162 Quotes by Gus Van Sant

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.