Perhaps the most delicate of Gus Van Sant’s recent run of independent and highly idiosyncratic films, Paranoid Park (see review page 20) is a story of teens, guilt and skateboarding set in the director’s long-time home of Portland. With its non-linear structure, largely non-professional cast and casual grace, it’s a low-key cousin to Elephant and My Own Private Idaho. It would also appear to end a phase in Van Sant’s career — his next project is Milk, a larger-scaled biopic in which Sean Penn stars as pioneering gay politician Harvey Milk. Van Sant spoke with EYE WEEKLY when Paranoid Park played TIFF last September.

The elliptical nature of the story­telling makes Paranoid Park a tough film to get a handle on — is it true that you’re not sure what to make of it either?
This is the first time I’ve had a kind of void as far as having strong opinions about a film that I made. I usually have some kind of personal opinion about the film myself. I can watch this and have a certain understanding — it’s just that I don’t have a strong feeling about how the story works.

Your script does substantially change the structure of the original book by Blake Nelson — did the different parts of the story fit together without you quite understanding how?
Very much so. It was very organic and allusive. I mean, there are reasons for all kinds of things that happen in the movie in terms of the order of the story. But I guess they’re hypothetical reasons — it feels a bit like it’s not my movie.

What was so compelling about Nelson’s book?
It was very introspective in a way that I liked. I thought it was like a young-adult version of Crime and Punishment. It just had a weight to it and I found it interesting enough to try to make a film version.

Teen subcultures are also a favourite subject of yours — why were you interested in the skateboarder culture here?
I’m always interested in subcultures, though the skaters’ subculture is getting to be less and less of a subculture. I was a skateboarder when I was younger but we had a different type of culture — it was more about the Beach Boys. It must’ve been scary to the parents, but it was clambakes and surf music. As for the modern-day skate culture, I went through the ’80s knowing skaters, people like the Skate Drunks, a punk-rock band, and Rebel Skates, these kids who made skateboards and were really hardcore outsiders. Still, I never really felt a part of that. I’m fascinated by the skate culture of today because this isn’t the Beach Boys kind of skate or surf culture that I’d known. And the skate park where the book was set was a few blocks from my house — it’s all very close to where I live. Yet this isn’t an insider’s point of view. 

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