Gus Van Sant Quotes

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

I used to take photographs just to remember people.

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

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

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.

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

Sometimes getting upset with yourself is necessary when you face the truth.

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.

I'm normally drawn to something I haven't done and seen before.

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.

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

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

When you get to be 23, 24 or 25, you start to freeze up and become an adult.

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

The rules of suspense are that you do know, and you just don't know when. In the Hitchcock rules of suspense, you are supposed to know that there is a bomb on the bus that might blow up, and then it becomes very tense - but if you don't know that there's a bomb and it just blows up, then it's just a surprise.

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.

Sometimes, the people who are helping you can drop the ball.

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

You never look at the backside of a mirror because when you do, it'll affect your future because you're looking at yourself backwards. No, you're looking at your inner self and you don't recognize it because you've never seen it before.

I'm usually trying to react to what the actors are coming up with. And then the environment, and then the story.

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.

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

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.

There is a common theme, though, in the stories I have told, which are usually associations of characters or families that are formed outside of a family circle.