Self-proclaimed macho man James Cameron may be the favourite to pick up the statuette for Best Director at next month's Oscar ceremonies, but some of us will be rooting for a Portland, Oregon-based film-maker who has made some of the most strikingly original films of the last decade, and who, until now, didn't seem a likely candidate for acclaim by the Hollywood establishment. Gus Van Sant's previous films, such as Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho, have often dealt with the kind of marginal subcultures - drug addicts and male prostitutes respectively - that are unlikely to appeal to the elderly, conservative voters of the Academy, while his last film, the brilliant, black comedy To Die For, was far too spiky a satire on the media's obsession with fame.
But Good Will Hunting, with a screenplay written by its two young stars, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, is a different kettle of fish, a huge critical and commercial hit in the US which has received nine Academy Award nominations. On paper, the film looks like one of those overly squishy heartwarmers of the Dead Poets Society or Awakenings breed, particularly given the presence of Robin Williams as the sensitive psychologist who helps disturbed young genius Damon to come to terms with himself, but in fact, the script and Van Sant's deeply impressive direction both manage to be deeply moving without ever lapsing into sentimentality. It's a bravura piece of film-making that has brought Van Sant into the mainstream without sacrificing any of the qualities that have made him one of America's most respected independent directors.
The softly-spoken Van Sant acknowledges that he knew the screenplay had hit-potential the moment he saw it. "The reason I wanted to do this screenplay so badly was because I reacted so strongly to the material, but we knew we had some kind of chance of attracting Oscar nominations, although we weren't thinking we would get so many. I figured if it had that effect on me, then it would happen to everybody. It wasn't really conscious, but the script always had that potential, of attracting that sort of mainstream attention and having popular appeal."
He admits happily that this is his most unabashedly populist film to date. "Not that I thought of the others as being for an exclusive audience, but I never expected them to be over-the-top successful. I think they're good films, but this was something I'd never tried before.
"I'd made five movies without making the kind of optimistic statement that could attract great box office. This is the kind of movie that Sidney Lumet might make, or that mainstream Hollywood might make."
Damon and Affleck were struggling unknowns when they sat down to write Good Will Hunting as a vehicle to demonstrate their acting abilities, planning to make it as a low-budget feature, but the screenplay soon attracted serious interest in Hollywood, which caused its own pressures, Van Sant explains. "They were young first-time writers, their exposure in the industry was limited, and they met a lot of people who were interested in doing the project. They really just wanted it to happen, so long as they were able to be on camera and do their roles. But when a bigger company bought the script, and reckoned they really needed someone like Brad Pitt to play Will, Matt and Ben insisted they should play the characters to the point where they jeopardised their own involvement. Investors don't like betting a lot of money on unknown actors, so they offered them a deal. They gave them two months to see if someone else would pick up the project with them attached, and they managed to do that, thankfully.
"Matt and Ben felt they had the ability to do a better job than anyone else, and I was really pleased that it happened that way in the end. It was a benefit to me, because it's not something I often get to do - people always want famous names, but in this case the requirement was just to cast these two guys."
Set mostly in the Irish-American enclave of South Boston, Good Will Hunting contrasts the blue-collar world of Will's upbringing with the rarified environment of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "South Boston is a neighbourhood that's very enclosed, both geographically and psychologically, and where we were shooting there were still a lot of first-generation young Irish guys. It seemed the people there were still very connected to Ireland. It's a place that's kept to itself for generations, and it's referred to as an Irish ghetto. It's better off now than it used to be, but it's very tightly knit and clannish. The outside world is suspect.
"Ben and Matt, who are from Cambridge, Massachussetts, brought me into a bar there and it's not like Ireland, which I haven't been to but which my friends have told me is very friendly. In South Boston, we were tolerated, but we were obviously outsiders who didn't know their place. You should tell me if I'm incorrect, but my little theory is that the Irish had been beaten down by Britain for so long that this sort of insular behaviour was conditioned."
For whatever reason, Irish-American identity seems much less defined in cinematic terms than that of other ethnic groups such as Jews or Italians. Van Sant's depiction of that world is convincing without labouring the point. He agrees that in most parts of the US, "Irishness" has become blurred into invisibilty in the melting pot. "But not in a community like South Boston - probably because that was the first place before people moved on to Philadelphia or wherever. I don't know of that many other Irish communities like that, but I do know that Matt Dillon is very Irish, with a large extended family that is identifiably Irish in a prototypical kind of a way."
Good Will Hunting may mark a move towards the mainstream for Van Sant, but many of the film's themes, its characters and predicaments, recall his earlier works, in particular their acutely perceptive depiction of disadvantaged young men on the cusp of adulthood. "I suppose I emotionally identify with marginalised young men, maybe as an artist and as a gay man myself. When I was a younger member of the film-making community, it was hard to find out where you wanted to get to, or even how to get a job. Also, when I was growing up my family moved around a lot, and I had a lot of different homes, so the idea of your home base changing all the time meant that I always had this feeling of uncertainty, which comes through in the characters in my films."
Since shooting the film, Damon in particular has become one of Hollywood's hottest young properties, starring in Francis Ford Coppola's The Rainmaker and Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, and is in contention for two Oscars (Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay) for Good Will Hunting. "That's the most fun of all, to have your unknowns become famous, which is my favourite part of movies, seeing these actors coming from nowhere."
However, he agrees that one of the remarkable things about his earlier films is the opportunities they have given to relatively established actors such as River Phoenix, Matt Dillon and Nicole Kidman to give the best performances of their careers. "Part of what's good about all of those performances is that they're doing unexpected things. River is very strange in My Own Private Idaho, he's doing things he didn't do in other movies. In Drugstore Cowboy, Matt is talking all the time, whereas he had been given very limited dialogue up until then. It wasn't like he couldn't do it, it's just people hadn't seen it before. Nicole was playing this sociopathic woman, which is unusual for her or any actress of stature, playing an evil person. But having someone who is unknown play a breakthrough role can be fascinating, too."
Good Will Hunting opens nationwide next Friday