Gus Van Sant

Gus Van Sant is an openly gay American director known for a career that moves fluently between indie experimentation and mainstream Hollywood. His early films — Mala Noche (1985), a raw, low-budget portrait of a store clerk's obsessive love for a teenage Mexican immigrant that helped kick off the New Queer Cinema movement, Drugstore Cowboy (1989), and My Own Private Idaho (1991) — established him as a poet of the margins, with My Own Private Idaho in particular earning a place in the canon of queer cinema for its tender portrait of two young male hustlers. He directed the mainstream hit Good Will Hunting (1997), earning an Academy Award nomination for Best Director, and the controversial shot-for-shot remake of Psycho (1998), then returned to a minimalist art-film mode with his Death Trilogy — Gerry (2002), Elephant (2003), and Last Days (2005). His film Milk (2008), a biopic of gay rights pioneer Harvey Milk starring Sean Penn, won two Academy Awards. Van Sant has been openly gay throughout his career and has made queer visibility a consistent thread in his work.