Best 72 quotes of Gus Van Sant on MyQuotes

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.

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.

And Later I Thought, I Can't Think How Anyone Can Become a Director Without Learning the Craft of Cinematography.

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.

Apparently there’s this kind of songbird that thinks it dies every time the sun goes down. In the morning, when it wakes up, it’s totally shocked to still be alive—so it sings this really beautiful song.

As I do with most films, I try and find some music that you could use throughout, not just a sampling of lots of different artists.

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.

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

Digital information, for every type of storage, is unfounded. If everything is on a hard drive and the hard drive freezes up, your whole photography collection could just go away. We can still look at printed photographs of our grandparents. We can physically hold them in our hands and look at it.

Even if you try to copy a film shot by shot, you still can't. It's still your own film.

Even when you're making a movie about life, death is a presence, and I guess it's part of my dramatic viewpoint. I'm not sure why exactly.

For all the boredom the straight life brings, it's not too bad.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If a movie isn't released, it's one thing, but if you know it will be, it's nice to have closure and see it come out.

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.

I find it interesting, the different rules that apply to journalism and drama, even though journalism has become more and more about entertainment, and entertainment has become more and more about journalism.

If it were up to the executives, they probably wouldn't have directors at all.

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.

If you put up posters around town for high-school kids, high-school kids will come. If you're casting politicians, you can't put up posters and have politicians come down.

I have my ideas of what a good documentary is, but drama is a different animal because you're arranging everything.

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.

I knew about Heatmiser, and I saw them one time at Pine Street [later changed to La Luna], which was the center of a lot of alternative bands during the 80s. But I didn't really know too much about their music.

I'm a junkie. I like drugs, I like the whole lifestyle, but it just didn't pay off.

I mean, I think I'm pretty sentimental.

I'm going in a really weird I-don't-know-where direction, but I prefer anything [different] from how standardized filmmaking has become.

I'm thinking of remaking 'Psycho' again. Doing a third remake. The idea this time is to really change it - we're talking about doing a punk rocker setting.

In rare cases, I've had music before I shot the movie. I think that for 'Good Will Hunting' I had an Elliot Smith record or a couple of them and I just somehow felt like the sound had something to it that reminded me of the story. So in that case there was music beforehand.

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.

I think that in some cases, I've made films that have a sentimental quality, at least as part of the film.

I try to get to know the actors as much as I can. I feel like I'm friends with them for starters and for a week or two, we rehearse when they're getting the costumes together.

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.

It's easy to keep score at a football game because it's just how many times you get the ball over the goal. But, when you ask an audience to tell us how many times the invisible ball got over the invisible goal, and they go, "Well, it was 46," they're just making it up. So, if you're listening to that, as though you're actually listening to the score of a football game, you're misleading yourself.

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.

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.

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.

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

I was petrified because all my friends would be going to Washington, DC, to protest. I was sixteen, and I was like, "I don't think I'll be going with you guys," just because I was scared. Then you saw the news, and cops - not students in schools with guns - cops are killing sixteen year old protesters on the news. To me that was more horrifying, to have the authority figures actually killing people on the evening news, than to have another student firing a gun.

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.

Modern-day cinema takes the form of a sermon. You don't get to think, you only get to receive information.

My art teacher in junior high was a very out gay man and a mentor to me.

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.

My family moved a lot as a kid. We started in Colorado, where I lived for five years. We moved to Chicago for two years, to San Francisco for one year, Connecticut for seven, Oregon for a couple years, and then I went to school.

Narcotics have been systematically scapegoated and demonized. The idea that anyone can use drugs and escape a horrible fate is ananathema to these idiots. I predict that in the near future, right wingers will use drug hysteria as a pretext to set up an international police apparatus.

No construction stiff working overtime takes more stress and straining than we did just to stay high.

Now the music industry is sort of like a Craigslist venture, right? Where you're making your own records and selling them online.

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.

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.