Cannes 2005: Van Sant's Last Days

I'm sort of immoderately interested in Last Days, Gus Van Sant's dramatic retelling of the demise of Kurt Cobain. The french trailer has been on the web for a while, and from the looks of things, Michael Pitt (the former WB network contract player who starred in The Dreamers, a film I appreciated conceptually but yawned through in actuality) has filed an eerilly accurate impersonation of the junkie/father/leader of the only really relevant rock group of the 90s. And it's good to see Van Sant follow Elephant with another auteur effort; there was a point in the late 90s where we started to worry about him.

Via Movie City Indie I found an article by Van Sant in Liberation, in which the director describes his one meeting with the real Cobain. It was 1991, and the two were guests at a dinner party hosted by Cobain's manager. Van Sant describes a fascination sparked that night that would lead to the making of this film.


"We were all sitting in the back yard smoking, and Courtney [Love] was reading from a rock and roll magazine, and doing a kind of stand up routine," Van Sant writes. "The thing that I noticed the most was Kurt. He was laughing like a very kept audience at Courtney's diatribe. And we started to laugh along partly because Kurt was laughing - and sometimes adding a few comments along with Courtney...I pretty much just listened and started to realize that I was really fascinated by Kurt. And at the same time, realizing some of this fascination was probably what drew everyone to him."