Van Sant discusses the challenges of bringing a gay icon's life to the big screen:

Q: Is it true that Milk's friend Cleve Jones, who's played by Emile Hirsch in the film, brought you this script?

A: I stayed in Cleve's house in 1993 when I was working on the screenplay for The Mayor of Castro Street, a different Milk film. Four years ago, he called and said two guys were making a musical about him. One of them was Dustin Lance Black. Three years later, Cleve called again and said he wanted to fly up to see me in Portland, Oregon, because Black had written another script—a drama about Harvey Milk.

Q: Oliver Stone's W was released before the election, to spur debate. Did you think about doing the same thing?

A: The one issue the film could speak to is Proposition 8 in California, the repeal of gay marriage—which is a tragedy. And we're going to screen it before the election to have a part in that. But because it's a political film, if it had opened before the election, the end of its life could have been November 4. It could have become a film you were supposed to see during the election, and after it was over, it's "Oh, that's the election film, right?"

Q: Because you're a gay man yourself, was there added pressure in making this film?

A: There was a little less pressure as a gay man. But it's always hard to make a film that's set in a social milieu. Like Paranoid Park: We were in the skateboarding world, and that's difficult. It has its fast-and-hard skate-or-die politics, and so does the gay community. I think there's a very wary contingent of the gay population that's like, "Don't fuck this up or we'll fuck you up," but there's also a very forgiving side that's like, "Finally, we get our Harvey movie." We ended up showing pretty much only the political aspects of the story, not the Queer as Folk stuff—the street cruising and bathhouse life.

Q: James Franco talked to Jimmy Kimmel about wearing a prosthetic penis, and Sean Penn said he texted Madonna to tell her about his first same-sex kiss. Does that kind of thing distract from the seriousness of the film?

A: He texted Madonna? [laughs] It doesn't bother me. I view things in the "What would Harvey think?" way, and I think he'd love that.

Last update: 11-26-2008 14:59