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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.

Gus Van Sant

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.
GUS VAN SANT

Astrology Balance Tuesday
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.
GUS VAN SANT

Climbing Shopping War
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.
GUS VAN SANT

Culture Thinking Trying
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

Blow Experience Hunting Laughing Limited
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’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

Actors Hunting Movie
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.
GUS VAN SANT

Adventure Space Teenage
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

Different Filmmaking Really Weird
Everything’s changing so fast that it’s sometimes hard to keep up.
GUS VAN SANT

Hard Something Sometimes
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.
GUS VAN SANT

Fun Stories Track
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
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
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.
GUS VAN SANT

Gay Jobs Religious Retain
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

Records Selling Venture
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.
GUS VAN SANT

Anything Gay Identity Say
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.
GUS VAN SANT

People Real Trying

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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Modern-day cinema takes the form of a sermon. You don’t get to think, you only get to receive information.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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