CINEMA & MOVIES ACTIVITY Gus Van Sant, Gus Greene Van Sant, Jr. (born July 24, 1952, Louisville, Kentucky, U.S.), American film director and writer, known for focusing on marginalized and isolated characters. The son of a traveling businessman and a housewife, Van Sant lived an itinerant childhood. He began making amateur films in high school, and he later studied film at the Rhode Island School of Design (B.A., 1975). His early releases were short films, notably The Discipline of D.E. (1982), an adaptation of a William S. Burroughs short story. Mala Noche (1985), his first feature-length film, centres on a drugstore clerk obsessed with

a young Mexican immigrant. The theme of homosexual love apparent in the story would manifest with varying degrees of sensitivity in many of Van Sants later films. Van Sant next wrote and directed Drugstore Cowboy (1989), which starred Matt Dillon as the leader of a group of heroin addicts who rob to finance their habits; the film was a commercial and critical success. Good Will Hunting (1997) brought Van Sant to a wider audience with its moving portrait of a young mathematical genius struggling to achieve his potential. The film, written by and starring Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, earned Van Sant an Academy Award nomination. He continued to gravitate toward populist fare, directing a remake of Alfred Hitchcocks 1960 thriller Psycho (1998) and Finding Forrester (2000), about a reclusive writer (played by Sean Connery) mentoring an African American teenager. Van Sant then directed a trilogy of films focusing on death. The first in the series, Gerry (2002), which was conceived by and starred Damon and Casey Affleck, comprises largely improvised scenes of two men lost in a desert. In Elephant (2003) Van Sant brought the topical lens of school shootings, choosing to highlight the isolation of adolescence rather than the violence itself. He similarly concentrated on the theme of alienation in Last Days (2005), this time creating an impressionistic, mainly silent chronicle of the days before the suicide of a rock star resembling Kurt Cobain. His latest movie is The Sea of Trees, which is running for the Official Selection of the Cannes Festival film (2015). Matthew McConaughey plays Arthur, a man who has lost his way in life and treks into the thick forest at the foot of Mount Fuji looking for existential answers. Sounds right up the philosophical alley of Rust Cohle in True Detective. They are very different projects and characters yet they are both poetic, McConaughey tells EW. I say another title for this film is

CINEMA & MOVIES ACTIVITY Youve got to go through annihilation to get to salvation. Its one hell of a survival story. Gus Van Sant is directingcurrently shooting in rural Massachusetts and then Japanand it costars Ken Watanabe (above, standing) and Naomi Watts. McConaughey says Gus Van Sant is the right man for the material. Gus is a wonderful voyeur and a really gentle soul of a man. Hes got the right sensibility for a film like this. He listens and considers any ideas that I throw at him and I undeniably trust the direction he gives me, he says. Hes a lot of fun to create with. McConaughey also has a prediction for how audiences will react after seeing The Sea of Trees. Everyone is going to leave the theater and have their own walk and talk through the parking lot to muse about its meanings, what it was about and what it wasnt, what was real and what was a dream. Plot: A story about an American man who travels to the "Suicide Forest" (Aokigahara forest) to kill himself at the base of Mount Fuji in Japan, the site of numerous suicides. There he encounters a Japanese man, who wants to kill himself as well and then both men begin a journey of self-reflection and survival. 1. Watch some of the trailers of his movies and try to understand what they are about.

CINEMA & MOVIES ACTIVITY

Milk (2008) ( )

Paris, je taime (2006) ( ) ( ) ( )

Good Will Hunting (1997) ( )

1. 1 1. Look at the movie covers. What do they have in common? 2. Have you watched the movies? If yes, try to remember what they are about. 3. Match the movies with the correct plots.

a. A janitor at M.I.T., has a gift for mathematics, but needs help from a psychologist to find direction in his life.

b. Through the neighborhoods of a famous city, love is disguised, revealed, imitated, sucked dry, reinvented and awakened.

c. The story of a man and his struggles as an American gay activist who fought for gay rights and became California's first openly gay elected official.

CINEMA & MOVIES ACTIVITY