"Milk" roundup: Penn talks research, Van Sant talks mainstream, and Cleve Jones on recapturing the '70s

It's two weeks until the highest profile gay-themed film since Brokeback Mountain opens nationwide (it starts rolling out next week in select cities), and the anticipation is running high. After the break, you can see a roundup of recent interviews, and be sure to check back Tuesday for our full review of Milk.

Cleve Jones, Emile Hirsch

Cleve Jones worked on Harvey Milk's campaign for San Francisco Supervisor in the 70's and worked as a historical consultant on the set, but he's best known for starting the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt back in 1987. He says that working on the Milk set was like stepping back in time:

“The designers and artists did a great job of making it very real and a poignant experience,” he says. “To suddenly find myself working on sets where everyone looked, spoke and acted as we did back then was quite lovely.”

To see Harvey's story brought to the big screen is something he's waited decades for:

“He changed my life, and everything that happened goes back to meeting him,” Jones says. “As the years passed on and the [AIDS] epidemic continued, most people Harvey and I worked with in that period passed away, and I began to get frustrated and concerned that Harvey’s story would never make it to the big screen and people wouldn’t know who he was and what he had accomplished. “It’s important for those reasons and I have a great sense of satisfaction to see it done right and by the right people,” he says.

Cleve is portrayed in the film by Emile Hirsch (who takes the kinds of roles that have "future Oscar winner" written all over them). He says that Cleve helped him understand what it was like being a young gay man in San Francisco in the 70's:

“He told me lot of inspiring stories about his life and involvement with Harvey Milk,” Hirsch says. “We’d be driving around San Francisco and he’d point out Market Street and say ‘32 years ago I was leading a crowd of 10,000 screaming queens at midnight down the street.’ I think that’s amazing and I was just really grabbed by the story and by Cleve and by Harvey.”

Gus Van Sant, Sean Penn

Out director Gus Van Sant talks about the research required before he could bring this story to the screen:

"Well, I'd been involved in a project in 1993 that was Oliver Stone directing and he decided not to direct it. That's really where I heard about the project, through Rob Epstein, who had made The Times of Harvey Milk. At that time, then yeah, there was a lot of study and I lived with Cleve Jones, and I met some of the people that were the real characters and lived close enough to the Castro to sort of soak up its energy. It was '93, so it was a lot different than it is now. It's actually changed in those ten years quite a bit, the Castro itself, in the last fifteen years. There are condos, there's families, a lot of straight people. It's not the same. Even in '93, it had a little bit more of a connection to '78. I mean, it was devastated by the AIDS epidemic, but the research I did was all the way through the last ten or so years."

Josh Brolin

LOGOonline.com has an interview with the cast, and Josh Brolin, who plays killer Dan White, talks about meeting some of the people who knew him:

"I think the most informative thing for me was, I talked to some cops who knew Dan White and one of those cops had taped his confession, so I heard the confession tape, which was extremely revealing because there was a sense of arrogance in it, but also a sense of being a victim to it. Then Sean, at one point, called me when we were on the set and said, “Charlie, who is Dan White’s son — I went out to dinner with him. Do you want to meet him?” And it was the day we were doing the baptismal scene with White’s family in the film, so it was him. That’s who we were baptizing in the scene! So Charlie was in Sean’s trailer and I went to go meet him, and it was a severe reaction, as you can imagine, when I walked in with the mutton chop sideburns and the clothes. But he was very happy once we spoke for a while, that his dad was not portrayed as being ... as just the result of what he did. It was more of a question of how did this decent guy get to the point, the incredibly frustrated point, where he felt like the only power he could muster was doing something tangible like loading a gun and shooting somebody."

From everything I've heard, Milk is definitely in the running for all the top year-end awards, but it'll be interesting to see how it plays in Peoria. When asked that very question, Gus responded that he thinks the film is one of a kind at the marketplace right now, and Josh quipped, "and that one gay guy in Peoria can’t wait for this movie."

I hope he's right.