I used to take photographs just to remember people.
GUS VAN SANTWhen 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.
More Gus Van Sant Quotes
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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’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 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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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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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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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 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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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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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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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.
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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’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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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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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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No construction stiff working overtime takes more stress and straining than we did just to stay high.
GUS VAN SANT






