"Infinite Jest: Reviews, Articles,
and Miscellany"
A FUN THING THEY'LL NEVER DO AGAIN
Gus Van Sant meets David Foster Wallace
Dazed & Confused, May 1998
There's a symmetry to having Gus Van Sant and novelist and essayist David
Foster Wallace converse. One of Van Sant's favorite writers, Wallace is
the eagle-eyed observer of the minutiae of mid-America, yet has remained
largely unnoticed in this country [Britain]. His obsessivly detailed observations
were spotted early by Van Sant, who approached Wallace, hoping to adapt
his turbulent opus "Infinite Jest" for the big screen. Nothing
has as yet come of the project -- but watch this space for collaborations
between two of the most potent voices of popular culture.
The following interview was conducted over the phone between Van Sant's
hotel room in LA and Wallace's home in Bloomington, Illinois. Van Sant transcribed
and edited the conversation and requested the original punctuation and interferences
remain untouched.
David Foster Wallace: The thing that I don't get, and this doesn't have
to go on record, is that either you're a total mensch, or this is some sort
of very important venue, because I would have imagined that you know, you
could go around being offered cocaine by the...
Gus Van Sant: (laughter)
DFW: ...people in LA. (interference) Um's and 'ers. (interference, Gus fumbles
with tape recorder covering David's words)... Full of long distance conversations.
GVS: I'm a mensch. What does mensch mean?
DFW: What does mensch mean...?
GVS: Good guy, right?
DFW: Good, sturdy, good hearted guy.
GVS: (Pause) I thought that after we talk together I would type this up
and then send it to you to approve it. Give you a...do you have a computer?
DFW: Uh...yeah. (loud unexplained bang) But I don't have anything that,
like...I make my own disks and stuff. Well, you're a mensch, I'll probably
sign off on whatever you do as long as you don't have me you know, confessing
to pederasty or something like that (Gus laughs). Not having a passport
makes me very blasé about what appears in foreign periodicals since
I know I'll never see it.
GVS: Really, so you don't travel abroad?
DFW: I will at some point but I haven't had a passport since I was a little
boy.
GVS: Wow. (long pause) Um, well, so , um, how's your class?
DFW: I'm on leave this year. I'm auditing a class but I'm not teaching.
The class I'm auditing is a real bitch but somehow I'm holding on at a high
C or low B.
GVS: What's the class?
DFW: It's ah, it's advanced tax accounting, which is a long story and you
probably don't want to know about it but it's wa-a-a-y over my little noggin'.
It's a Will Hunting class.
GVS: Oh my God.
DFW: 35 pages of incredibly dense, you know, CPA stuff at night and then
you get tested on it the next day.
GVS: Wow.
DFW: Speaking of which -- can I just ask -- did those two guys -- was that
the first screenplay that they'd written?
GVS: Yeah.
DFW: Did either of them have serious math backgrounds?
GVS: Um (pause) no. But we had a guy -- do you know math?
DFW: I mean I, I (breathes into phone) one of the things I majored in um,
was like Philosophy of Mathematics so I know a lot of the theory of math.
I'm not...
GVS: Mmhmm.
DFW: ...I couldn't do what he does.
GVS: Because we had a guy named Pat O'Donnell in Toronto who was a professor
of Physics, University of Toronto, and he devised, he designed the mathematics
basically and he had his own kind of like fun with it because he realized,
you know, that the people that he was designing the math for were the mathematicians
around the world that would see the movie.
DFW: That's the thing -- and some of it was over my head. What was the problem
-- it was the second problem that Will solved, um, that the grad student
notices was correct on the board and that the other faculty member at MIT
gets so upset about, because Will comes up with the solution and it involves
joining and forming almost what looks like a horizontal tree.
GVS: Right.
DFW: What, what, do you recall the problem?
GVS: You mean the one where he insults the guy and he leaves the room, they're
doing it on the overhead projector?
DFW: Yeah, I don't know how much of an insult it is but it's a great moment
of like academic vanity...
GVS: Yeah, he...
DFW: ...the academic realism of that movie was -- I don't know that I've
seen anything else that quite captures the...
GVS: It's a, it's a problem that, uh, I don't know what that one is, I've
forgotten literally what it is. Um. It's a mathematical -- all the, all
the problems are pretty much not physics they're mathematical and uh, that
one is, is a, um, a problem that the guy is kind of known for, it's a, the
guy he's disproving, he's found a new way to look at it, so...
DFW: right.
GVS: ...He's kind of damaged all this work that the guy has done and that
little solution that he's putting up on the board is something (clears throat)
...it was a touchy one because we wanted to have that be kind of like the
most advanced problem within the film...
DFW: yeah.
GVS: ...So Pat, our advisor, said that he could find a problem where, where
the answer would actually be, um, like, when you're talking to the mathematic
public they'll actually believe, you know, that what Will has written might
be a solution, but if you looked into it it's sort of a red herring and
it's not really a solution at all.
DFW: Yeah, I kept trying, 'cause here are sort of three separate problems
that are explicitly done and the second one's done in a quick montage and
they cancel out some terms and then give each other a high five and that
I was pretty sure was a Fourier trans- (interference)
GVS: Yeah...
DFW: -- which is something that I've seen, um, but-but that one (dog barks)
hang on, HUSH! -- that one with the joint vertices I, I had recog- (chair
moves loudly) ...so, so in the screenplay did Damon (dog barks) and Affleck
just put in a lot of math in there or something or did you...
GVS: Yeah...
DFW: ...massage the screenplay?
GVS: We had to work on it because we didn't have the math problems in the
screenplay we just had (clears throat) we had uh, you know: Will looks at
the problem on the board and he writes an answer. And then, the next scene
would read: the professor, um, encounters the answer on the board and puts
his hand on his forehead and says Oh my God!
DFW: Uh-huh.
GVS: You know, that kind of thing. There were never any literal problems
and so when we started filming we realised, well -- there has to be something
(laughs) on the board. So we went to um...
DFW: Well that stuff was _real_ interesting.
GVS: Yeah. We went -- yeah it was kind of interesting partly -- um a physicist
at Harvard (whose name is Shelly) um, had told us that physics and the mathematics
that go along with it is not particularly something that you can go and
make money with in the marketplace (sound of one of us peeing in the toilet).
You need grants and that sort of thing to get by, people are not going to
really want to have anything to do with you except other physicists, it's
not that valuable, and people are not going to be fighting over the guy.
You needed to have -- in his estimation -- a combinatorial mathematician
who is way more valuable and people need him to solve their problems, like
to do their accounting, like doing the stuff in the class you're taking.
DFW: Oh sure, or it was dead-on about cipher decryption, that's like...
GVS: yeah
DFW: ...that's probably the biggest money field that there is right now.
GVS: So we changed it so he was a combinatorial mathematician.
DFW: Well that's what Steffan Skaarsgaard was. The thing that interested
me about Will -- and of course this is like a stroke movie for me -- is
you've got like a total nerd who is incredibly good looking, can beat people
up and has Minnie Driver in love with him, so I'm, like I saw it twice voluntarily.
Most of the serious math weenies who I've met, and I've met a few, like
who've graduated from college at 12 and stuff, they're not all that smart
in other areas. I've like never met any who've had photographic memories
with respect to stuff like agrarian social histories of the American South
or legal precedent in the American judicial system and stuff, and so he
seemed as if he could almost have done anything that he wanted to do and
that math was almost a kind of accident.
GVS: That's the way we thought of him. But I always felt that his memory
was something that was kind of like a bonus. And that mathematics was something
that he had done when say he was alone as a child.
DFW: Uh-huh.
GVS: And he had learned and he had become very advanced but that his memory
was maybe separate -- the memory was like the trick part. So he remembered
certain things that he had read in different books his retention was so
phenomenal but it was almost like a trick so when he is defeating the guy
in the Harvard bar by quoting from text books this sort of capitalist versus
socialist...
DFW: Which trust me is every bonehead kid's fantasy of being able to do
that. (Gus laughs) Fuckwad with a pony tail in a Harvard bar, I've met that
guy. The girl I went and saw the movie with first thought that the guy was
like to icky and villainous to be realistic and I hastened to disagree with
her. It was the first script they had written?
GVS: Yeah, it was.
DFW: That's kind of amazing.
GVS: And they were really young, I mean, at the time they were like 22 and
24.
DFW: Really? ...bastards.
GVW: I know, it's crazy.
DFW: One of the great puzzles I work with is I'm basically a nerd and everybody
I know are nerds and how do you make nerds interesting (Gus laughs). And
I haven't seen it done that compellingly for a while. We'll stop talking
about "Good Will Hunting" in just one second, but one thing is
that I really like Skaarsgaard. I liked "Zero Kelvin" and "Breaking
the Waves." The conflict in him of discovering someone who in Whitman's
phrase "spreads the broader breast than his own" I thought was
really well done and it's a lot how it is for writing teachers. You want
your student to be brilliant but not too brilliant. And particularly that
scene where Damon sets the proof on fire, which could have very easily been
cheesy and I thought was really moving. There were intimations that Skaarsgaard
was tormented and was a student seducer. The first time we see this he's
under some sort of tent and he says "Would you join me for a drink
tonight?" And the second, oh, it's when Will is fucking with the mind
of George Plimpton and outside Skaarsgaard is talking about a proof being
like a symphony. But he's doing it in a very sort of Svengali way (Gus laughts)
to some nubile undergraduate. Was there more of that stuff, or...
GVS: That was the result of basically Stellan filling out his character.
(clears throat) He is really a very amazing actor. He's been in the Stockholm
Shakespearean Company for like sixteen years. He has a really, like extensive
background. And he is also not known in our country, so when he is over
here it is nice for him because he is used to being some kind of Richard
Gere of Sweden. And he was in "The Unbearable Lightness of Being"
as the hunky Swedish guy. So these things he added on his own after we talked
about him being like a rock star version of a math professor.
DFW: Well, but also at MIT within the world of math there's sexy math and
non-sexy math, and sexy mathematicians. That was one texture that I thought
the movie captured really well.
GVS: Along with that there were the questions on how he relates to his students
and he thought that maybe he was attracted to some of his students, and
then the question was was it just girls or was it girls and boys and so
I suggested that maybe its both and we left it at that.
DFW: And you know it suggests and probably not to anyone in academia, but
a professor who is that overt with his students -- there's something pathetic
about it, it's the big sign that there's a big void, big pain, unless the
guy is just Snidely Whiplash and is twirling his moustache and laughing.
The thing that made me not believe it was these two kids' screenplay was
how, for me, as interesting as Will was, I thought that with Skaarsgaard
and Williams, the movie was very generous (dog barking) about their own
characters and their own pain and the way Will in a very kind of tangential
way I thought...it didn't seem contrived at all, kind of became an occasion
for their pain to get illuminated and in certain ways worked out. That encounter
the two of them have -- see this is going to look like I'm totally kissing
your ass -- in the middle of the third act right before Will comes in, when
Williams is telling Skaarsgaard to shove the medal up his ass, but its also
clear that Williams is coming very much out of his incredible grief over
the death of his wife, that's when I really got impressed -- the way I think
of it -- with the screenplay. Because when you have a male - model - nerd
- cool - tough - guy - hero and it's all about him and his conflicts and
all that stuff. I thought it was Williams' best movie. Maybe "Fisher
King" was as good but he capered in that and except for one recreation
of a home run he didn't go manic in this at all. And he didn't do his adorable,
you know...
GVS: So do you have students like that in your school?
DFW: (laughs) This is the interviewer segueing isn't it. Trying to shift
the focus. Students who are like Will Hunting?
GVS: Well, yeah. Essentially. But I guess you got out of that type of class,
because you started out teaching in a more advanced writing kind of graduate
situation and then you went to teaching more of a literature 101.
DFW: (noncommittal) Yeah. What's great about under grad classes and especially
in the Midwest is that you'll get kids who are talented and the ones who
are educated are almost always autodidacts like Hunting simply because public
education in the Midwest isn't very sophisticated and so the kids who can
write, write naturally, really sort of out of themselves so when you discover
them you're really discovering something. You're not just checking off on
a superstar student who was admitted through a highly selective process.
The best under grad writing student I've had was this girl. I met her when
she was 18, she had a three year old kid. She is from a little town, trailer
park, got knocked up at fifteen and was reading "Middlemarch"
on the bus trying to go to the welfare office to get her bottle of milk
subsidy from the Government agency (Hindu music). You know and she didn't...anything
she knew she taught herself. And you find these kids, and it really is one
of those rare moments where you understand why teaching is this incredibly
magical profession because you get to be the voice of authority that gets
to say nice things instead of mean things and wake them up to the fact that
they're brilliant (more Hindu music). You know this girl's now going to
the Iowa Writers Workshop, and this is one of two or three magical stories
that I've had since I started here. But that's why I prefer the undergrads
to the grads.
GVS: What has she ended up doing?
DFW: Well she ended up doing fiction writing which actually I had dissuaded
her from. I think that she is a much better critic than a fiction writer
but she's gotten accepted at Iowa and she's going next year and Iowa is
probably the MIT of creative writing (music). Not that that happens all
the time but when it does and you're the first to actually see it, it's
another reason why I really vibed well with the movie, I kinda understood,
you know, why his testicles drew up when he saw that answer to the equation
on the board and realized who had written it. And just the fact the writers
of the screenplay are two kids that young who could also recreate the textures
of blue collar Boston you know which I lived in for three years. They have
got the Boston bonehead culture down perfectly -- and can also realize how
a teacher would feel upon making a discovery, I thought it was really rather
remarkable. The film-goer cap is doffed. I hope they don't just start being
in big-budget action movies and spend all their time at the gym and retreats
making...
GVS: Me too.
DFW: ...hundred million dollar salaried plastic product. There was about
a year when "Infinite Jest" came out and I was finishing the last
thing of the book of essays, and then there were all the errors in "Infinite
Jest" to correct from the hardcover and then there was the copy editing
for the essay book and there were also the first serious reading tours that
I did for both books for about a year. The only writing that I did was like
on airplanes and it's all like tiny little weird fragments and uh, yeah
I've been doing some stuff that's not really sort of -- straightfoward.
I don't know where it's going as much as I normally do but that seems like
it's all right. Everything's kind of winding down now and there was this
last little tour for the paperback and the essays and then there will descend
a great silence.
GVS: Which is important right?
DFW: Well, I think to be honest, when you haven't had much attention, ever,
and you get a lot of attention, there are things about it that are nice
and the more juvenile parts of me are going to miss (Gus laughs). But there's
also a lot of just absolutely unavoidable fakiness and bullshit which I'll
bet you have seen and I'm not looking forward to that.
GVS: Can you work on the road?
DFW: Well, it's probably the same for you -- there's all kinds of signifiers.
GVS: You're absorbing stuff on the road.
DFW: I mean I can work... it's probably not an accident the next book that
I will finish will be a book of short stuff, some of which is very very
very short and I guess I've sort of been in a position where I've had to
do really short things for a while. I don't see being able to do anything
long while traveling a lot simply because -- it's gotta be somewhat like
making a film -- at a certain point you've just got to develop a momentum
and the thing's got to be worked on until it's done and you can't really
take three weeks off and go do something else and then come back to it.
So I don't know. What's the next thing for you? You probably've already
shot something else by now.
GVS: I want to write a book.
DFW: Do we know what we... Jesus, you've got a lot more direction than I
do. What are you going to do?
GVS: I've been working on something for about a year. It's about a Romanian
kid who flees the Ceaucescu regime in the 80s for the States and becomes
an American Dead Head and goes on tour. It's mostly about the character
and the people that he runs into and it does have the tour as something
that he drifts in and out of. Actually he gets... there's this Romanian
family he is part of and his father is an animator who animates with wooden
dowels, these animated puppets. And he is a famous animator in America but
he'd started off as an industrial designer in Romania. And when they come
over, his real father, as it turns out is an importer of large quantities
of marijuana that he brings in from Asia.
DFW: How do you know all this stuff before you're done with the thing?
GVS: I've mapped it out. I've been writing different chapters. I haven't
filled it all out but I've been bouncing from one part of it to another.
You know I don't know if this is actually how it will end up... but...
DFW: See this always happens whenever I talk to somebody else who's writing,
suddenly I feel this incredible wave of self-loathing.
GVS: (laughs) Oh-no. How come?
DFW: Well because when you're not making really good movies, then with your
left hand you're...
GVS: But I'm a very begining writer.
DFW: Yeah, well.
GVS: Who are some of your favorite writers?
DFW: You're really wielding the old baton on this aren't you? To be honest...
my faves?
GVS: Yeah.
DFW: Ones that people don't know all that well? Oh, that's right this is
a British magazine so they won't have heard of a lot of these. Cormac McCarthy,
have you read "Blood Meridian"? It's literally the western to
end all westerns. Probably the most horrifying book of this century, at
least fiction. But it is also, this guy, I can't figure out he gets away
with it, he basically writes King James English, I mean, he practically
uses Old English thou's and thine's and it comes off absolutely beautifully
and unmannered and ungratuitous. He's got another one called "Suttree,"
God that one, God that would make a fantastic movie.
GVS: (perks up) What's it called?
DFW: It's called "Suttree."
GVS: How do you spell that?
DFW: S-u-t-t-r-e-e. It came out, oh golly, mid 70s. But it's about a down
and out college educated man named Cornelius Suttree who has kind of abandoned
everything to live in a houseboat in Knoxville, Tennessee in the late 40s
and early 50s and all of his friends in his entire world are derelicts and
retards and twisted people. It's about four hundred pages of the most dense
lapidary prose you can imagine about characters who are at the level of
functional idiots and are drinking rot-gut. "Suttree" is the book
that got him a MacArthur grant and he used the MacArthur to go to Mexico
and do the research for "Blood Meridian." Okay, we'll play. Are
there any new movies coming out that you like?
GVS: I just saw Michael Moore's film "The Big One" -- I liked
that quite a bit.
DFW: Have you seen "The Big Lebowski"?
GVS: I did see that, and I liked it a lot. There have been those that don't
think that it stands up to "Fargo," but there you go. People have
their opinions, and that's OK.
DFW: Their movies are really smart but they ride or fall on their characterizations.
"Fargo" had Frances McDormand who was fantastic. And "Miller's
Crossing" had Gabriel Byrne in far and away his best role. ...I'm going
to have to wind up here soon.
GVS: ...OK...
DFW: ...do something about these dogs and let them outside or they're going
to...
GVS: Okay. I'm totally done.
DFW: Something tells me, Gus, that when you start transcribing that you
aren't going to want to transcribe all this... and not to sound cheesy but
good luck at the Oscar ceremony.
GVS: Thanks.
DFW: Anyway. Thanks very much, and thanks, Dazed & Confused.
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GUS VAN SANT
Biography by Mike Fordham
His first feature film, made for only $35,000, was "Mala Noche,"
a raw and elliptical tale of obsession and unrequited love. It became evident
with his second film, "Drugstore Cowboy," that Gus Van Sant had
style, and with his third, "My Own Private Idaho," that he had
substance.
Van Sant became, if not one of the very few voices of gay cinema to cross
over into the mainstream, certainly the most audible one. "Even Cowgirls
Get the Blues," Van Sant's next cinematic venture, was probably his
most poorly judged. The adaptation of Tom Robbins' novel became lodged in
a post-production impasse, and finally received a less than lukewarm response
on release. Van Sant's first studio picture, "To Die For," was
a return to form, an acid-sharp look at the media and the nature of success.
"Good Will Hunting" star Matt Damon auditioned for the part of
Nicole Kidman's schoolboy lover, and although he didn't get the role (he
was too "all-American"), Van Sant kept in touch with him. He faced
competition for both Damon and Affleck's Oscar-winning script from Robert
Redford and Sidney Pollack, but secured "Good Will Hunting" nonetheless.
Van Sant has faced accusations of selling out ever since the commercial
success of "To Die For" and this is to some extent the topic of
his first novel, "Pink," published last year. The most experimental
and obviously autobiographical piece of work he has done in any medium for
a while, the book's protagonist is a middle-aged infomercial director who
is mourning the death of a young actor. It doesn't take much imagination
to see that the actor is based on River Phoenix. Van Sant has also ventured
into music, releasing two records over the last year. His next film project
will be the direction of a music video for the band Hanson.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
Biography by Nicky Wise
In the mid-to-late 80s it was Jay McInerney, Tama Jamowitz and Bret Easton
Ellis who cultivated hardcore literature into a fashion accessory. But there
remained a void in the market, as there always is, for a writer of enough
weight to entirely encapsulate the gestations of this generation without
needing to be worn on its sleeves. After the enormous and diverse wakes
created by the IQ contents and tangents of DeLillo and Pynchon novels, it
was difficult to imagine what was left to tackle. Until David Wallace's
"Infinite Jest." Published in 1996, it is a 1000-page comic tome
considering substance abuse, dysfunctional families and tennis against a
post-millennial backdrop. Behind the center story of three brothers -- a
sex-craving football fan, a clever tennis prodigy and a dwarf -- who are
trying to deal with the suicide of their father, is a vast non-linear structure
of tangential riffs that seem to gel into a vision of collective and individual
psychic meltdown. Wallace's two previous books, "The Broom of the System"
(1987) -- a tale of a switchboard operator's search for love -- and "Girl
with Curious Hair" (1989) -- a follow-up volume of short stories --
hinted at his potential genius.
Son of a philosophy professor and an English teacher, he spent his childhood
playing tennis and listening to his parents recite Joyce's "Ulysses"
and seemed to be set for a career as a professional philosopher. But Wallace
chose fiction and his senior thesis at Amherst College in Massachusetts
became the first rough chunk of "The Broom of the System." After
graduating he attended a creative writing programme at the University of
Arizona and soon had a contract with Viking Penguin. Thus began a period
of self doubt and abuse as Wallace took up excessive drinking, drugs, promiscuity
and suicidal tendancies in keeping with what he thought was the lifestyle
of a serious writer. Sourcing the tennis references for "Infinite Jest"
from his youth, this period definitely fuelled his other subject areas of
addiction and depression. Halting his descent in 1990 for a straighter existence,
he moved to Normal, Illinois taking a job as an associate professor at the
college. He bought a middle-class home and adopted two labradors called
Jeeves and Drone. Wallace's latest work is called "A Supposedly Fun
Thing I'll Never Do Again -- essays and arguments." After moving to
Bloomington, Illinois, he is currently working on a volume of short stories.
© 1998 Dazed & Confused
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