“We had the students talking about violence from the very beginning and we found that the violence in their world was a running high school joke.”Nevertheless, when it comes to the film’s bloody climax, Van Sant does everything he can not to exploit it. He decided that he wanted to use actual high school kids rather than professionnal actors. From the casting, he then developed the characters with the kids, listening to their experiences of being at school and their feelings towards what happened at Columbine.”Their opinions informed my view, but I don’t know if they changed it,” says Van Sant. “Mostly Satantango by Bela Tarr and Chantal Ackerman’s Jeanne Dielman – films that play with pacing and time.”When it came time to shoot, Van Sant was so energised by the loose, improvisational technique he had used on Gerry, that he chose to ditch the original script and make Elephant the same way.

“Elephant was, um, just the way we identified what we were supposed to be doing,” recalls Van Sant slowly. “It was, um, an interpretation of events that described the violence that happened as opposed to the literal thing itself.”In fact, Van Sant didn’t even watch Clarke’s film until much later, eventually discovering he had misconstrued the British director’s reason for calling his film Elephant. Van Sant thought the name came from an ancient Buddhist parable about a group of blind men and an elephant: the men each examine different parts of the beast – trunk, tail, ear etc – individually coming up with a different understanding of the animal that they each believe is true; none recognises the whole. But later, Van Sant read a quote from Clarke explaining that he was actually referring to the notion of the elephant in the living room: the problem that everyone knows about, but nobody wants to deal with.”But when I did see Clarke’s Elephant, there were things in it that were similar to some of the films I had been very influenced by of late,” Van Sant goes on to acknowledge.

In many ways his approach is more like a documentarist – beginning with a subject and willing to take anything that happens on board.Elephant is a perfect example. When Van Sant first pitched the idea of doing a film about Columbine to producers HBO, they said no, they couldn’t make Columbine – it was too obvious – but they could make Elephant, referring to the late British film-maker Alan Clarke’s television film of the same name which detailed a succession of shootings in Northern Ireland without any context, condemnation or attempted justification.Van Sant had never seen Clarke’s Elephant but he knew it was the favourite film of his friend Harmony Korine (writer of Kids and director of Gummo) The pair began work on a script. I’m less prepared for his evident discomfort in talking about his work.It takes very little time in his company to realise that Van Sant is not a “question and answer kinda guy”. He listens thoughtfully enough, looks constantly for clarification of the question, then struggles to muster a coherent response “Um,” he proffers a great deal “I don’t know… I guess…”It quickly becomes clear that such interrogation of his motives is anathema to this director: his method is to feel his way through themes and ideas, without any preconceptions, without any decision as to what the outcome might be.If it at times makes him an infuriatingly opaque interviewee, it also makes him an extremely flexible and adaptable film-maker. Time in Van Sant’s hands is elastic, speeding up and slowing down in reaction to the temperature of the characters’ moods. The soundtrack, too, is phenomenal, tuning in and out of conversations, turning up the personal, internal soundtracks teenagers play in their heads.He captures brilliantly the vibrancy of adolescence, that feeling that the tiniest gesture holds huge significance, that every moment could be the one that changes you forever.Van Sant’s natural empathy with teenagers has long been evident in his films so I’m not surprised to meet a man who looks more youthful than his 50 years.