Gus Van Sant
Gus Van Sant
Gus Green Van Sant, Jr.is an American film director, screenwriter, painter, photographer, musician and author who has earned acclaim as both an independent and more mainstream filmmaker. His films typically deal with themes of marginalized subcultures, in particular homosexuality; as such, Van Sant is considered one of the most prominent auteurs of the New Queer Cinema movement...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth24 July 1952
CountryUnited States of America
extension films originally sort
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.
argue boys executives guess harder man million movies sort
I hadn't made a big-budget film, and in Hollywood there's a sort of man and boys situation. You're a man, you make $80 million movies! As if it's harder to make an $80 million movie. Well, I guess businesswise it is because you have more executives to argue with.
goes good last worried
I think that for the actors, the last thing that they want is a director that's not watching, a director that goes 'Okay, it sounded good to me,' and they were doing something else or preoccupied with something else because they were worried about the light changing.
guy leading positive somebody supposed
I had never had a positive leading character - somebody that wasn't an antihero, or who wasn't more of a guy that you're supposed to be on the side of.
check scene watching whether
Usually, when I read something, I'm looking for the story first. And then, when I re-read it, I check every part of it to see whether every scene is necessary. You imagine yourself watching the movie, to see whether or not you're losing the through-line of the story.
approving characters classic direct inventions remind shoot simple watch
I don't usually direct actors in the classic sense of that word. Instead, I try to remind the characters before the shoot what's going on in a very simple way. I then watch them, their inventions as actors, approving or not approving what they're doing.
chose material million
I did 'Mala Noche' as a way to do something that was outside of the system, because I was outside of the system, and I deliberately chose material that Hollywood wouldn't touch in a million years.
bigger california death less lots stuff valley
Death Valley is really wide-open - it's bigger than Rhode Island - and it's less a part of California than an ungoverned territory, so there's lots of weird cops-and-robbers stuff going on.
school character high-school
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.
war shopping yuppies
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.
writing thinking trying
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.
movie nice actors
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.
real people feelings
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.
stuff actors department
My department is to get actors to do stuff.