Gus Van Sant, then 30 years old, was walking through New York on his lunch break in 1982 when he came across a legend. He recalls seeing him walk down the street. “Across the street from where I worked in advertising, on Madison Avenue.

He was dressed in a light blue parka with a backpack.” Warhol was engrossed in discussion and didn't notice Van Sant, although he was instantly identifiable.

"I was like, 'OK, there's Warhol!'" she says. He was a cinch to spot.”

As he giggles, the filmmaker's face creases into a warm smile, incredulous. “He looked exactly like he does in photos.”

Van Sant is making his directorial stage debut in Lisbon with Andy, a musical play about the life of the high priest of pop art, four decades later. It's the latest surprising turn from the Palme d'Or-winning director of Elephant, who was also nominated for Oscars for Good Will Hunting and Milk, and whose other films include a shot-for-shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and a fictionalized account of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain's final days.

When we meet in Lisbon, Van Sant recalls his childhood visits to his aunt Joanne, who would put on musicals like Carousel at her Ohio college. Musicals and theater did not attract his interest at the time.

“I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, when musicals were the standard form of the time... now they're a new form.” The Book of Mormon and Hamilton, he claims, transformed his perspective on musical theater and its potential.

“I thought something was going on, and I thought it was obliquely related to Andy.” Andy's stage designer and composer is Van Sant, which is expected given that he has been composing music "as a hobby" for quite some time.

“I used to make entire albums, some of which are now available online. Some of which, you know, we really pressed as CDs.”

The show's music was created in partnership with Paulo Furtado, AKA the Legendary Tigerman, a Portuguese artist. With era-appropriate oohing and aahing in the background, the main theme is accented by 1950s finger-snapping against xylophone and bass guitar.

Consider a blend of West Side Story and 1990s alternative rock: low-key, reverb-heavy, and slightly grungy.

The performers' clothes for Andy, which are primarily 1960s-inspired yet modern in cut, feature reds, yellows, blacks, blues, and gold. Long white flowing sheets flank either side of the stage, imitating an open, vast museum where Warhol prints are suspended. The exhibition is structured as a greatest hits of Warhol's career, spanning the years 1959 to 1967, when he transitioned from an uncomfortable, bashful Andrew Warhola to the iconoclastic darling of modern art.

Van Sant had planned to make a film about Warhol's life in the early 1990s, with River Phoenix starring in the lead role. The production was never completed after the actor died in 1993.

Andy, apparently a new project, was formed when the film-maker was approached by the Biennial of Contemporary Arts in Lisbon with an invitation to collaborate. It took place in conjunction with the 25th edition of the Gay Lisboa film festival, which featured a retrospective of Van Sant's works honoring his contribution to queer cinema over the last four decades.

Andy stars a Portuguese cast who sings and acts in English, although that wasn't always the intention. “I wanted it to be in Portuguese,” says the author.

However, because the show was traveling [to Belgium, Germany, and Italy], I believe English was a good fallback language that would be easy to adapt to each region. When we first talked about it, we planned to cast it in the United States.

The reason we didn't was most likely due to the way things were going with Covid and potentially money.”

All of the actors are between the ages of 17 and 23, with Diogo Fernandes portraying Andy Warhol, who succeeds in portraying the artist's transformation from soft-spoken, shoe-gazing outsider to secretive, platinum-wigged creative who energised the art world. The chance was described by Fernandes as "the realization of a lifelong dream."

Van Sant is known for collaborating with and showcasing emerging, younger talent. He has supported up-and-coming filmmakers like Harmony Korine and Xavier Dolan throughout his career. When I ask him who inspires him, he says Lil Nas X, whose videos he describes as "over-the-top" and "culturally provocative in a kind of great, amazing, in-your-face way."

He discusses how the pop music scene is constantly altering and how "all of a sudden there's this, like, thing." It's almost as though when Nirvana appeared, everyone was like, "Oh!"

We must pay close attention to them!' Even though you had no idea a week ago.”

Van Sant was set to shoot The Prince of Fashion, a film about a reporter's visit to the Paris Fashion Week menswear shows with his 13-year-old son, before the epidemic struck. Will Ferrell was supposed to play the lead, but Covid sabotaged the production.

Van Sant's transition to musical theater comes at an interesting time. The influenza pandemic of 1918 shook the movie industry to its core.

The director has experimented with several styles of screen narrative, including an unusual mini-series for Gucci (Ouverture of Something that Never Ended). He cites a 1971 interview with Andy Warhol, in which the artist declares that movies are dead: “TV was where everything was going, and he had these ideas that TV was going to get better... and everyone was against him, which wasn't true until last year when people couldn't go to the theater.

As a result, he had a knack of seeing and projecting into the future.”

Thanks to Jad Salfiti at The Guardian whose reporting provided the original basis for this story.