Everything’s changing so fast that it’s sometimes hard to keep up.
GUS VAN SANTWhen you get to be 23, 24 or 25, you start to freeze up and become an adult.
More Gus Van Sant Quotes
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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Yeah, I try to be really calm.
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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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I was once a shameless, full-time dope fiend.
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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.
GUS VAN SANT






