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Harvey Milk, the San Francisco city supervisor who, in 1977, became America’s first openly gay elected official, kicked off many of his speeches with a rousing ice-breaker: “My name’s Harvey Milk,” he would say, “and I’m here to recruit you.” Watching the film Milk, a lucid account of how this middle-aged man of no fixed ambition transformed the civil-rights landscape before his death at the hands of a colleague, you can feel the movie’s director making a statement of a similar stripe. Yes, his name is Gus Van Sant, and he’s here to recruit you.

Not that he could be mistaken for the cheerleading type. His father enjoyed a lengthy and lucrative career as a salesman, but it’s doubtful whether Van Sant himself could flog a bagel to a starving man; he tends to communicate in a low, unwavering monotone, his conversation augmented by shrugs and smiles, and littered with pauses that would have driven Harold Pinter to distraction. Which is not to say that the 56-year-old director is unfriendly: on the sweltering morning when I meet him in the air-conditioned refuge of a Hollywood post-production studio, he never once ducks a question or shows an unwillingness to chuckle at himself. He has been adding some finishing touches to Milk, and looks relaxed, taking a break on the sofa while Milo, his beloved Australian shepherd, snoozes at his feet. Van Sant’s greying, medium-length hair and casual attire (jeans, trainers, T-shirt) lend him the look of the nonconformist next door. He blends in.

Now, though, he has made a film about a man who advised precisely the opposite. “Never blend in” is one of the lines spoken in the movie by Harvey Milk, forcefully played by Sean Penn, who appears physically slight while deploying a vocal muscularity that shows why the real Milk was such an inspiring orator. “Sean did everything on his own,” the director points out admiringly. “It was very much like him creating something as an artist, as opposed to us co-creating. I went to his house for the first meeting and he said, ‘Well, I don’t really need to talk about it. I guess I just have to learn my lines and show up.’ And I thought, ‘Yeah, that’s pretty much what you have to do.’ ” Van Sant laughs, perhaps realising that he is thwarting my attempts to get to the bottom of the creative process. James Franco, who plays Milk’s lover, Scott Smith, tells me that

the experience of being directed by Van Sant really is as amorphous as it sounds. “It’s weird,” he sighs. “Gus seems like he’s doing so little. What he does is to make you feel like you’re not being directed at all. It’s still baffling to me. But then you watch Milk and you can see it’s a Gus Van Sant movie.”

Well, yes and no. It ticks most of the boxes of the biopic genre and has emerged as a sure-fire Oscar contender; Penn and Van Sant should definitely start looking into tuxedo rental and limousine hire for late February. None of which squares with the pioneering Van Sant filmgoers know and love to argue over. Sure, he enjoyed a brief spell in Hollywood’s good books in the mid-1990s, with that award magnet Good Will Hunting, which brought his only Oscar nomination to date (along with accusations that he had sold out — see Kevin Smith’s Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back, in which Van Sant appears as himself, counting his piles of Hollywood loot). But that hit was an anomaly in a career largely devoted to chronicling the sort of dropouts whom many film-makers wouldn’t touch with a boom mike: Mexican street kids in Mala Noche, smackheads in Drugstore Cowboy, rent boys in My Own Private Idaho.

Latterly, Van Sant has been responsible for an extraordinary quartet of experimental work, including the Palme d’Or-winning Elephant, about a Columbine-style massacre, and Last Days, a Kurt Cobain-inspired tale of rock’n’roll neurosis that the average snail would consider somewhat on the slow side. Milk, though, is marked out not only by its immediacy, but because it is arguably the director’s most personal work. Van Sant came close to telling the story in 1993, when he moved to the gay Castro quarter of San Francisco, Milk’s former stamping ground, to rewrite Oliver Stone’s script about the politician. When that stalled, the project was put on the back burner: there were attempts to revive it over the years, including one that proposed Robin Williams as the lead, but it’s significant that this study of empowerment ended up back with Van Sant, an openly gay director who has had issues with his own sexuality.

“If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door,” Milk once said, and this sentiment resonates for Van Sant, who was in the closet until the mid-1980s. To illustrate where his own head was at while Harvey Milk was busy demanding gay rights, the director tells me about the time in 1976 when he picked up a hitchhiker. “He’d made this little 8mm film, and he invited me over to his house to watch it,” he recalls. “It was the first time I’d seen or thought of making something like that. He told me he wanted to make the first authentic American gay film. He asked me, ‘Don’t you want to make a gay film?’ I said, ‘No, because I’m not gay.’ In fact, I was gay, I was just in the closet.

“I think of that as a big missed-opportunity period in my life. I was dedicated to film-making, but your work should involve saying something about your life. And I wasn’t expressing myself.”

He pauses, reflecting on the story he’s just told. “I think the guy was actually inviting me to have sex with him. And I was not getting it.

I thought he just wanted to hang out.” I ask if it would be fair to see the new movie as a way of Van Sant sending a message to his younger, closeted self. “Yeah,” he nods. “I guess that could be it. I never thought of it like that.”

He makes no secret now of his sexuality, and seems to be the first port of call for any gay-themed project. (He came within a cowboy’s lasso of making Brokeback Mountain.) Yet Milk is his first movie with a gay hero since 1991’s My Own Private Idaho, and only the third in his entire career. “Wow. . . uh. . . I guess you’re right,” he says when I point this out. Then he mentions casually the reclusive novelist played by Sean Connery in his 2000 film Finding Forrester. “The studio didn’t want us to advertise the fact, but Sean wanted to play that part as gay.” James Bond in Gay Movie Shock? Apparently so, though the moment for scandal may have passed.

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