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Some films feel like they were made at precisely the right moment in history. They seem to capture the zeitgeist in a way that feels like the most perfect timing: Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968; Richard Linklater's Slacker in 1991; Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction in 1994. Gus Van Sant's new movie, Milk, about the rise and subsequent assassination of the first openly gay man elected to major public office in the United States, is that kind of film. Last month, California's Proposition 8, a bill banning same-sex marriage, was passed in California. It has its cinematic parallel in Van Sant's film with the fight over Proposition 6, which in the 1970s made it lawful to fire anyone suspected of being gay from teaching in a public school. The proposition was defeated, but it showed just how deeply the fears of homosexuality ran.

Van Sant was first attached to a “Harvey Milk” project in the early 1990s, when Oliver Stone hired the filmmaker to direct a film based on Randy Shilts's book, The Mayor of Castro Street. Flush from the success of My Own Private Idaho, Van Sant has just been crowned the new indie darling. He had yet to make his mainstream breakthrough, Good Will Hunting, or his more recent experimental features like Paranoid Park and Elephant.

“They had been through a few different people who had passed on the project, including Stephen Frears,” Van Sant says. “Oliver was really excited about me doing it, and so I started working on it. The script that Oliver had, which was written by David Franzoni [Gladiator], was preoccupied with … the murder of Harvey. It concerned itself a lot with the shooting.” Van Sant was not satisfied with Franzoni's script so he wrote his own.

That film might well have gone into production, since everything seemed in place. “The money was there, Robin [Williams] was ready to do it, there was a script, and there was the director, me. Everyone was saying, ‘Let's go,' but I didn't think the script was ready to go. Oliver's reaction was, just write it while you're shooting it, just keep working on it.” Van Sant opted to drop out of the production. “Then, pretty quickly, the whole thing fell apart.”

The project languished for years, with different actors and directors attached, including most recently, Bryan Singer (X-Men, Superman Returns). Singer's version of The Mayor of Castro Street was still in development when Dustin Lance Black, a young, gay writer who had worked on the HBO Mormon series Big Love, contacted Van Sant a few years back, with a version based on his own painstaking research. “The movie that Lance wrote took a position of seeing the story through Harvey's political work,” Van Sant says. “Lance went to the original sources. He interviewed the same people that were part of the original story, like Michael Wong and Cleve Jones and Anne Kronenberg. They told him their story, and he created this new script.” Van Sant felt that the new script captured just the right tone and focus and he got on board.

But even with Van Sant's cachet, and a relatively modest $20-million (U.S.) budget, he had trouble getting the film made. “We had the script, and we had actors that wanted to do it, but it was really hard to find the money. We had meetings all over town, but people were hesitant,” Van Sant says. “They were nervous about whether it was going to be something that people would want to see.”

Van Sant's film focuses on the last eight years of Milk's life, from the time he left New York and essentially reinvented himself in San Francisco, to his death in 1978 at the hands of Dan White. What attracted Van Sant to the project was not just the chance to tell Harvey Milk's story, but to tell the story of a movement and a community. “The interesting thing to me was the street itself, the Castro, and the way it became a community. The interest was the creation of that street, and [Milk's] involvement in it, being a spokesperson for that street.”

The passion in Milk is built into its script, Van Sant says. “It was pretty emotional when you read the script. You found yourself getting choked up. And pretty much everyone had that reaction. … It's something about them coming together as gay men and women that makes you feel that way. It makes you feel really choked-up and inspired.”

Special to The Globe and Mail