Last days: it's been more than a decade since Kurt Cobain ended his own life with a shotgun blast. Now, with a new film inspired by the risky rocker's waning days, director Gus Van Sant delves headlong into a cultural obsession that refuses to die

Interview, August, 2005 by Thurston Moore

More than a decade after his death, Kurt Cobain continues to sit front and center in the arena of popular culture, being the subject of books, gossip, and now inspiration for Last Days, the new film from Gus Van Sant. Here, the director speaks with Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore, longtime collaborator and intimate of Cobain, about the film and the man whose spirit haunts nearly every frame.

THURSTON MOORE: Hey, Gus. Where are you?

GUS VAN SANT: I'm in Portland.

TM: Did you go straight there after the Cannes Film Festival?

GVS: I went to Paris for the week in case we won anything.

TM: Did you win anything?

GVS: Actually, we got a little sound award, which you should get a copy of, because it's the area you're credited for.

TM: The music in Last Days is so great. When I first heard it I kept thinking, This is exactly the kind of music I would have wanted to do for this film. But most people who see the film have the impression that it is me, because I'm the music consultant. I got a lot of people saying, "I really loved the way you used those concrete sounds." And I was like, "No, it's by this composer, Hildegard Westerkamp. I had nothing to do with that." But I wish I had because I think it's completely brilliant.

GVS: We used it in Elephant [2003] as well. It was the same piece but a different part.

TM: That whole genre of music is so exciting--it's the mother lode of avant-garde composition, and there aren't that many people working in film who reference it. I've always been involved with archiving that stuff, and I have this fantasy of working as a music supervisor for films. It's really like a higher-bracket DJ gig. Someone, please give me that gig. [laughs] So, you're having the U.S. premiere of your film in Seattle?

GVS: Yeah, it's going to be, like, 10 blocks away from where the movie is set.

TM: I remember going out to the location in New York and seeing the big dilapidated mansion and thinking, Well, this is astounding-looking. But I didn't really look at it as reflective of the Cobain house, because I wasn't thinking of the film in that way, even though that was an obvious thing in the script--the mysterious last days of Kurt.

GVS: The script was originally going to be more obscure, because the way I thought of it, Mike [Michael Pitt, who plays the role of Blake, the character inspired by Cobain] had shorter hair.

TM: Well, when I read the first draft you sent me, it was more obscure; it was about a character just sort of drifting around. But even when it became more of a story and a film, I still had the sense that it had its own remove from its obvious references. So I'll be curious to hear what kind of feedback you get from the community in Seattle.

GVS: I think it'll be okay. There's one person I've been warned about, though, who did a TV show called, um, Kurt Cobain Was Murdered.

TM: After Kurt died, Kim [Gordon] and I never did interviews about him, so it was really weird for us at Cannes. That's all they wanted to talk about there. In a way, we felt it was a proper forum for us to address certain things about Kurt and his image and how the rest of the world relates to it. I certainly wouldn't want to be involved with any film that exploited Kurt Cobain, and I never really felt this movie did. In fact, this movie was the only one I had seen to address the identity of Kurt with any respect because it's this creative gesture from a person that Kurt really respected. I can't think of any other director he would've had a good feeling about, just due to the nature of your work, even your geography.

GVS: Right, coming from the Northwest.

TM: There's also the whole weird thing about Kim acting in this film, actually approaching the character of Blake. For Kim it was extra heavy because it's like what she would've said to Kurt had she had that interaction at that time. They were very tight, and there were lots of times when Kim would be there, putting her arm around Kurt, saying, "It's going to be okay."

GVS: When would that have been?

TM: During that summer tour through Europe in 1991.

GVS: That was the year they say punk broke. Was that intensity visibly upsetting to him?

TM: We didn't even think about it; we were over there playing these festivals with bands like the Ramones. Nirvana was always at the bottom of the bill, going on at 12 noon. Nevermind [1991] wasn't out yet, so they were just some band from the States that a few kids might have heard of. At the same time, there were heavy-metal and hard-rock festivals throughout Germany with bands like Motley Crue and Guns N' Roses doing versions of "Anarchy in the U.K." This was when you started seeing grunge fashion in high-profile magazines and punkwear on fashion models. So that's when we felt like punk was breaking, but it was sort of a double entendre because it was breaking--it was broken, they broke it, let's get out of here. At that time, I never got any sense of Kurt being sick and doing drugs. I think that all reared its head a little later. Nevermind came out, and then all of a sudden they were big. I think fame and fortune brought in more access.