Will Hollywood Rope the Director of ‘Drugstore Cowboy’? : Movies: Gus Van Sant’s offbeat film has made him a hot property. His low-budget tales of Americans leading marginal lives are finding an audience.

“I guess I just look like the kind of guy who wants coffee,” quips director Gus Van Sant after the spacey waiter in the dining room of a West Hollywood hotel offers him a cup for the third time. Van Sant does have an intense, no-nonsense manner that says “coffee-drinker.” Dressed for efficiency in jeans, a T-shirt, sensible walking shoes and a watch, he comes off as a serious guy ready to hunker down and get to work.

Anyone who’s seen Van Sant’s films, however, knows that his conventional appearance is something of a disguise. The director of “Drugstore Cowboy,” one of the most daringly offbeat films of the year, is Hollywood’s current rebel of choice.

In Los Angeles from his hometown of Portland, Ore., to oversee the recent premiere of his first film, “Mala Noche,” made in 1987 (one of the perks of a critically acclaimed film is that people take an interest in your early work), Van Sant is currently in the midst of the intense courting ritual that ensues when Hollywood spots an original young talent.

“Right now it seems like all I do is have meetings,” says the 37-year-old Van Sant over waffles and orange juice. “A typical day for me is, I get up, make a lot of phone calls, go out to eat, then go back home and make phone calls all day--which is torture. I’m in a tortuous period of my life right now,” he laughs. “Actually, I like what’s happening because I’ve always been the kind of person who didn’t get enough phone calls and always wanted to get phone calls all day. And now I do.”

“Drugstore Cowboy” is what got Van Sant’s telephone buzzing. Based on an unpublished novel by James Fogle, an inmate at Washington State Penitentiary, the film is an unromanticized depiction of the shabby, life-on-the-run existence of four Portland drug addicts whose lives revolve around the pursuit and ingestion of narcotics. Set in 1971, the film centers on the gang’s leader, Bob (Matt Dillon), a smooth operator who finally gets it together to quit the dead-end existence he’s fashioned for himself.

Similarly, “Mala Noche” is a portrait of people living on the fringes of society who are enslaved by appetites for transcendence and ecstasy. Shot in black-and-white on a budget of $20,000, “Mala Noche” is the story of a convenience-store manager on Portland’s Skid Row and his unrequited love for an illegal Mexican immigrant.

Adapted from a semi-autobiographical novella by Portland poet Walt Curtis, “Mala Noche’s” searingly realistic exploration of the themes of emptiness and desire draws its power from Van Sant’s flawless eye for detail, his black sense of humor, and his compassion for the sorry characters who people the film. As Scorsese put his indelible stamp on Little Italy in “Mean Streets,” Van Sant marks out Portland as his creative turf.

“I use Portland’s down-and-out people and back-street settings because it’s a simple arena that’s easy to identify,” says Van Sant of the milieu he favors for his films. “This world is something I’ve found and can understand, and as a low-budget film maker, it’s also attractive because it’s accessible.”

Van Sant’s affinity for marginal Americans living on the edges of respectability is hard to explain, because it certainly wasn’t his birthright. Born in Louisville, Ky., and raised in Portland, he had a resoundingly normal upbringing.

“I was raised in a suburban tract home, and that probably played a big role in shaping my world view,” he recalls. “Being raised in that environment gave me a love of the generic--I like things to be highly specific, yet generic. I was raised Episcopal, and I’m sure my parents probably wanted me to be on the football team, but they let me do what I wanted and whatever happened was fine with them.

“In 1971--the year ‘Drugstore Cowboy’ takes place--I was living your average upper-middle-class high school existence,” he continues. “At that point, I was painting and making short films, but after I got out of high school and went to the Rhode Island School of Design, my films became complicated enough that I had to give up painting.”

After design school, Van Sant moved to Los Angeles and tried to make his way in the film world. It was slow going.

“I was here for six years, but nothing really happened. I hung around with an outsider group of art students and struggling film makers and though it was an interesting time, I never got close to directing a film, which was the whole point of my being here. So, I moved to New York and got a job in an ad agency, where I worked for two years and saved up $20,000. When I quit that job, I moved back to Portland because that was where ‘Mala Noche’ was set, and spent my savings making that film.”

Shot in four weeks with a crew of four, “Mala Noche” garnered the 1987 Los Angeles Film Critics Award for best experimental/independent feature and introduced the distinctive style Van Sant used so effectively in “Drugstore Cowboy.”

“I go for a realism that borders on the surreal, because if you get things realistic enough they take on a magical dimension,” says Van Sant of his directorial style. “David Lynch--who’s one of my favorite film makers--does a similar thing in his films. Lynch accesses the emotional content of a scene, then plays that up to an extreme degree, either through the actors or the framing of the shots. He moves from emotion to emotion rather from one action to the next--it’s a form of storytelling shorthand that goes straight to the heart of things.”

While Van Sant mentions David Lynch, Stanley Kubrick and Samuel Beckett as artists he admires, he credits novelist William Burroughs with having the biggest influence on his work. (Burroughs appears in “Drugstore Cowboy” as Tom the Priest, an elderly drug fiend who’s something of a legend on the Portland drug scene.)

“I’m attracted to the way Burroughs’ work is abstract yet concrete at the same time,” says Van Sant, “and I love the humor and the wild streak of experimentation in his writing.”

Being a fan of Burroughs, does Van Sant share his enthusiasm for drugs?

“Drugs played a big role in my life in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and I was pretty familiar with pot and LSD during that period,” he says, “but I stopped using them because I got too old to be doing that stuff. People who continue doing drugs into their 30s turn into complete messes.”

“Drugstore Cowboy” has been faulted as being pro-drug by a few critics, but Van Sant insists that “directors shouldn’t be obliged to take a moral position on their subject matter because then they’re dictating to the audience--and unless you’re making a political film you shouldn’t be doing that. People should be allowed to make up their own minds. My position on drugs comes through if somebody is really looking for it, and though my position is admittedly highly ambiguous, it was never my intention to make a pro-drug film.”

Though drug-related films are considered taboo in Hollywood (“not because of any moral stigma, but because drug films don’t make money,” says Van Sant), “Drugstore Cowboy” has generated a flurry of enthusiastic interest in Van Sant’s next film. What he plans to do next, however, is probably not exactly what the studios had in mind. The story of a pair of street hustlers on the road between Portland and Seattle, “My Own Private Idaho” centers on the betrayal of this partnership when one man inherits some money and leaves the other behind. The main character is a narcoleptic and the story is told from his point of view, during his fitfully waking moments.

“Sure there are people chomping at the bit to give me big bucks right now, but they won’t give me money to make my next movie, they’ll give me money to make a movie,” says Van Sant. “ ‘My Own Private Idaho’ is of a nature that doesn’t suggest wide audience appeal, so it will be an independently financed low-budget film made for $1.5 million. Actually, none of my films have been designed for big budgets--they’re conceived as films that can be made for $100,000.

“ ‘Mala Noche’ was made for $20,000, and though we expanded ‘Drugstore Cowboy’ into a larger-budget picture, it could’ve been made for much less. Maybe it’s a mistake to make ‘Private Idaho’ at this particular point in my career, but everything always feels like maybe it’s a mistake. I have this project ready to go, so I don’t care if it’s right or wrong--I’m just gonna do it.”

“My Own Private Idaho” will keep Van Sant in Portland through the winter, but he says he would be going back there either way. Though Hollywood is currently calling his name, Van Sant has no plans to relocate.

“I like Los Angeles, but I’m going to stay in Portland because there’s much less stress there. I’m pretty naive when it comes to business, and working as a film maker in L.A., you really have the sense of being in the heart of the lion’s den. I don’t know if I’m ready for this town yet. I feel lucky to have gotten such good reviews but it didn’t make me feel like wow, ‘I’m great.’ I still feel like wow, ‘Maybe I’m not so great.’ ”