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Exclusive: “Restless,” Gus Van Sant’s death-haunted romance, interview

By Jack Egan Sep 20, 2011, 1:33 GMT

05/13/2011 - Henry Hopper, Gus Van Sant and Mia Wasikowska - 64th Annual Cannes Film Festival - "Restless" Photocall - Palais des Festivals - Cannes, France © Pixplanete / PR Photos

In “Restless,” the new film from Gus Van Sant, the quirky and eclectic director, returns to one of his favorite themes, the angst of adolescents who live outside the boundaries of the world around them.

Van Sant is known for films like “Drugstore Cowboy.” “My Own Private Idaho,” and “Elephant.”

“Restless” couldn’t be more different than Van Sant’s last film, double Academy Award winner “Milk,” the biopic about San Francisco supervisor and gay activist who was assassinated. (It earned Van Sant his second “best director” Oscar nomination after “Good Will Hunting”). 

By contrast “Restless,” painted on an intimate canvas, is about a bittersweet romance that develops between two young people who are, in different ways, haunted by death.

Enoch, with a suppressed rage resulting from an auto accident that took the lives of both parents, is a dropout from life who has the morbid habit of showing up at funerals of people he doesn’t know.

Annabel with a surprising joie de vivre and an avid interest in Charles Darwin—she does meticulous sketches from nature—is dying of an incurable disease and has only a few.months to live. A relationship develops between them after they meet at a funeral that blossoms into a tender love affair, fated to end with Annabel’s  imminent passing.

The movie, with a plot that could easily tip into mawkishness, succeeds by dint of Van Sant’s mature, mature direction and, even more so, by the affecting on-screen chemistry of its two young leads—Henry Hopper and Mia Wasikowska--who were both 19 when the film was shot two years ago.

Was “Restless” more of a pure romantic film than any his previous movies? I asked Van Sant in an interview conducted before the film opened last weekend in Los Angeles and New York City: “Whether they are romances, there are very strong relationships in most of the films I’ve made,” he responded. “I’’ve always been attracted to stories about close friendships—so for me it wasn’t that unusual doing ‘Restless’.”

Enoch is the first film role for Hopper, son of unconventional actor Dennis Hopper who passed away in 2010. He bears a remarkable resemblance to his father, and his debut in some ways evokes the senior Hopper’s attentrion-getting performance in “Rebel Without a Cause” when he was about the same age.

By contrast, rising star Wasikowska, who in the film looks remarkably like the young Mia Farrow, is a relative veteran of film and television though she is only 21. The Australian actress who started in Oz TV in her early teens, made her American debut as Sofie, the suicidal teen character on HBO’s “In Treatment” and played the title role in last year’s “Alice in Wonderland,” directed by Tim Burton. She also appeared in Lisa Cholodenko’s “The Kids Are Alright,” and most recently in the remake of “Jane Eyre.”

“Mia was extremely experienced and together they were amazing to work with,” says Van Sant. “There were only a couple of weeks of rehearsal before shooting began--Henry and Mia were doing such a good job as actors that rehearsals with them mostly involved my suggesting degrees of direction they might go in rather than providing detailed instructions.”

“Restless” is far from the first time Van Sant has worked with young actors. “Good Will Hunting,” starred Matt Damon in his first screen role, based on a script by Damon and Ben Affleck that went on to win an Oscar for best screenplay. The leads in “My Own Private Idaho” were River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves.

Van Sant went through a lengthy casting process finding the right actors. Hopper had some stage experience at the Actor’s Studio in Santa Monica. When he was asked to read for the part he was in Berlin doing paintings. “Growing up with Dennis Hopper, he must have had some of his father’s acting DNA in his genes,” says the director. “The only thing he found difficult doing film was how many hours it involved—and we were only shooting 10 hours a day,” Van Sant chuckles.

Hopper was not the only person involved in “Restless” who is second-generation Hollywood.  Schuyler Fisk, who plays Annabel’s older sister, is the daughter of Sissy Spacek and production designer Jack Fisk.

And Bryce Dallas Howard, who recently made a splash in “The Help,” is one of the producers on “Restless,” and is the daughter of notable actor/director/producer Ron Howard. The actress was a long-time friend of screenwriter Jason Lew and helped develop the script and then wound up bringing it to Imagine Entertainment, the production company headed by her father and Brian Grazer, which produced the film. Sony Entertainment Classics is distributing the film.

How does “Restless” fit in with other films in Van Sant’s oeuvre?

“It joins the rest of my family,” he says. “They each have separate lives but they are all children of mine. They share a common theme which is about ad hoc families that are not necessarily related but come together.”