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 SANTYeah, I try to be really calm.
More Gus Van Sant Quotes
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Casting the locals is my primary concern because all the other things you assume will be manageable.
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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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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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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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It’s hard to speculate as a human about the afterlife because you’re not in it. And it’s probably as wild and wacky as you could imagine. The idea that people have figured it out, I’m not sure if I can fathom that.
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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.
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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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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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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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Free time keeps me going.
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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.
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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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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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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’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