Auteur-matic

by Amar Patel in ,


Gus Van Sant is perhaps best known as the director of Oscar-winning Good Will Hunting. A crowdpleaser that focuses on the relationship between a gifted but troubled young man (Matt Damon) and his therapist (Robin Williams), and his reluctance to break free from the cocoon of small-town Southie in Boston.

But when you consider this against some of his riskier projects – Gerry with its barely speaking two-person cast wandering the desert, Elephant recalling the horror of Columbine, that shot-for-shot remake of Psycho or “forgery” as Van Sant dubs it – we get a very different picture of the filmmaker. The Art of Making Movies is as coherent and linear an appraisal of his work as you will find, and yet it also reminds us that this is someone who rarely sticks to the script or goes by the book.

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Amar Patel