Q. How did the narrative side of your work evolve?  A. I wrote stories in junior high English class. By then a person is influenced by all the TV shows and movies they’ve seen. So you have pretty advanced — at least mediawise — storytelling ideas. Things I wrote were like Alfred Hitchcock’s scary stories for young people. Later, in high school, I made a film about a brother and sister who leave the city because they think it’s a bad place. It had a weak psychological idea behind it. It wasn’t dramatically realized because I didn’t know how to do a scene because I was in art class. I wasn’t in drama class. I still don’t know how to do a traditional scene. I can make it up. But I’ve learned to rely on my own deficiencies to create what I think of as a story. And having gone through a period where I was into stories that weren’t strictly stories, like James Joyce or Samuel Beckett, things that were austere enough so the story was reduced to a very simple idea, almost like a word. In “Waiting for Godot,” the story is “waiting,” and then all the other stuff is infused into the waiting part.  Q. Do you have one story you always return to?  A. For me it’s outsiders living their life. Watching the outsiders live their life. Not necessarily having them triumph or anything.  Q. You’ve shot so many films in Portland, it feels like an important element in your work. Before you moved there in high school, what did you think Portland was going to be?  A. Dirt roads and stop signs. I didn’t know there was a city there. There was a name. I guess I could have looked it up in the World Book. My first image was it would be like Bozeman, Mont. Then when I got there I was like, oh, there’s a city there.  Q. What was it like when you first got there?  A. There was a ’70s hippie culture, and I guess I felt aligned with that.  Q. What’s it like now?  A. The things I learned when I first moved there are the same things that make it interesting today. It’s not a big enough city that people really move to or move out of. It gets more cosmopolitan every decade. It’s still its own universe. It’s a frontier town. And even with an influx of people that have come from the outside, it still retains a small-town existence. Like Boise, Idaho, where the people that are there, they were born there, and they will die there.  Q. Does the gray climate of Portland affect you in any way? I think of Elliott Smith or Raymond Carver; many artists that come out of that area seem to have a built-in gloom factor.  A. I think a person’s darkness or lightness factor is their own point of view. I don’t think Elliott Smith thought of his songs as dark. Kurt Cobain, his songs were pretty dark. Angst-ridden. And booming. And loud. Later, while working on the movie [“Last Days”], I realized that their songs really sounded like falling trees and chain saws. I don’t know if it was an accident or what. They lived in a lumber town. They were using a sound that was relevant to them.  Q. “Elephant” and “Paranoid Park” are your two films about teenage characters. Was there some special approach you used?  A. They were real teenagers. From Portland.  Q. What do you think of teenagers?  A. There’s always something new going on with them. They’re sort of the creators of the new. If there’s something that you see or understand that’s going on right now with them, two years later there’s some new thing. There’s a new generation that’s arrived. They’re connected to the other generations.  Q. What did you imagine you’d end up being when you were 16 years old?  A. At that time I was painting, so I thought I’d be a painter.  Q. How did you imagine yourself dressed?  A. I thought I’d be wearing a suit. I thought when you were an adult, that’s what you wore.  Q. Were there people you looked up to as you came up?  A. Kubrick was a good model. He had an autonomy I’ve never had but that one desire. He organized things a certain way. And he had a good relationship with Warner Brothers. He was their class act.  Q. I sense you enjoy the small crews and the minimal filmmaking of these recent films.  A. I was really getting into making movies that were unencumbered by rules. Different filmmakers do it different ways. My way was to make something for cheap. It’s a good deal for people to give me $3 million for a movie. So they don’t have a lot of requirements. If I was looking for $30 million, then they need more requirements. They need movie stars, and they need backup for their money. The drawback is, when they spend small amounts of money, the studios don’t tend to release the movie very wide since they don’t have that much at stake. Which is O.K. because the films can fend for themselves and be seen by word of mouth.  A version of this article appears in print on , on Page AR6 of the New York edition with the headline: Back in Portland, The Latest Outsider Has a Skateboard. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Blake Nelson, the author of the book “Paranoid Park,” interviews the films director, Gus Van Sant. The film is now out on DVD.