You never look at the backside of a mirror because when you do, it’ll affect your future because you’re looking at yourself backwards. No, you’re looking at your inner self and you don’t recognize it because you’ve never seen it before.
GUS VAN SANTIf 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.
More Gus Van Sant Quotes
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I was once a shameless, full-time dope fiend.
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It’s hard to speculate as a human about the afterlife because you’re not in it. And it’s probably as wild and wacky as you could imagine. The idea that people have figured it out, I’m not sure if I can fathom that.
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No construction stiff working overtime takes more stress and straining than we did just to stay high.
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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.
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Now the music industry is sort of like a Craigslist venture, right? Where you’re making your own records and selling them online.
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Everything’s changing so fast that it’s sometimes hard to keep up.
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I have this new theory about films. It’s almost like astrology, where if we started on a Tuesday the film will be different than if we started on a Wednesday. Not because of the planets. It’s that sometimes you start with the wrong balance and the whole thing gets messed up.
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I’m going in a really weird I-don’t-know-where direction, but I prefer anything [different] from how standardized filmmaking has become.
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Free time keeps me going. It’s just something that’s always been a part of my life. 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.
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Silent is about needing to make a scene shorter by having physical things to cut to. That way, you can manipulate a character to the other side of the room. But, if they say the wrong thing, it might locate that action in a particular part of the scene. It’s a mechanical need.
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A person’s sexuality is so much more than one word “gay.” No one refers to anyone as just “hetero” because that doesn’t say anything. Sexual identity is broader than a label.
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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.
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When you’re on a film and you’re doubting something, it’s usually because you don’t think the audience is going to like it.
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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.
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Yeah, I try to be really calm.
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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.
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I used to take photographs just to remember people.
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When you get to be 23, 24 or 25, you start to freeze up and become an adult.
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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.
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If it were up to the executives, they probably wouldn’t have directors at all.
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Joanna Priestley is one of the most interesting and adept personal animators and filmmakers. I have enjoyed her work for years and been amazed at how she gets into her own thoughts onto the screen in a very elegant and focused way. You have to see this.
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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.
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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.
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Modern-day cinema takes the form of a sermon. You don’t get to think, you only get to receive information.
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Casting the locals is my primary concern because all the other things you assume will be manageable.
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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.
GUS VAN SANT