For the Table

As a shy suburbanite too strange for the suburbs, Chloë Sevigny often found herself stealing time. In Darien, a wealthily quiet town off of Connecticut’s Gold Coast, she was but a jagged-edged cog in its machine of domestic homogeneity, but a one-hour train ride away in downtown Manhattan—where the streets were just as reckless as the city’s chaotic, early ’90s energy—she was a girl to be known. And known she was. Amidst passed-out club kids and skaters bulldozing through, she first encountered Harmony Korine in Washington Square Park. The collision not only set off an on-again, off-again love reaction that has waned from fire to friendship, but it also at once launched and cemented her filmic destiny. In 1993, the artist-filmmaker cast her opposite Rosario Dawson in the cult flick Kids, which he wrote, Larry Clark directed, and their friend, the filmmaker Gus Van Sant, produced. Everything changed for all of them afterwards.

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Though Sevigny, 49, never formally met Van Sant until her second Korine collaboration, the 1997 experimental drama Gummo, the two have a shared history. Separated by two decades, Van Sant, 71, too, lived in Darien, although his time on the East Coast was bisected at an early age. The Palme d’Or award winner is a true auteur, having played director, screenwriter, producer, and even editor for films such as My Own Private Idaho, Good Will Hunting, Elephant, and Milk, all of which have shaped our collective consciousness and given us both empathy and heartbreak. Like Sevigny, Van Sant’s practice flows outside of the studio, and his return to painting is just one of the ways the artist continues to probe.

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Thirty years after Kids—and with her own kid now a factor—the pair reunited on set last year for Feud: Capote vs. The Swans. The second season of Ryan Murphy’s anthology series focuses on American writer Truman Capote’s tumultuous relationship with the New York socialites he drew inspiration from. It’s the director’s first TV project. To mark the moment, the longtime friends and collaborators reflect on their intertwined pasts, pause on the present, and make dinner plans for the future.

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Gus Van Sant: I don’t remember where we first met... I think the set of Gummo?
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Chloë Sevigny: You didn’t come to any of the Kids functions?
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GVS: Hmm... I went to the screening at Cannes.
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CS: Oh, they didn’t bring us because they wanted the international film audience to believe that we were still living on the streets and drinking. You know, up to the antics that we were doing in the film. It was part of the marketing. Harmony went to represent us as both our patron saint and punching bag. Why didn’t you come to set?
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GVS: I probably thought that I’d just get in the way; I was always editing To Die For, this movie I was making at the time.
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CS: I’ve heard of it!
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GVS: But I was there on Gummo. I remember the first day you were doing the bunny ears, right?

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CS: Growing up, my father existed outside of Darien’s social circuit; we didn’t have as much money as everybody else. I ended up gravitating towards kids that were children of alcoholics or from divorced homes. My older brother [Paul] was very handsome and popular but also punk. He was a dominating presence in our community, and as far as socializing went, I was kind of non-existent. Weirdly, I felt like that about Harmony. When we first met, Harmony was championed as this genius, and I was just his actress girlfriend. So, I’ve had these men in my life that have been very dominant and charismatic and, you know, heralded, while I’ve been almost like a shadow. It put me in this place where I didn’t necessarily know how to own myself or verbalize what I was into because I didn’t have to. After my father died, my brother and I became very close. During the ’90s and early 2000s, I brought him to basically every film festival with me as kind of a guard. I didn’t even have to communicate because he was so good at it.
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GVS: I had my share of being an outside family-ish. My dad was an executive at a clothing company in New York, but both of my parents were from Mayfield, Kentucky. Their crowd was very Southern—from Georgia and South Carolina—so we weren’t necessarily like everyone else in Darien or in Portland, Oregon, where I finished high school. I ended up going to the Rhode Island School of Design after. There, everyone wanted to be some kind of architect or visual artist—including my classmates, the Talking Heads, who were painters but put together a hit band seemingly overnight—but most of us were struggling. I bailed from painting after hearing all these horror stories about New York only having 40 galleries and 6,000 painters wanting to be in them. I thought film made more sense, so I switched to that, and I ended up moving to Hollywood.
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CS: And now you’ve come full circle with your painting career at Vito Schnabel’s gallery.
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GVS: Yeah, I’m still trying and still struggling.
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CS: That transition is very hard: to be multifaceted, or multi-hyphenated, in the art world. There are not many people that can straddle that.

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GVS: Yeah, I don’t know if I’m straddling it very well. But I like it, you know; I like doing it. I’ve realized painting is a lifetime thing. It’s not something you can just go back to and do out of nowhere. I’m sure you feel the same about the many things you are doing.
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CS: I started off at age 5 wanting to be an actress. When the opportunity with Kids came, I had already been doing music videos, interning at Sassy, doing test shoots with Bernadette Corporation, and was just very much into working. I think I might have had my first job at like 12. I’ve also always been interested in costume design—like with Gummo; I’d like to be doing that again. As far as the future, I’m focusing on directing.

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GVS: But also, your family is this amazing, new development. I was just looking at pictures of your son and imagining what it would be like to have a family that I don’t have. How are you doing outside of work?
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CS: I understand why people have babies when they’re young. I had [Vanja] at 45, and even just thinking about working and committing to work and finding the mind space to do so... it’s exhausting. I haven’t even watched all of Capote yet! I need to find eight hours somewhere. It’s very hard right now because I need to figure out how to focus on myself again.
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GVS: Every day is different, right?

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CS: Yeah, I mean, it’s so fun, and he’s so chatty. He’s a real ham. I always say he’s got so much personality; he’s so dramatic. My husband’s always like, “It’s your fault,” and I tell him, you know, “nature versus nurture.” He’s got his own thing going on. You can’t blame me.
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GVS: I’m sure there’s a lot of you in there.
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CS: Hopefully the good parts! I’ve always really found you super interesting as a filmmaker because your works are so totally different. You don’t make one movie or, now, TV show—before Capote, I always wondered if you’d ever do TV—over and over again. You don’t have one look or style like so many great filmmakers do. There’s a diversity in the works you take on, and I wonder where that comes from? Michael Winterbottom also has a little bit of that.
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GVS: I’m not sure. Part of it is rather simple: Because I’ve done one thing one way, there’s this idea that, Oh, well I could do this other thing, and What would that be like? I’d rather stay interested than perfect what I’ve done. Although I did kind of go through a series: Mala Noche, Drugstore Cowboy, and My Own Private Idaho all could have lived on the same street. Those characters, I mean. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues was like a fantasy, which was some- thing completely different, and then I kept going. All the stories are about outside characters, like To Die For, until Good Will Hunting, where we had a real protagonist, a positive protagonist as opposed to an edgy, negative drug addict or hustler or murderer. I think with Good Will Hunting, I was wondering if I could even do that; wondering if I really needed an antihero to succeed. So yeah, that was different, too, and it just keeps going. Capote is a mixture of all those things, positive and negative.

CS: I think that all the actors on set were just shook. They were like, Wait, just one take? People get used to this pacing of television with a lot of coverage—tons of takes and shooting digital—and you were very economical, I guess? Or maybe you just knew what you wanted? The camera was always moving—and moving on.

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GVS: I was trying to stay on budget and on time! I was trying to bring a sense of [director Bernardo] Bertolucci and [cinematographer Vittorio] Storaro, the way they would shoot moving the camera around. I think I successfully got it for the first time; I’ve tried it on other films and ended up bailing out of it.

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CS: It worked really well in Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot. I mean that movie was so beautiful; it seems like that camera was just sliding around the entire time.

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GVS: Oh yeah, that one, too.

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CS: I don’t know how much you like to talk about process, but with [playwright] Robbie Baitz writing the script, there was so much dialogue. You’d have us go through the emotions of a 12-page scene without saying anything; it was a very meditative and interesting exercise that I’ve never experienced as an actor. You were also very open to improvisation. It was still Covid when we were finishing Capote, so it wasn’t like we were socializing offset so much, but do you remember Tom Hollander organized this dinner towards the end at Via Carota that was really nice? It was the first time we all came together.

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GVS: That was nice. Because of the project at that time, I went to La Grenouille a lot, which was one of Capote’s favorite places. It has flowers everywhere. It’s on 52nd right up near Fifth Avenue. That would be a good place for us to get dinner now.

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CS: I would love you to bring me there because, you know what, I’ve never been! I’m ashamed to admit it.

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GVS: It’s amazing. I mean, somebody told me about it. There are a couple of places like that in New York that are still like they were in the old days. You just have to be brought there.

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CS: Great, let’s go.

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Talent CHLOË SEVIGNY.
Hair Stylist EVANIE FRAUSTO.
Makeup Artist MARCELO GUTIERREZ using CHANEL BEAUTY.
Manicurist FLEURY ROSE.
Set Designer GERARD SANTOS.
Photo Assistants CHRISTOPHER SMITH and BRANDYN LIU.
Digi Tech CASEY FRANKLIN.
Fashion Assistant SAM DEUTSCH.
Hair Assistant AUSTIN WEBER.
Makeup Assistant JASON CASE.
Set Assistants SASHA VERYOVKA and TIM UZOR.
Production VIEWFINDERS.
Post-Production STUDIO RM.
Special Thanks MARCUS ALLEN.