Top 70 Gus Van Sant Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Everything’s changing so fast that it’s sometimes hard to keep up.”

— Gus Van Sant

2. “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.”

— Gus Van Sant

3. “Free time keeps me going.”

— Gus Van Sant

4. “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.”

— Gus Van Sant

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

— Gus Van Sant

6. “Yeah, I try to be really calm.”

— Gus Van Sant

7. “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

8. “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.”

— Gus Van Sant

9. “I’m a junkie. I like drugs, I like the whole lifestyle, but it just didn’t pay off.”

— Gus Van Sant

10. “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.”

— Gus Van Sant

11. “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.”

— Gus Van Sant

12. “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

13. “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.”

— Gus Van Sant

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

— Gus Van Sant

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

— Gus Van Sant

16. “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.”

— Gus Van Sant

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

— Gus Van Sant

18. “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.”

— Gus Van Sant

19. “The reason I know about ‘Tomb Raider’ is from when I was researching ‘Elephant.’ It was 1999, and I was trying to research the Columbine-massacre kids, and they had played video games, and I, at the time, had never really seen one. It was a world I didn’t know.”

— Gus Van Sant

20. “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.”

— Gus Van Sant

21. “Wong Kar-Wai is a really great inspiration. He’s always referred to as the Jimi Hendrix of filmmaking.”

— Gus Van Sant

22. “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

23. “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

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

— Gus Van Sant

25. “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.”

— Gus Van Sant

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

— Gus Van Sant

27. “Even if you try to copy a film shot by shot, you still can’t. It’s still your own film.”

— Gus Van Sant

28. “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

29. “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.”

— Gus Van Sant

30. “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.”

— Gus Van Sant

31. “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.”

— Gus Van Sant

32. “There is a way that a younger person can accept the inevitable problem that they’re going to die, whereas somebody a little bit older might be overcome.”

— Gus Van Sant

33. “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.”

— Gus Van Sant

34. “For all the boredom the straight life brings, it’s not too bad.”

— Gus Van Sant

35. “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

36. “There’s a lot of films that have relatively rigid road maps because they have a script and others that are less rigid because they have less of a script, like ‘Elephant.’ The road map becomes more interpretive, maybe, than one with a detailed script. Editing-wise, they all have their problems.”

— Gus Van Sant

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

— Gus Van Sant

38. “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

39. “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.”

— Gus Van Sant

40. “I mean, I think I’m pretty sentimental.”

— Gus Van Sant

41. “I’m normally drawn to something I haven’t done and seen before.”

— Gus Van Sant

42. “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

43. “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.”

— Gus Van Sant

44. “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

45. “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

46. “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.”

— Gus Van Sant

47. “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

48. “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.”

— Gus Van Sant

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

— Gus Van Sant

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

— Gus Van Sant