Gus Green Van Sant Jr. Quotes

• Yeah, I try to be really calm.

  Gus Green Van Sant Jr.

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• 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.

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

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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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• When I was 14, I felt very rundown; I had a home to go to, but I felt like I was 60 or something, older than I feel now. And I don’t know if it’s something that happens at 14, or whether it was adolescence or whether I was gay, or closeted gay, or whatever it was, I felt that.

  Gus Green Van Sant Jr.

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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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  Tags in Dominant, Though

• Well, I want to do everything in sort of a documentary style, ever since I started in the ’80s.

  Gus Green Van Sant Jr.

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  Tags in Documentary, Well

• Usually when I read something, first of all I’m looking for the story and then when I reread it, I’m sort of checking every part of it to see if every scene is necessary.

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• Usually people just hire me.

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• There’s always a risk if you don’t do things the way you’ve done things before.

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• 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.

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  Tags in Maps, Detailed

• 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.

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• 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.

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• There are all kinds of ways that people present their films, but that’s kind of a good feeling, if you can make it seem like the characters are really there.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• The media has gone through lots of things that make it a less foreign thing to have your lead character be gay.

  Gus Green Van Sant Jr.

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• The dark comedies tend to be in a non-releasable area. There can be romantic comedies. There can be dramas. But there’s no ‘dark comedy’ inbox for the advertising.

  Gus Green Van Sant Jr.

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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.

  Gus Green Van Sant Jr.

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Gus Green Van Sant Jr. (70)

Birth:	24th July, 1952
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Author, Director, Musician, Painter, Photographer, Screenwriter

About

Gus Green Van Sant is an American film director, screenwriter, painter, photographer, musician, and author. He is a two-time nominee of the Academy Award for Best Director—for Good Will Hunting and Milk, both of which were also nominated for Best Picture—and won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival for his film Elephant. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

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Births

• 1908 - Max Bill
• 1831 - Mark Rutherford
• 1944 - Steve Carlton
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• 1938 - Lucien Bouchard

Deaths

• 1940 - Nathanael West
• 1943 - Beatrix Potter
• 1998 - Virginia Graham
• 1899 - Dwight L. Moody
• 2001 - Lance Loud