Gus Van Sant Quotes
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Everything's changing so fast that it's sometimes hard to keep up.
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Yeah, I try to be really calm.
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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.
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Wong Kar-Wai is a really great inspiration. He's always referred to as the Jimi Hendrix of filmmaking.
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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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No construction stiff working overtime takes more stress and straining than we did just to stay high.
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The artist himself is actually the subject in everything after, say, 1900. Eventually, art becomes so removed from the community that you have to know about the artist before you can even look at the painting, because there is a conceptual idea going on.
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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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Upon entering my vein, the drug would start a warm edge that would surge along until the brain consumed it in a gentle explosion.It began in the back of the neck and rose rapidly until I felt such pleasure that the world sympathizing took on a soft, lofty appeal.
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A lot of times, I relied on connections through my agency, just for financing and things like that. Even when I'm looking for a million and a half dollars to do a small film, there can always be hold-ups, because it's a large amount of money for some people, and it's a small amount of money for other people. In any case, it's significant enough to where you have to jump through a lot of hoops to get it to happen. Sometimes, the people who are helping you can drop the ball. And, of course, the reason agents want you to do bigger projects is that they make a bigger cut.
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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.
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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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I have my ideas of what a good documentary is, but drama is a different animal because you're arranging everything.
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If Im diagnosed with cancer I might become despondent, but someone young might not, and they might need connections with somebody outside their circle of family because their family is so despondent.
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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.
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I used to take photographs just to remember people.
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My art teacher in junior high was a very out gay man and a mentor to me. He would tell us about Greenwich Village and show us the 'Village Voice' and describe his life, but it was all sort of subversive and below the radar.
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Sometimes getting upset with yourself is necessary when you face the truth.
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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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Yeah, Kubrick's a big influence. In something like 'A Clockwork Orange,' he is trying to use the practical light - I mean, at least he says that in his interviews, like they're not using traditionally Hollywood lights. In 'Elephant' we basically used no lights; we never really adjusted.
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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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I mean, I think I'm pretty sentimental.
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My department is to get actors to do stuff.
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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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Well, I want to do everything in sort of a documentary style, ever since I started in the '80s.
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I don't think American independent films have ever really been particularly experimental, except for the original guys from the '60s who were huge influences, like Stan Brakhage, Robert Breer, and Stan van der Beek. They were the true independents.
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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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Sometimes, the people who are helping you can drop the ball.
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Because I didn't have brothers, I was always interested in the kids down the street that had four brothers in their family, so I became one of them - but it was not my family. I've always been attracted to temporary families. They tend to be lost characters.
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I'm not being analytical. I just create everything intuitively. If you're too analytical, what you're doing probably ends up being too specific.
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