Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" Once you're directing, you're kind of in a certain mode, where you're taking whatever is on the page and forming it into the film that you think it might want to be. So whether it's my writing or not, I still try to work with it in the same way. "

Related Quotes:

" I was originally a painter, and I made films sort of as an extension of that, and then I started to try to make dramatic films because the early films were experimental films. "

Gus Van Sant

Because

Try

Started

" I had never had a positive leading character - somebody that wasn't an antihero, or who wasn't more of a guy that you're supposed to be on the side of. "

Gus Van Sant

Character

Positive

" The area of teenage life is not necessarily rarefied; we've all gone through that period. It's not as rarefied as a western or a space adventure or a gangster film, but it has its own dynamic. "

" I'm normally drawn to something I haven't done and seen before. "

" I've told people who have just started to make a film that the one thing you might experience is this feeling that everybody is conspiring against you, because you're not necessarily able to tell what's real and what's not. "

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

" I have my ideas of what a good documentary is, but drama is a different animal because you're arranging everything. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Free time keeps me going. "

" When you get to be 23, 24 or 25, you start to freeze up and become an adult. "

Gus Van Sant

Adult

You

" Because I didn't have brothers, I was always interested in the kids down the street that had four brothers in their family, so I became one of them - but it was not my family. "

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

" Now the music industry is sort of like a Craigslist venture, right? Where you're making your own records and selling them online. "

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Even when you're making a movie about life, death is a presence, and I guess it's part of my dramatic viewpoint. I'm not sure why exactly. Maybe I'm drawn to it as a story element. "

" Well, I want to do everything in sort of a documentary style, ever since I started in the '80s. "

" Usually people just hire me. "

" 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. "

" 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 you put up posters around town for high-school kids, high-school kids will come. If you're casting politicians, you can't put up posters and have politicians come down. "

Gus Van Sant

You

Politicians

" 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. "

" Usually when I read something, first of all I'm looking for the story and then when I reread it, I'm sort of checking every part of it to see if every scene is necessary. "

" Everything's changing so fast that it's sometimes hard to keep up. "

Gus Van Sant

Sometimes

Hard

" 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. "