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 SANTEverything’s changing so fast that it’s sometimes hard to keep up.
More Gus Van Sant Quotes
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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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If it were up to the executives, they probably wouldn’t have directors at all.
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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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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.
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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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And Later I Thought, I Can’t Think How Anyone Can Become a Director Without Learning the Craft of Cinematography.
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I was once a shameless, full-time dope fiend.
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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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Casting the locals is my primary concern because all the other things you assume will be manageable.
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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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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.
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Everything’s changing so fast that it’s sometimes hard to keep up.
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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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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.
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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