Interview

GVS: Yeah, definitely. Harvey's relationship with Scott was his most established relationship. When Harvey died, it was as if Scott just said, "Okay, well, I was basically the main boyfriend." So Scott took over the responsibility of being the Widow Milk. He called himself the Widow Milk.

JF: Did Scott come up with that?

GVS: Yeah, I think he came up with that.

JF: I know that you're supposed to be interviewing me, but I'm going to interview you a little bit. When River interviewed you, he would ask you questions about how you felt when you were filming a particular scene and stuff like that.

GVS: He would ask really specific questions like "What's your favorite color?"

JF: Didn't he have a list of questions at the end?

GVS: He had some kind of list.

JF: He had some weird questions. He actually asked you one about the scene where the barn falls on the road in My Own Private Idaho. That was an important image to you when you were painting.

GVS: It was a house. I used to do paintings of this house-I mean, it was sort of toward the end of my painting career. It was a house that had a red roof and it was crashing, not on a road, but into the ground. Then there was this collage I made of objects floating above the road. There was a stewardess and a viola and a pilot-you know, I was cutting them out of these advertisements.

JF: Well, you went back to painting, and one of my prize possessions now is a painting that you made and gave to me. I guess there was a book of paintings or drawings [Federico] Fellini did that you said were based on his dreams?

GVS: Yeah, yeah.

JF: And that's kind of how you got back to painting?

GVS: Well, I just recently got that book. What got me back into painting was that Philip Glass had written to me, asking if I wanted him to do the score for a film, but the letter was lost. It was sent to the wrong address, and so the letter was really six months too late. I was planning to write him back, but it had been so long that I felt like I needed to make something to give him as an offering to apologize, so I was making these paintings. I haven't made his painting yet.

JF: So I got Philip Glass's painting . . . [laughs]

GVS: Well, I made a bunch of them, and I never gave him one. But I can make them really fast.

JF: You know, the first time that we met was, like, five years before we even met for Milk. I'm pretty sure it was when you came and saw the play that
I co-wrote called The Ape.

GVS: Yeah.

JF: When we were doing one of the costume fittings for Milk, you brought it up. You were like, "I remember going to see The Ape. What happened to that?" And I was like, "Well, I did make it into a movie . . ." You still haven't seen the movie.

GVS: No, I haven't seen it. The play was a comedy, though. You fell and stuff like that. It was physical comedy.

JF: There was physical comedy-it was basically a guy in an ape mask. But it was very obvious that it was an ape mask, and that's what I liked about it. I had bought this wacky ape mask for something else, and I thought, "Wow, this mask is kind of scary but also kind of funny. We could write a whole play around this mask." The jaw actually moved.

GVS: You did another play about picking up girls with certain-

JF: [laughs] Yeah, well, there were two one-acts, and so it was The Ape and-

GVS: You didn't like that other one?

JF: We wrote the other one, too-me and my writing partner at the time, Merriwether Williams. He wrote for SpongeBob SquarePants. The other play was called Fool's Gold. It was kind of inspired by stories that I had heard at acting school, but then there was also this guy I worked with named Max Martini . . . We worked together on this movie, and he had been, like, Brad Pitt's roommate. I don't know if they had been to acting school together, but he was like, "Yeah, man, I just went to acting school to pick up girls, and we knew which scenes to do"-like the romantic scenes. He said, "You've got to always use Fool for Love by Sam Shepard." But I don't know-it has a great title, but it's not that romantic a play. It's actually kind of incestuous-these people who are in love find out that they're brother and sister . . . So we used that in our play, but I know better scenes if you're really -going to try and pick up a girl.

GVS: Really?

JF: Well, I'm bad with the names of the things, but there's a horrible one that starts out almost like a rape scene. I think Farrah Fawcett did the movie version of it [Extremities, 1986]-it's a scene where the woman turns on her attacker.