Top 44 Gus Van Sant Quotes

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

My art teacher in junior high was a very out gay man and a mentor to me.

My department is to get actors to do stuff.

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.

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.

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

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.

I think that what I’m attracted to is people who are wild. But the self-destructive side comes out of the wild side. The wildness is very different from me. That’s why I think I like it.

If I’m diagnosed with cancer I might become despondent, but someone young might not, and they might need connections with somebody outside their circle of family because their family is so despondent.

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

I’d come into filmmaking as a painter so, for me, making ‘Good Will Hunting’ was experimental because I didn’t know how to do it.

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

If a movie isn’t released, it’s one thing, but if you know it will be, it’s nice to have closure and see it come out.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

There’s always a risk if you don’t do things the way you’ve done things before.

I think that in some cases, I’ve made films that have a sentimental quality, at least as part of the film.

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.

You’re following your track, the story, your only plan, your map for the audience, and all the other stuff is, like, the fun stuff: the costumes, the locations, the set-dressing and the actors. They can all be variable as you like if you stick – however roughly – to the path.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

The dark comedies tend to be in a non-releasable area. There can be romantic comedies. There can be dramas. But there’s no ‘dark comedy’ inbox for the advertising.

Wong Kar-Wai is a really great inspiration. He’s always referred to as the Jimi Hendrix of filmmaking.

I mean, I think I’m pretty sentimental.

Free time keeps me going.

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.

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

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

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

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. I’ve always been attracted to temporary families. They tend to be lost characters.

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

Yeah, Kubrick’s a big influence. In something like ‘A Clockwork Orange,’ he is trying to use the practical light – I mean, at least he says that in his interviews, like they’re not using traditionally Hollywood lights. In ‘Elephant’ we basically used no lights; we never really adjusted.

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.

I did ‘Mala Noche’ as a way to do something that was outside of the system, because I was outside of the system, and I deliberately chose material that Hollywood wouldn’t touch in a million years.

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

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.

Gay marriage is the last bastion of, to me… as a legal, ceremonial, sentimental and religious side, it’s one of the last steps. Retaining your job being one of the earlier steps, like, not getting kicked out of your job because you’re gay.

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.