Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" Death Valley is really wide-open - it's bigger than Rhode Island - and it's less a part of California than an ungoverned territory, so there's lots of weird cops-and-robbers stuff going on. "

Related Quotes:

" I don't usually direct actors in the classic sense of that word. Instead, I try to remind the characters before the shoot what's going on in a very simple way. I then watch them, their inventions as actors, approving or not approving what they're doing. "

Gus Van Sant

Classic

Doing

Simple

" I've always been interested in how to present something that relates to our reality - which is not really... I don't even know if documentary itself does as good a job. It has its own problems in trying to get at the reality of the situation. "

" I was once a shameless, full-time dope fiend. "

" When I was 14, I felt very rundown; I had a home to go to, but I felt like I was 60 or something, older than I feel now. And I don't know if it's something that happens at 14, or whether it was adolescence or whether I was gay, or closeted gay, or whatever it was, I felt that. "

" The media has gone through lots of things that make it a less foreign thing to have your lead character be gay. "

" One of the things that is devastating is I realise I haven't been living a different life than when I was, like, 12. I'm shocked at how reclusive I've been since then. I was unaware of it until recently. "

" If it were up to the executives, they probably wouldn't have directors at all. "

Gus Van Sant

Executives

Directors

" The things that inform student culture are created and controlled by the unseen culture, the sociological aspects of our climbing culture, our 'me' generation, our yuppie culture, our SUVs, or, you know, shopping culture, our war culture. "

" Sometimes, the people who are helping you can drop the ball. "

" I don't think American independent films have ever really been particularly experimental, except for the original guys from the '60s who were huge influences, like Stan Brakhage, Robert Breer, and Stan van der Beek. They were the true independents. "

" The biopic also wasn't a form that I necessarily believed in, because you can never really get it right, you know? It's also a form that's very popular - the straight-ahead biopic. "

" I hadn't made a big-budget film, and in Hollywood there's a sort of man and boys situation. You're a man, you make $80 million movies! As if it's harder to make an $80 million movie. Well, I guess businesswise it is because you have more executives to argue with. "

" The rules of suspense are that you do know, and you just don't know when. In the Hitchcock rules of suspense, you are supposed to know that there is a bomb on the bus that might blow up, and then it becomes very tense - but if you don't know that there's a bomb and it just blows up, then it's just a surprise. "

" I think that for the actors, the last thing that they want is a director that's not watching, a director that goes 'Okay, it sounded good to me,' and they were doing something else or preoccupied with something else because they were worried about the light changing. "

" In high school, I read 'Silas Marner' and I was very attracted to this character - he was very rundown and he'd just stop, and things would happen around him. "

" I've always been attracted to temporary families. "

" My department is to get actors to do stuff. "

" I'm usually trying to react to what the actors are coming up with. And then the environment, and then the story. "

Gus Van Sant

Environment

Story

" I find it interesting, the different rules that apply to journalism and drama, even though journalism has become more and more about entertainment, and entertainment has become more and more about journalism. "

" The artist himself is actually the subject in everything after, say, 1900. Eventually, art becomes so removed from the community that you have to know about the artist before you can even look at the painting, because there is a conceptual idea going on. "

" My family moved a lot as a kid. We started in Colorado, where I lived for five years. We moved to Chicago for two years, to San Francisco for one year, Connecticut for seven, Oregon for a couple years, and then I went to school. "

" I mean, I think I'm pretty sentimental. "

" There's a lot of films that have relatively rigid road maps because they have a script and others that are less rigid because they have less of a script, like 'Elephant.' The road map becomes more interpretive, maybe, than one with a detailed script. Editing-wise, they all have their problems. "

" My art teacher in junior high was a very out gay man and a mentor to me. He would tell us about Greenwich Village and show us the 'Village Voice' and describe his life, but it was all sort of subversive and below the radar. "

" Free time keeps me going. "

" For all the boredom the straight life brings, it's not too bad. "

" Modern-day cinema takes the form of a sermon. You don't get to think, you only get to receive information. "

" If you don't have the story and the unfolding of the trajectory of the saga, it's like getting in a car and not having any gas. "

Gus Van Sant

Having

Car

" There is a common theme, though, in the stories I have told, which are usually associations of characters or families that are formed outside of a family circle. "

" You know, I don't think I had a concept of what I would be or do. "