IJ study archive

A Fun Thing They'll Never Do Again: Gus Van Sant meets David Foster Wallace

source

TL;DR

A May 1998 Dazed & Confused interview, conducted by phone and transcribed by director Gus Van Sant, occasioned by Van Sant's interest in adapting Infinite Jest for film — a project that, the editorial framing notes, never happened. The conversation itself barely touches Infinite Jest: it is mostly Wallace and Van Sant admiring Good Will Hunting (its math, its portrait of a genius nerd) and comparing working lives. Its value is biographical and compositional, not interpretive: Wallace confirms three years lived in blue-collar Boston, describes correcting the hardcover errors of Infinite Jest, mentions the advanced tax-accounting class he was auditing (a documentable seed of The Pale King), and forecasts the short-fiction book (Brief Interviews with Hideous Men) coming next. It advances no theory about Infinite Jest.

Key claims

  • The occasion (editorial framing). The Dazed introduction states that Van Sant, one of whose "favorite writers" is Wallace, approached him "hoping to adapt his turbulent opus" — Infinite Jest — "for the big screen," and that "Nothing has as yet come of the project". This is the piece's headline Infinite Jest relevance — and it is the magazine's framing, not anything Wallace says: the interview proper never discusses adapting the novel.
  • What they actually discuss. Good Will Hunting (which Van Sant directed): its mathematics (Wallace, who "majored in... Philosophy of Mathematics," quizzes Van Sant on the film's proofs), its portrait of the autodidact genius, and the actor Stellan Skarsgård's professor. Wallace frames his own vocation around the same problem: "One of the great puzzles I work with is I'm basically a nerd and everybody I know are nerds and how do you make nerds interesting".
  • Boston, three years. Praising the film's blue-collar Boston texture, Wallace says the screenwriters "could also recreate the textures of blue collar Boston you know which I lived in for three years" — a first-person confirmation of the Boston residency that underlies Infinite Jest's setting.
  • Correcting Infinite Jest's errors. Describing his crowded 1996-97, Wallace lists the errors in Infinite Jest "to correct from the hardcover and then there was the copy editing for the essay book" — author testimony that the novel's hardcover carried errors he corrected for later printings.
  • The tax class (a Pale King seed). On leave from teaching, Wallace is auditing a class that is "advanced tax accounting, which is a long story and you probably don't want to know about it" — which he calls "a Will Hunting class" — a contemporaneous trace of the tax-accounting research that would become The Pale King.
  • What comes next. Wallace forecasts a lull after the reading tours — "and then there will descend a great silence" — and says "the next book that I will finish will be a book of short stuff, some of which is very very very short": Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999).
  • Register. Van Sant "transcribed and edited the conversation and requested the original punctuation and interferences remain untouched", so the printed text keeps its ums, dog-barks, and interruptions; it is quotable as what the magazine printed.

Themes

Film and adaptation (the unrealized Infinite Jest movie; the shop-talk about Good Will Hunting); the artist's working life (Wallace and Van Sant comparing process, self-doubt, and the pull of attention after fame); the "nerd" as subject (Wallace's stated central problem — making the intelligent interesting); composition and revision (the hardcover-error corrections; the coming short-story book). Infinite Jest sits in the background as reputation and setting, not as topic.

Cross-references

  • bdcwire-dfw-boston — corroborates the "three years" in Boston that Wallace states here; the fuller account of the Boston residency behind the novel.
  • infinite-summer-pietsch-editing-ij and iw-pietsch-2016-full — the editorial record of Infinite Jest's errors and their correction across printings, which Wallace's "errors... to correct from the hardcover" remark independently confirms.
  • Wallace's tax-accounting class is an early, dateable trace of the research that surfaced a decade later in The Pale King.

Notable passages

  • Wallace on his subject: "One of the great puzzles I work with is I'm basically a nerd and everybody I know are nerds and how do you make nerds interesting"
  • On Boston: the screenwriters "could also recreate the textures of blue collar Boston you know which I lived in for three years"
  • On the coming quiet: "and then there will descend a great silence"
  • On what comes next: "the next book that I will finish will be a book of short stuff, some of which is very very very short"