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A director who is capable of crafting both deeply unconventional independent films and mainstream crowd-pleasers, Gus Van Sant has managed to carve an enviable niche for himself in Hollywood. Since debuting in 1985 with Mala Noche, Van Sant has become one of the premiere bards of dysfunction, populating his films with a parade of hustlers, junkies, psychopathic weather girls, homicidal teens, and troubled geniuses. Following his first major success, Good Will Hunting, Van Sant directed a remake of one of the classic paeans to dysfunction, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. The son of a traveling salesman who rapidly worked his way up the corporate ladder into middle-class prosperity, Van Sant was born in Louisville, KY, on July 24, 1952. Due to his father's job, the family moved continuously during Van Sant's childhood. One constant in the director's early years was his interest in painting and Super-8 filmmaking; while still in school he began making semi-autobiographical shorts costing between 30 and 50 dollars. Van Sant's artistic leanings took him to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1970, where his classmates included David Byrne and other members of the Talking Heads. It was also at R.I.S.D. that Van Sant received an introduction to avant-garde directors like Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, and Andy Warhol; this introduction quickly inspired him to change his major from painting to cinema.After spending time in Europe, Van Sant went to Los Angeles in 1976. He secured a job as a production assistant to writer/director Ken Shapiro, with whom he developed a few ideas, none of which came to fruition. Van Sant channeled his frustrations into the 1981 Alice in Hollywood, a film about a na |
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