"Milk" producers Bruce Cohen and Dan Jinks talk about director Gus Van Sant...

I'm tardy in posting my chat with "Milk" producers Bruce Cohen and Dan Jinks from the Directors Guild of America Awards. They were at the event to support the film's director, Gus Van Sant, so I asked them to share with me their thoughts on him.

"There would be no "Milk" without Gus Van Sant," said Jinks. "He did more than direct this movie. He actually was in conversations with Oliver Stone many, many, many years ago about directing a film version of Harvey Milk's life. It didn't happen then but it came back around through the writer of "Milk": Dustin Lance Black and actually, the real Cleve Jones. Lance gave the script to Cleve and Cleve gave the script to Gus. It was so important to all of us to authentically portray the 1970s and there's nobody who's more about authenticity than Gus."

Cohen picked up on the authenticity theme and how Van Sant was at the ideal place in his career to direct "Milk."

"He's one of the great directors alive," he said. "But what was so exciting for this movie is he's made these bigger more mainstream films that people love - "Good Will Hunting" and "To Die For" and "Finding Forrester - and then, he had been in a phase for the last 4-5 years where he was making these smaller independent movies where he was really working on authenticity."

How did that impact "Milk"?

"You don't even feel like you're watching a film," Bruce said. "You feel like you're watching real people having real experiences. What we feel is that for "Milk," he brought those two strands of his work together. It has this big, epic Hollywood biopic feel to it and yet, it feels so real. You really feel like you're in San Francisco in 1978 and I think that's why people are responding to it."