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Gus Van Sant: Mala Noche
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After spending time in Europe, Van Sant went to Los Angeles in 1976, where he became fascinated by the existence of the marginalized people, especially in context with the more ordinary, prosperous world that surrounded them. Van Sant would repeatedly focus his work on those existing on society's fringes, beginning with his 1985 Mala Noche. Shot in black-and-white, Mala Noche earned its director almost overnight acclaim on the festival circuit, with the Los Angeles Times naming it the year's "Best Independent Film."
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Mala Noche was made two years after Van Sant went to New York to work in an advertising agency. He saved 20,000 dollars during his tenure there, enabling him to finance the majority of his tale of doomed love between a gay liquor store clerk and a Mexican immigrant. The film, which was taken from Portland street writer Walt Curtis' semi-autobiographical novella, featured some of the director's hallmarks, notably an unfulfilled romanticism, a dry sense of the absurd, and the refusal to treat homosexuality as something deserving of judgment. Unlike many gay filmmakers, Van Sant — who had long been openly gay — declined to use same-sex relationships as fodder for overtly political statements, although such relationships would frequently appear in his films.
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For Van Sant, the theme of mentorship isn't something that started with Good Will Hunting, when Robin Williams won an Oscar playing a wounded healer who rescues a young genius (Matt Damon) from self-destruction. In fact, it's woven through most of his eight feature films, starting with Mala Noche (1985),
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Van Sant's first works, created in the mid-1980s, were a series of short and experimental films. His initial feature, shot on a shoestring, was Mala Noche, the story of a gay man's infatuation with an illegal immigrant. While these early films brought him a degree of critical attention, it was Drugstore Cowboy that established him as one of independent filmmaking's most authoritative new voices. The film's low-key tale of a pack of 1970s-era junkies in perpetual pursuit of drugs won near-unanimous accolades.
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Mala Noche was made two years after Van Sant went to New York to work in an advertising agency. He saved 20,000 dollars during his tenure there, enabling him to finance the majority of his tale of doomed love between a gay liquor store clerk and a Mexican immigrant. The film, which was taken from Portland street writer
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Mala Noche