Gus Van Sant Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
More Gus Van Sant quote about:
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“I'm normally drawn to something I haven't done and seen before.”
-- Gus Van Sant -
“I try to get to know the actors as much as I can. I feel like I'm friends with them for starters and for a week or two, we rehearse when they're getting the costumes together.”
-- Gus Van Sant -
“Even if you try to copy a film shot by shot, you still can't. It's still your own film.”
-- Gus Van Sant -
“I try to shoot the first rehearsal because people are more spontaneous. People in real life don't really know where they are going to be either positioning themselves or how they will be saying their words. When people goof during the first take, it usually looks realistic.”
-- Gus Van Sant -
“I used to take photographs just to remember people.”
-- Gus Van Sant -
“Casting the locals is my primary concern because all the other things you assume will be manageable.”
-- Gus Van Sant -
“For all the boredom the straight life brings, it's not too bad.”
-- Gus Van Sant -
“And Later I Thought, I Can't Think How Anyone Can Become a Director Without Learning the Craft of Cinematography.”
-- Gus Van Sant -
“Now the music industry is sort of like a Craigslist venture, right? Where you're making your own records and selling them online.”
-- Gus Van Sant -
“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.”
-- Gus Van Sant -
“I have my ideas of what a good documentary is, but drama is a different animal because you're arranging everything.”
-- Gus Van Sant -
“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.”
-- Gus Van Sant -
“I'm thinking of remaking 'Psycho' again. Doing a third remake. The idea this time is to really change it - we're talking about doing a punk rocker setting.”
-- Gus Van Sant -
“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.”
-- Gus Van Sant -
“Apparently there’s this kind of songbird that thinks it dies every time the sun goes down. In the morning, when it wakes up, it’s totally shocked to still be alive—so it sings this really beautiful song.”
-- Gus Van Sant -
“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.”
-- Gus Van Sant -
“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.”
-- Gus Van Sant -
“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 -
“I think over the course of 14 films, I'm returning to a place that I know to tell a story... the same way Spielberg returned to fantasy, Lucas returned to the 'Star Wars' saga, or John Ford returned to the western.”
-- Gus Van Sant -
“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.”
-- Gus Van Sant -
“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.”
-- Gus Van Sant -
“When I grew up in the '60s, we were actually dominated by this, you know, sort of conforming '50s culture, even though we were like trying to express our own culture, like, the dominant culture was the thing that was forming us. And I think that that's true today.”
-- Gus Van Sant -
“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.”
-- Gus Van Sant -
“There is a way that a younger person can accept the inevitable problem that they're going to die, whereas somebody a little bit older might be overcome.”
-- Gus Van Sant -
“There are all kinds of ways that people present their films, but that's kind of a good feeling, if you can make it seem like the characters are really there.”
-- Gus Van Sant -
“The reason I know about 'Tomb Raider' is from when I was researching 'Elephant.' It was 1999, and I was trying to research the Columbine-massacre kids, and they had played video games, and I, at the time, had never really seen one. It was a world I didn't know.”
-- Gus Van Sant -
“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.”
-- Gus Van Sant -
“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.”
-- Gus Van Sant -
“In rare cases, I've had music before I shot the movie. I think that for 'Good Will Hunting' I had an Elliot Smith record or a couple of them and I just somehow felt like the sound had something to it that reminded me of the story. So in that case there was music beforehand.”
-- Gus Van Sant -
“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.”
-- Gus Van Sant
