LOS ANGELES — If you asked the auteur film director Gus Van Sant how long he has been painting, he might tell you about winning first prize at the annual art show in his hometown Darien, Conn., when he was 12. He might relate the influence of Jackson Pollock on his style as an 8-year-old. (It wasn’t such a big deal, he’d say. “It was really just because you could throw paint and that was a painting.”) He might even explain how, as a dual painting and film major at the Rhode Island School of Design, he dropped the art course because film “was harder, and I just didn’t know about it. I knew about painting.”

He is not bragging, merely stating facts. On the day we meet at his modest hillside home in Los Angeles, Mr. Van Sant wears a black Diamond Supply Co. skate T-shirt tucked into loose indigo Levis and pads around shoeless. Breakfasting on takeout Denny’s pancakes and eggs at his kitchen counter, he is clearly aiming to impress no one.

Mr. Van Sant, 67, has always seemed indifferent to conventional standards of Hollywood success and acclaim. Setting out with an interest in experimental avant-garde films, he made his name in the late 1980s with the art-house film “Drugstore Cowboy,” following it in 1991 with “My Own Private Idaho.” Both are now considered classics of their genre.