black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

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

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

Assuming Casting Concern
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
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
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 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
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
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 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
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
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
Yeah, I try to be really calm.
GUS VAN SANT

Calm Trying Yeah
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
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

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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Gus Van Sant Quotes