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 SANTYeah, I try to be really calm.
More Gus Van Sant Quotes
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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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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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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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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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Free time keeps me going.
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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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And Later I Thought, I Can’t Think How Anyone Can Become a Director Without Learning the Craft of Cinematography.
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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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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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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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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 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.
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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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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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No construction stiff working overtime takes more stress and straining than we did just to stay high.
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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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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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With ‘Good Will Hunting,’ Miramax made certain the recruited audience wasn’t expecting to laugh at Robin Williams like they normally do. From my limited experience, you can really blow test screenings by conducting them in the wrong way.
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.
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If it were up to the executives, they probably wouldn’t have directors at all.
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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.
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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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I was once a shameless, full-time dope fiend.
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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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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 -
Yeah, I try to be really calm.
GUS VAN SANT