“I guess I’m interested in sociopathic people,” he has stated, “in life and in my movies”. With art school training in painting as well as film, Van Sant worked in commercials before entering the film industry by making small personal films that played the festival circuit, notably in highbrow gay and lesbian venues. Openly gay, he has dealt unflinchingly with homosexual and other marginalized subcultures without being particularly concerned about providing positive role models. Van Sant’s first feature was “Mala Noche” (1986), a dreamy black-and-white rumination on the doomed relationship between a teen Mexican migrant worker and a liquor-store clerk. Made for about $25,000, the film won a Los Angeles Film Critics Award as the best independent/experimental film of 1987. “Drugstore Cowboy” (1989) chronicled the exploits of a rootless druggie (Matt Dillon) and his “crew” who survive by robbing West Coast pharmacies. Lyrically shot, and boasting superb performances from Dillon and co-star Kelly Lynch, the film marked Van Sant as a director of considerable promise.

Van Sant’s 1991 feature, “My Own Private Idaho”, based on his first original screenplay, starred River Phoenix as a narcoleptic male prostitute whose search for home and family takes him from Portland, OR, to such disparate locales as Idaho and Italy. Keanu Reeves plays his well-heeled companion of the streets and son of the local mayor who, like Shakespeare’s Prince Hal, goes slumming amongst the low-lifes before reclaiming his place in society. Unified by poetic visual imagery, the film combines a less than entirely successful contemporary retelling of the Bard’s “Henry IV” with a harsh, unsentimental and nonjudgmental look at the lives of hustlers.

The trades buzzed that Van Sant would make his Hollywood studio debut as the helmer of “The Mayor of Castro Street”, based on Randy Shilts’ book about San Francisco’s assassinated, openly gay city supervisor Harvey Milk. Oliver Stone was set to produce and Robin Williams reportedly wanted the lead. The project eventually fell apart due to the creative differences between Van Sant and Stone over the screenplay.

Van Sant returned to familiar territory–another indie road picture centering on an outsider (budgeted at $7.5 million), “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” (1994). Adapted from Tom Robbins’ 1976 cult novel about a young woman whose outsized thumbs make her a formidable hitchhiker, “Cowgirls” was highly anticipated after the attention-getting success of the writer-director’s preceding two features. The film was reportedly rushed through editing to be ready for the international film festivals. After “underwhelming” audience response at the 1994 Toronto Film Festival opening night screening, “Cowgirls” was returned to the editing room for extensive recutting. (Van Sant has denied the rumors that reshooting was required.) Nonetheless, the final product was deemed a tedious bore, top heavy with would-be quirky characters. It fizzled with both critics and audiences.

The debacle of “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” could have derailed Van Sant’s career had he not already committed to helming “To Die For” (1995), his first major studio project, before the release of “Cowgirls”. The medium budget satire also marked the first time Van Sant directed a film without receiving a screenplay credit. Scripted by Hollywood veteran Buck Henry, “To Die For” was inspired by the true story of a high-school teacher who seduced her teenage lover into murdering her husband. A modest commercial success, the film was a critical hit for everyone involved, particularly its star Nicole Kidman who portrayed the media-obsessed careerist who romances Joaquin Phoenix into murdering Matt Dillon. Some demurred from the consensus, dismissing the critique of American media as facile and Kidman’s characterization as misogynistic. However, most were impressed by Van Sant’s empathetic handling of the alienated teen characters.

That same year, Van Sant served as executive producer on one of the more controversial films of 1995–Larry Clark’s “Kids”, a ‘verite’-styled drama about the sex and drug habits of a group of middle-class Manhattan teens. Some found the work profound, while others found it profoundly troubling for its “exploitive” use of young actors (though the filmmakers maintain that all actors shown simulating drug-taking and copulation were at least 18). Van Sant’s favored cinematographer Eric Edwards (”Mala Noche”, “Drugstore Cowboy”, “My Own Private Idaho”) lensed the visually striking feature.

As a follow-up, Van Sant returned to the director’s chair to guide “Good Will Hunting” (1997), about an underachiever (Matt Damon) on the road to self-destruction who finds unlikely aid from several people, including a therapist (Robin Williams) and his best friend (Ben Affleck). Written by Damon and Affleck, the film is well-crafted, but somewhat predictable. Van Sant’s sure-handed direction and authentic sense of place (it is set in Cambridge, MA) overcome whatever deficiencies and he elicited strong performances from the cast. While “Good Will Hunting” might seem an unlikely choice for the director, its themes of outsiders struggling to connect to the mainstream place it squarely in his oeuvre. The feature’s success moved Van Sant toward mainstream Hollywood.

Since 1984, Van Sant has been making an annual, autobiographical short film that he ultimately plans to assemble into a cinematic diary; Van Sant also paints, plays guitar and writes for his own Portland rock band, “Destroy All Blondes.”

Many Barker fans had already guessed this from some of the themes that reoccur in his work.

He writes:

“As a gay writer/filmmaker, I think it’s inevitable that some of my characters and situations echo my orientation. It is, however, a problem to push these elements as far as I would like. By and large, the horror audience is curiously conservative when it comes to erotic matters.”

Naturally, however, Barker is a little too complex to be so easily defined. He also writes:

“I define myself as a gay man who’s had relationships with women. [...] I am bound, by political reasons much than anything else, [to] say, well, I’m a gay author. And, I’m very happy to be identified that way. Proud to be identified that way. Is it a simplification? Yes. Is it a politically useful simplification right now? I suspect it is. I suspect it’s important to say that right now. Not because I have a boyfriend and he’d be really pissed off if I didn’t… but, I also think it’s important to say, get over it.”

Clive Barker was born near Penny Lanes, Liverpool in 1952. After attending junior school in that city, he entered Liverpool University to study English Literature and Philosophy. At twenty-one, Clive moved to London. There he formed a theater company to perform the plays that he was writing and worked in that medium throughout his twenties as a writer, director, and actor. Many of these early plays contained the fantastical, erotic and horrific elements that would later become part of his literary work. They include: History of the Devil, Frankenstein in Love, Subtle Bodies, The Secret Life of Cartoons, and a play about his favorite painter, Goya, entitled Colossus. HarperPrism has put together The History of the Devil, Frankenstein In Love, and Colossus in a collection entitled Incarnations.

The imaginative qualities that were such a fundamental part of Clive’s theatrical work found their first literary outlet in the short fiction to which he turned in his late twenties. The first published examples of these tales are Book of Blood, Volumes 1-3. They saw only modest success in the U.K., but with the publication of the book in the United States and the appearance of his first novel, The Damnation Game, he began to find favor with readers and critics alike.

Three more volumes followed, published in the U.K. as the Book of Blood, Volumes 4-6, and retitled in America as The Inhuman Condition, In the Flesh, and Cabal. By this point many of his books were finding their ways into translation, and now appear in over a dozen language.

In 1987, following the adaptation of two of his stories for the movies (Rawhead Rex and Transmutations, both of which he disliked), he decided to direct something himself. The result was Hellraiser, based on a novella called The Hellbound Heart. The film developed a cult following and has since spawned several lines of comic books as well as three movies sequels: Hellbound: Hellraiser 2 (directed by Tony Randal), Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (directed by Tony Hickox) and Hellraiser: Bloodline. Subsequently, Clive adapted his short story Cabal into Nightbreed, which he also directed.

After the publication of the novels Weaveworld and The Great and Secret Show, several Barker-related publications appeared: graphic art adaptations of his short story called “Tapping the Vein” and two large format covering his art work called Clive Barker: Illustrator, Volume I and II.

The epic fantasy novel Imajica followed, then an illustrated children’s fable called The Thief of Always, a line of superhero comics for Marvel called “Razorline”, and a one-man art show at the Bess Cutler Gallery in New York where his work is still being displayed.

Clive has served as Executive Producer on the film Candyman (directed by Bernard Rose) which was based on his short story, “The Forbidden” and on Candyman 2: Farewell to the Flesh (directed by Bill Condon).

Most recent, Clive published Galilee, Everville, the sequel novel to The Great and Secret Show, Second Book of the Art, and Sacrament, a dark fantasy for all ages. His most recent film project was Lord of Illusions, which he wrote, directed and co-produced. Projects currently in development are: an animated feature based on The Thief of Always, a mini-series Weaveworld, and an interactive computer game called Extosphere.

Though Clive has moved to Los Angeles and is now involved with several projects for both the large and small screen, his first love remains books. He number amongst his literary influences the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Ray Bradbury, Herman Meville, William Blake, Will Burroughs, Arthur Machen and both the old and new testaments.

About himself, Clive writes: “My enthusiasm as an artist is rooted not in any particular medium, but in the act of imagig. My books, films, drawings and plays, thought they may seem to be very disparate in content, are still mapping out different parts of the same landscape: that is to say, the world between my ears, I am motivated to write or paint by the images and scenes which arise from my subconscious, without invitation, which seems on closer inspection to dramatize elements of my deeper self.

I am a Jungian, not a Freudian. I believe that a collective unconscious–a pool of shared images and stories which all humanity is heir to–exist, and the artist dealing in the fantastique is uniquely placed, in that he or she can create stories or paintings which dramatize the eruption of the unconscious into our day to day lives.

I’ve pointed out many times that we spend one-third of our lives asleep. During the adventure of dreaming, we are making both a private investigations into our hopes and fears and also swimming in the dream pool, which we share with the rest of our species.

I hope that the fiction I write will empower us to both comprehend our secret dream selves and understand the profound intimacy we share with every other human being.”