As an aspiring teenage artist, Gus Van Sant had his head turned by the writing of Jack Kerouac and fellow Beats William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. Then, as an aspiring filmmaker at RISD where classmates included future Talking Heads he was influenced by a visit to Italy, where he watched the Fellini film Casanova and met Pier Paolo Pasolini. The Beat influence can be seen in his first film, Mala Noche (1986), and even more so in Drugstore Cowboy (1989), in which Burroughs portrays ‘Tom the Priest’. Gus Van Sant talks with PKM’s David Stewart about the lingering influence of Jack Kerouac, on the eve of the centennial of the writer’s birth (March 12).