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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.

Gus Van Sant

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.
GUS VAN SANT

Feelings People Real
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

Jobs Reality Trying
If it were up to the executives, they probably wouldn’t have directors at all.
GUS VAN SANT

Directors Executives Probably
Casting the locals is my primary concern because all the other things you assume will be manageable.
GUS VAN SANT

Assuming Casting Concern
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

Couple Hunting Thinking
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.
GUS VAN SANT

Dramatic Film Trying
Yeah, I try to be really calm.
GUS VAN SANT

Calm Trying Yeah
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.
GUS VAN SANT

Form Knows Popular Very
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.
GUS VAN SANT

Doubt Film Thinking
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

Character High School
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.
GUS VAN SANT

Actors Movie Viewpoints
I was once a shameless, full-time dope fiend.
GUS VAN SANT

Dope Full Shameless
A lot of times, you’re not necessarily off the page because you haven’t been able to take the time to prepare a character. It’s very easy to find even great actors reading it more like a reading. Things aren’t really coming alive yet, even though you know they will.
GUS VAN SANT

Actor Character Reading
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

Thinking Trying Writing
Everything’s changing so fast that it’s sometimes hard to keep up.
GUS VAN SANT

Hard Something Sometimes
When you get to be 23, 24 or 25, you start to freeze up and become an adult.
GUS VAN SANT

Adult Adults Freeze

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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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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Popular Authors

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