If it were up to the executives, they probably wouldn’t have directors at all.
GUS VAN SANTI’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.
More Gus Van Sant Quotes
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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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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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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.
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Now the music industry is sort of like a Craigslist venture, right? Where you’re making your own records and selling them online.
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Sometimes getting upset with yourself is necessary when you face the truth.
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Joanna Priestley is one of the most interesting and adept personal animators and filmmakers. I have enjoyed her work for years and been amazed at how she gets into her own thoughts onto the screen in a very elegant and focused way. You have to see this.
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Free time keeps me going.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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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.
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When you get to be 23, 24 or 25, you start to freeze up and become an adult.
GUS VAN SANT