lost to the epidemic.
The two other principal characters are African-American activist Ken Jones and social justice advocate Roma Guy from Maine, both of whom end up with Cleve Jones in San Francisco.
Van Sant says making the first two hours of “this amazing story”, which he describes as an “elongated Milk that begins in 1972 ... was very enthralling and exciting”.
“I must admit I distrust politics, so it is not wholehearted from my point of view,” Van Sant said.