CINEMA & MOVIES ACTIVITY Gus Van Sant, Gus Greene Van Sant, Jr. (born July 24, 1952, Louisville, Kentucky, U.S.), American film director and writer, known for focusing on marginalized and isolated characters. The son of a traveling businessman and a housewife, Van Sant lived an itinerant childhood. He began making amateur films in high school, and he later studied film at the Rhode Island School of Design (B.A., 1975). His early releases were short films, notably The Discipline of D.E. (1982), an adaptation of a William S. Burroughs short story. Mala Noche (1985), his first feature-length film, centres on a drugstore clerk obsessed with a young Mexican immigrant. The theme of homosexual love apparent in the story would manifest with varying degrees of sensitivity in many of Van Sant’s later films. Van Sant next wrote and directed Drugstore Cowboy (1989), which starred Matt Dillon as the leader of a group of heroin addicts who rob to finance their habits; the film was a commercial and critical success. Good Will Hunting (1997) brought Van Sant to a wider audience with its moving portrait of a young mathematical genius struggling to achieve his potential. The film, written by and starring Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, earned Van Sant an Academy Award nomination. He continued to gravitate toward populist fare, directing a remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 thriller Psycho (1998) and Finding Forrester (2000), about a reclusive writer (played by Sean Connery) mentoring an African American teenager. Van Sant then directed a trilogy of films focusing on death. The first in the series, Gerry (2002), which was conceived by and starred Damon and Casey Affleck, comprises largely improvised scenes of two men lost in a desert. In Elephant (2003) Van Sant brought the topical lens of school shootings, choosing to highlight the isolation of adolescence rather than the violence itself. He similarly concentrated on the theme of alienation in Last Days (2005), this time creating an impressionistic, mainly silent chronicle of the days before the suicide of a rock star resembling Kurt Cobain. His latest movie is The Sea of Trees, which is running for the Official Selection of the Cannes Festival film (2015). Matthew McConaughey plays Arthur, a man who has lost his way in life and treks into the thick forest at the foot of Mount Fuji looking for existential answers. Sounds right up the philosophical alley of Rust Cohle in True Detective. “They are very different projects and characters yet they are both poetic,” McConaughey tells EW. “I say another title for this film is