Tag Archives: Matt Dillon

The Gus Van Sant Podcast 5: Richard Drew on TO DIE FOR (1995)

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I very much wanted to speak to the wonderful Richard Drew about TO DIE FOR (Gus Van Sant, 1995). Richard has a degree in Film and Literature so knows something about film, yet unusually for the guests on this podcast, he is not a Gus Van Sant fan. More importantly, Richard is a television producer, now based in Los Angeles, but who got his start on the ground floor of Reality TV in England and has worked on BIG BROTHER, SECOND SURVIVOR, FAME ACADEMY, and many more. He is now SVP of Development at Law and Crime Productions, specialising in True Crime Documentaries. His latest work, JAILBREAK: LOVE ON THE RUN is currently on Netlfix.

In the podcast we discuss how TO DIE FOR draws on the talk show culture of the era (Oprah, Geraldo, Sally Jesse Raphael, Phil Donahue) as well as the rise of celebrity culture in print (PEOPLE, US) and Television (ENTERTAINMENT TONIGHT). It’s a film that’s very much about not only a grasping for fame, but for television and televisual fame. We talk of the performances, the film’s form and structure, how it’s a story  complexly told but in a manner that’s experienced as simple and direct. All this and much more can be heard below:

The podcast may also be listened to on: Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

We previously spoke to Matt Hays on the Criterion’s re-release of the film here:

The Gus Van Sant Podcast 5A: To Die For (1995)

Some of the clips discussed in the podcasts may be seen below:

Fame:

From death to celebrity:

 

 Keep your feet off the coffee table:

 

Matt Dillon as a particular kind of object of desire:

Famous Sweet ‘Home Alabama’ moment: 

Mediated evidence:

 

Some images to think about:

José Arroyo

The Gus Van Sant Podcast 5A: To Die For (1995)

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The first of two podcasts on Gus Van Sant’s TO DIE FOR (1995), this one with Matt Hays, journalist, co-editor with Tom Waugh of McGill-Queen’s Press’ QUEER FILM CLASSICS series, and a professor of film at Concordia University and Marianopolis College. Matt’s reviewed Criterion’s recent edition of the film for the current CINEASTE and I wanted to pick up on some of the excellent points he raises there: how is the film a turning point in Van Sant’s career? What is this shifting of gears between Van Sant’s more commercial and more esoteric works? Was the film prescient? What does it tell us about celebrity culture, the media and politics? What is the film’s view of heterosexual relations? Is there a ‘gay gaze’ on the male bodies? What does it tell us about race in America? What are the formal tensions running through the film? It’s structure has been compared to that of CITIZEN KANE and RASHOMON. How so? We agree that Kidman gives one of her greatest performances but have Matt Dillon and Joaquim Phoenix been overlooked? All this and much more can be heard here:

 

The podcast may also be listened to on: Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

 

Matt’s article and the list of questions that arose from it:

José Arroyo

The Gus Van Sant Podcast No. 2: Drugstore Cowboy (1989)

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We found DRUGSTORE COWBOY, Gus Van Sant’s second feature, beautiful, imaginative and moving; a film that gets better with each viewing. We discuss Matt Dillon, so extraordinarily good looking and yet also so very believable as a ‘regular guy’. Tom Waits was the original casting and we talk about what Dillon brings to the role, his choices, and another possible connection to Van Sant, how he is also drawn to the marginal, the outsider; we talk about the experimental montages, clearly influenced by Anthony Balch’s Fires Open Fire (1963) which evoke a subjective state of mind, usually drug fuelled, but which also act as a structuring device and help make the film aesthetically cohesive. We discuss continuities: time-lapse photography, Super8 filming, the Pacific Northwest, subject matter of marginals, outsiders, small time crims, junkies. We both agree that we don’t like William Burroughs in the film, even though he was much praised upon its release. We discuss how Van Sant’s second feature is an announcement of a major American director with a distinctive voice, a very particular style, a visual vernacular, a contiguous world from film to film, peopled by recurring figures, a darkly comic tone

The podcast may be listened to here:

The podcast may also be listened to on: Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

More info, clips, examples, a bibliography below:

Montages ostensibly influenced by Towers Open Fire (Anthony Balch, 1963) see below:

Images such as these do seem an inspiration for Drugstore Cowboy:

The film has two types of scenes that structure it: robberies of drugstores, it can be read as one long heist film; and the subjective montages, which evoke a subjective state of mind, usually drug fuelled, but which also act as a structuring device and make it aesthetically cohesive.

The first is from the beginning where he’s so eager to shoot up after the robbery that he does so in the car before even getting home.

The prank-on-cops montage

The ominous hat, ‘Hat on Bed!’; ‘I’ve now paid my debt to the hat)

Autumn leaves, childhood, hat montage at the burial; and time for change.

A scene that rhymes with the scene with the mother earlier on; bonds of affection, there, but over-ruled by drugs. ‘I wish I could win you back’. Very moving.

 

Fear of prison:

 

Beginning and end (accompanied by the use of Super 8 footage, which is beginning to seem a signature

 

Time montage and time-lapse

 

A junkie deals with the cops:

 

 

Initial Bigliography:

Cindy Fuchs, ‘Drugstore Cowboy’, Cineaste, Vol 18, Iss 1, (1990): 43-45

Nick James, ‘Intoxication’, Sight And Sound: A to Z of Cinema, Sight and Sound, February 1997, pp.26-28.

Dale Kutzera, ‘Drugstore Cowboy: Set Against Bleak Landscape’. American Cinematographer

Lucy Neville, Drugstore Cowboy, Sight and Sound, November 2002, p. 63.

Michael O’Pray, Drugstore Cowboy, Monthly Film Bulletin, Dec. 1, 1999, 56, 671.

Phillippe Rouyer, ‘Ironie du sort (Drugstore Cowboy)

Steve Vineberg, ‘Drugstore Cowboy’.Film Quarterly, Vol 32. Iss 3, (Spring 1990):27

 

José Arroyo