In Milk, Gus Van Sant makes extensive use of newsreel footage (some of it provided by Miami's own Lynn and Louis Wolfson II Florida Moving Image Archives) in order to depict the battle that raged across the United States in the 1970s between gay-rights groups and anti-gay organizations such as Save Our Children, which sought to repeal ordinances that prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Many of the people seen in the vintage clips are also portrayed in the film by actors. But one of the most notorious figureheads of the anti-gay brigade, former Miss America contestant and pop singer Anita Bryant, appears in Milk only via historical footage.

Van Sant says the decision to not have an actress play Bryant in the film was incorporated into Dustin Lance Black's script from the beginning. ``I actually fell into a search for stock footage of her because Dustin didn't think the things she said would sound right coming from an actor. They would sound corny and odd. And he was right. If he hadn't suggested it, we probably would have cast the character.''

Although a biopic of the life and times of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man elected to public office in the United States, had been kicking around Hollywood for years (at one point with Robin Williams set to star), Van Sant says the movie finally came together out of simple synchronicity.

''It was simply a combination of having an actor [Sean Penn] everyone liked, the people involved being happy with the screenplay and the studio happy with the people involved,'' he said. ``Sometimes, it's really hard to get all those things to come together.''

Milk also marks a return to conventional filmmaking for Van Sant, who had abandoned the accessible approach he used in movies such as Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester for the more ethereal, contemplative style of Elephant, Last Days and Paranoid Park.

''All those movies were seven years of making films and really playing with the form,'' Van Sant said. ``That's a long time, and it definitely had an effect on Milk -- mostly one of style -- especially since I was working with the same cinematographer [Harris Savides] who shot those movies.

``Milk had a pretty traditional screenplay and story form. It was linear like Finding Forrester. But we still talked a lot about things we wanted to do. We just didn't always do them. For example, the shot in which Dan White [played by Josh Brolin] walks all the way from the mayor's office to Milk's office was shot in one take, like in Elephant. It was probably four minutes long.

''We just ended up cutting it,'' Van Sant added, laughing. ``It probably would have seemed a little out of place in this movie.''

-- RENE RODRIGUEZ

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