Director Van Sant hunts down more good will

On the heels of that commercial and critical failure, Van Sant returns with "Finding Forrester," a student-mentor tale similar to his earlier master-pupil flick, "Good Will Hunting."

Is this Van Sant seeking safe harbor after the tempest of "Psycho"?

"No," Van Sant says. "I think I thought because it wasn't that different from something I'd done before, that in itself was different."

After becoming a critics' favorite with such edgy films as "Drugstore Cowboy," "My Own Private Idaho" and "To Die For," Van Sant experimented with the mainstream on "Good Will Hunting."

Van Sant wondered whether he could pull off the upbeat tale of an unlikely math prodigy and his mentor with the same aplomb he displayed in dark flicks about doomed street hustlers and drug addicts turned pharmacy bandits.

"I didn't know whether, without the controversial material, would I still be standing?" the 48-year-old Van Sant says during an interview. "If I wasn't able to wield the freaky characters in front of the viewers, would I be interesting anymore?"

The result: Academy Awards for 1997's "Good Will Hunting" co-star Robin Williams and screenwriters Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, plus a best-picture nomination and a directing nod for Van Sant. The movie grossed nearly $140 million domestically, roughly four times the business of his previous films combined.

With sudden clout, Van Sant moved on to essentially a shot-for-shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho," a project he had been pushing for years.

From the outset, the idea drew raised eyebrows — and cries of "Sacrilege!"

While many questioned why a director would undertake an exacting remake of such a well-known film, Van Sant viewed it as an extension of his visual-arts training at the Rhode Island School of Design.

"This was sort of a large-budget, active appropriation on the art side of things," Van Sant says. "They teach appropriation your first year at the school. You're supposed to go out and find your found object and make it your own. Draw it, become obsessed with it."

"Then there's the marketing scheme, to make something that had been successful before and renew it with added ingredients, the new Norman Bates, and put it in the marketplace and see if it works."

It didn't work, though Van Sant says he believes critics partly undermined the movie. Press coverage about the "Psycho" remake came off as something akin to, "I challenge Alfred Hitchcock to a duel," Van Sant says.

"I really found the critics were a lot more conservative than I had imagined. It was almost like, 'Lynch him, lynch the guy.' Right-wing. I started to view critics as having sensibilities way narrower than I expected."

Intentionally or not, Van Sant is squarely back on secure, mainstream ground with "Finding Forrester."

Sean Connery stars as the title character, an author who wrote the great American novel in his 20s then recoiled from publishing and the public eye. Fifty years later, the reclusive Forrester is thrown into contact with a gifted teen-age athlete and writer (newcomer Rob Brown), mentoring the youth while taking small steps back into the real world.

In a sense, "Finding Forrester," which co-stars Anna Paquin and F. Murray Abraham, is another experiment, a test to see whether the success of "Good Will Hunting" was just a fluke, Van Sant says.

He had not actively sought a similar project. The script for "Finding Forrester," by first-time screenwriter Mike Rich, landed on his desk while Van Sant was trying to line up other, more subversive projects, including a film about a "transvestite, junkie hooker who becomes a Zen teacher."

Though the script bore a resemblance to "Good Will Hunting," Van Sant thought it was too good to pass up. Both scripts were the sort of audience-pleasers that Van Sant, who wrote his earlier films himself, felt he could never pen himself.