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I was once a shameless, full-time dope fiend.

Gus Van Sant

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.
GUS VAN SANT

Stars Thinking War
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
Sometimes getting upset with yourself is necessary when you face the truth.
GUS VAN SANT

Faces Sometimes Upset
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
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
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
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.
GUS VAN SANT

Car Stories Unfolding
Modern-day cinema takes the form of a sermon. You don’t get to think, you only get to receive information.
GUS VAN SANT

Cinema Information Thinking
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 SANT

Looks Mirrors Self
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.
GUS VAN SANT

Afterlife Idea Ideas People
I was once a shameless, full-time dope fiend.
GUS VAN SANT

Dope Full Shameless
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
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’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
When you get to be 23, 24 or 25, you start to freeze up and become an adult.
GUS VAN SANT

Adult Adults Freeze
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
Free time keeps me going.
GUS VAN SANT

Free Time
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

Different Haven Realising
Casting the locals is my primary concern because all the other things you assume will be manageable.
GUS VAN SANT

Assuming Casting Concern
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
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
No construction stiff working overtime takes more stress and straining than we did just to stay high.
GUS VAN SANT

Addiction Construction Stress
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
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
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
Yeah, I try to be really calm.
GUS VAN SANT

Calm Trying Yeah
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.
GUS VAN SANT

Character Cutting Needs

I was once a shameless, full-time dope fiend.

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I was once a shameless, full-time dope fiend.

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