Gus Van Sant

Van Sant began in Portland with Mala Noche in 1987, made for almost nothing, about a convenience store clerk's hopeless infatuation with a young Mexican migrant. Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho followed, and by 1991 he was one of the defining figures of what critics were calling new queer cinema. His films have kept returning to marginalised lives, especially gay ones, and to people the system has already written off.

What he actually does, which is easy to miss underneath the subject matter, is watch. His camera follows people from behind at walking pace, holds long after a conventional director would cut, and refuses to explain anybody. The most rigorous version of that is the run of Gerry, Elephant, Last Days and Paranoid Park: films built out of duration, back-of-the-head shots and non-professional casts, where meaning is left entirely to the viewer. The awards on record for him are a Palme d'Or and a Cannes best director prize.

Running alongside is the studio track, and it is a genuinely different filmmaker: Good Will Hunting, Finding Forrester, Promised Land, and Milk, which is the one place where the two halves meet properly. The outlier is the 1998 Psycho, a near shot-for-shot remake that almost nobody defends and that remains far more interesting to argue about than to sit through.

He is also a photographer, painter and musician. Dead Man's Wire is due in 2026.