Mystery and Memory

Director Gus Van Sant reflects on the making of his 2005 film Last Days

When the world learned of Kurt Cobain’s death on April 5 1994, fans and media alike struggled to make sense of the loss. The lead singer of American rock band Nirvana, Cobain had left an indelible mark on music culture, his name and image emblematic not only of grunge and anti-establishment ethos birthed from the Pacific Northwest, but of the greater fabric of Generation X. Now, he was gone. Discovered in his Seattle, Washington home with a shotgun across his body, Cobain, forensics would determine, had died by suicide three days earlier. It was these three days, largely unaccounted for, that served as inspiration for American film director Gus Van Sant, whose film Last Days, loosely based on Cobain’s death, was released on HBO in 2005.

‘When Kurt died, there were a bunch of different mysteries,’ says Van Sant over a Zoom call in August, ahead of rehearsals for the world premiere of composer Oliver Leith and librettist, art director and co-director Matt Copson’s adaptation at the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Theatre. (Though he’s not had any direct involvement on the Linbury production, Van Sant offers insight into his own inspiration for the film – and the opera’s source material.) One of the mysteries, Van Sant continues, was ‘what happened in the last three days of his life. These days were pretty much missing. And so it was attractive to me to try and improvise what those three days may have been like.’

Last Days is the final instalment of Van Sant’s ‘Death Trilogy,’ which also includes Gerry (2002), about two men – each named Gerry – who get lost in a desert, one eventually killing the other, and Elephant (2003), about a high school shooting that takes place across a seemingly normal day in the suburbs of Portland, Oregon. Like Last Days, which follows musician Blake (Michael Pitt) in the final moments of his life, Gerry and Elephant draw inspiration from real-life events, the former from a news item Matt Damon (one of the Gerrys) had read, and the latter from the 1999 Columbine High School massacre. Thematically bound by death, the films mark, also, a stylistic shift for Van Sant, who had earned commercial recognition previously with Drugstore Cowboy (1989), My Own Private Idaho (1991) and Good Will Hunting (1997).

Rather than genuflect to the Hollywood institution, the trilogy follows a Slow Cinema approach; long takes, minimal dialogue and non-professional actors appear across the films, with little narrative thread. ‘There was this idea of Slow Cinema,’ explains Van Sant, invoking European filmmakers Béla Tarr and Chantal Akerman, both of whom served as inspiration for the trilogy. (Much of Last Days’s camerawork is informed by Akerman’s 1975 landmark Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, on domestic anxiety.) But ‘I didn't think of [Last Days] so much as slow, more just leaving in the parts that are more arduous.’

A story like Cobain’s can easily become a vehicle for sensationalism. ‘There was just this avalanche of press,’ says Van Sant, recalling the aftermath of the death. ‘So many people were analysing what happened. So many people were writing about it. Newspapers, magazines – and people were making small documentaries.’ In this, he saw room for dramatic interpretation. ‘There was a moment where I thought maybe I should do more of a biopic version,’ says Van Sant, who consulted with Cobain's widow Courtney Love, of the rock band Hole, during film development. He cites familiar musician biopic fodder: arguments within the band, changing drummers. ‘You know, all the traditional things. But it didn't come out that way.’ Instead, what emerges is a meditation on isolation, on silence amidst noise and on, indeed, mystery. ‘I did actually think it was going to be more specific and more realistic, and not as dreamy as it turned out.’

It’s not just the mystery of the death – which, as Van Sant explains, became mired in various anecdotal accounts (from the private investigator Love had hired to locate Cobain during his final days, who then blogged about his experience, to people who had spotted him ‘on a park bench, at a rock show’ days earlier), but the mystery of the man himself. ‘I knew him a bit,’ says Van Sant, who was first introduced to Cobain in 1991, at a fundraising event in Oregon in support of gay rights. ‘It was definitely interesting to meet him – he was a legend.’ But, he continues, ‘It was during a period of his life where he was very quiet. Extremely quiet.’

Paradoxes like these – a rock star on top of the world, surrounded by fame and all the same alone, apathetic to the noise – also define Cobain’s legacy. ‘With Last Days we are getting into the interior monologue and feelings of the character who would be a Kurt-like character,’ says Van Sant. But with little dialogue to reflect this interior monologue (Blake mumbles to himself for most of the film – a quality maintained in Leith and Copson's operatic adaption), Van Sant turned, instead, to his environment. He invokes decay – the physical decay of a house, specifically – as a kind of metaphor. ‘I visited the house that Kurt and Courtney owned in Seattle. And it was a beautiful house built, I think, around 1900 or 1905. I had owned a house in Portland that was built in that same period, which is where I was originally going to shoot [Last Days]. And yet, as we got closer to shooting, none of these houses in the Northwest, even the biggest and grandest and oldest houses, were as representational [of the aesthetic we wanted] as the houses on the East Coast.’ Among those he scouted in Upstate New York, Castle Rock estate, where filming eventually took place, stood out. Isolated atop a hill amidst overgrown nature, it’s a house marked by neglect: paint flakes from the wall, floorboards creak from wear. ‘There were lots of very big old houses that were kind of still standing,’ Van Sant recalls. ‘Some of them were in different states of disrepair, which represented something that we felt was in the interior monologue of the character.’

Nearly 20 years have passed since Last Days was released, and Van Sant admits he hasn’t watched the film for some time. ‘I’ll have to see it [again],’ he laughs. ‘I literally haven't seen it – probably for 10 years.’ Still, the legacy of Nirvana, and of Cobain, endures – for those that knew him, admired him, loved him and mourned him. Van Sant, too, remembers. ‘I was travelling around England to do press for a film – I can't remember which, I guess it must have been To Die For – and pretty much everyone was wanting to hear about Nirvana. Not about my movie – just about the music culture in Seattle and what was going on. It was so, so important at that time. And it was such a large thing.’ He pauses. ‘And then, very quickly, [Kurt] was gone. It was only a few years. It was like the prototype of rock star, including the end.’