Interview

JF: The first piece of art that I ever bought-when I could afford it-was a Warhol sketch from the period when he was just getting out of doing commercial work and more into art. It's a sketch of a young guy's face. I guess the gallery that I bought it from thought I would like it because the young guy kind of looked like James Dean. I don't know. But I liked it because it was unusual for Warhol. It was kind of before the silk screens or anything that is really recognizable-it's almost like a fashion drawing, but it's a portrait.

GVS: Yeah, he did a lot of that in that period. I was kind of all set to do the Warhol movie at one time-I even had a financing party. Maybe I'll go back to that someday.

JF: Milk was in the works for a long time, too, right?

GVS: Yeah. And when something takes a long time to happen and you're thinking about it over and over, by the time you do it, all that history becomes part of it.

JF: Now, am I correct in thinking that you always wanted Sean Penn?

GVS: I did offer the role of Harvey Milk to Sean-in '98, I think it was. I thought maybe I could get it going if I got stars connected to it, so I was trying to get Sean Penn to play Harvey Milk, and Tom Cruise to play Dan White [the former city supervisor who assassinated Milk]. But I was kind of a bad producer. I thought because they weren't calling me, they didn't really want to do it. But that's not really the way it works.

JF: And was there any response from Tom Cruise?

GVS: I talked to him on the phone. He was shooting the [Stanley] Kubrick movie Eyes Wide Shut [1999]. At the same time, I flew down to L.A. and had a meeting with Sean. It was just at a weird time in Sean's life where . . . [splashing noise] My dog just jumped into the pool. Could you hear that?

JF: Yeah.

GVS: He is something . . . Anyhow, Sean was going through a period where he was just about to move to San Francisco and he was having a difficult time with his family, so I really needed to be calling him and not, like, hoping that he would call back. At one point, I wanted River to play Cleve Jones [an associate of Milk's who conceived of the AIDS quilt].

JF: Oh, really?

GVS: Yeah. In '93, I guess it was. We actually moved to San Francisco to edit Even Cowgirls Get the Blues [1993] so that I could just be there. I was living in Cleve's house and I was sort of thinking about different things. River and I would talk, you know, like once a week or so, and I kept telling him, "I've got this role for you. It's Cleve Jones." He wasn't as into the Cleve Jones idea as he was the Warhol. It wasn't really the starring role. That was probably what it was-that it wasn't Harvey Milk.

JF: Did you have anybody in mind for my character, Scott Smith, way back when?

GVS: No. I was just trying to get Harvey Milk and Dan White. Once we got those parts cast, we would get things going.

JF: I actually wanted to ask you about the real Scott Smith, because when you first started working on Milk, he was still alive, right? [Smith died in 1995.]

GVS: Yeah, he was.

JF: It was surprisingly hard to find material on him. Even in Randy Shilts's book The Mayor of Castro Street or any of the books on that period, they'll kind of mention him here and there but not give anything substantial about what he was like. Finally, I went to Rob Epstein, who made the documentary on Harvey Milk that Scott's in [The Times of Harvey Milk, 1984] for, like, two seconds, and I asked him if he had any material. Rob had done a pre-interview with Scott for the documentary, so finally I got to hear how he talked and see how he behaved.

GVS: Scott had a Mississippi accent.

JF: Yeah. Slight. He had a little twang. The interview was done something like two years after Harvey was killed. When I played James Dean, I talked to some of his old friends and everybody had a different take on him, and I felt something similar about trying to find out about Scott and his relationship with Harvey. Obviously Harvey was assassinated, and so his life just stopped abruptly. But his relationship with Scott didn't end . . . They were not necessarily a couple when Harvey died, but when something like that happens there are all these loose ends. And with somebody like Harvey who is so important, it's like keeping his memory alive then becomes a major part of a lot of people's lives. It's hard when you're doing a film based on a true story to really figure out what all those relationships were.