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
Even if you try to copy a film shot by shot, you still can't. It's still your own film.
If it were up to the executives, they probably wouldn't have directors at all.
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.
I've always been attracted to temporary families.
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.
Yeah, I try to be really calm.
I think that in some cases, I've made films that have a sentimental quality, at least as part of the film.
The media has gone through lots of things that make it a less foreign thing to have your lead character be gay.
I'm normally drawn to something I haven't done and seen before.
If I'm 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.
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.
Modern-day cinema takes the form of a sermon. You don't get to think, you only get to receive information.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've always been interested in how to present something that relates to our reality - which is not really... I don't even know if documentary itself does as good a job. It has its own problems in trying to get at the reality of the situation.
I had wanted to do a comedy.
Everything's changing so fast that it's sometimes hard to keep up.
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.
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.
Free time keeps me going.
When you get to be 23, 24 or 25, you start to freeze up and become an adult.
I mean, I think I'm pretty sentimental.
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.
You know, I don't think I had a concept of what I would be or do.
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.
My department is to get actors to do stuff.
I think that what I'm attracted to is people who are wild. But the self-destructive side comes out of the wild side. The wildness is very different from me. That's why I think I like it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, I want to do everything in sort of a documentary style, ever since I started in the '80s.
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.
Sometimes, the people who are helping you can drop the ball.
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.
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.
My art teacher in junior high was a very out gay man and a mentor to me.
My family moved a lot as a kid. We started in Colorado, where I lived for five years. We moved to Chicago for two years, to San Francisco for one year, Connecticut for seven, Oregon for a couple years, and then I went to school.
Usually people just hire me.
I'm usually trying to react to what the actors are coming up with. And then the environment, and then the story.
There's always a risk if you don't do things the way you've done things before.
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.
One of the things that is devastating is I realise I haven't been living a different life than when I was, like, 12. I'm shocked at how reclusive I've been since then. I was unaware of it until recently.
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.
I think over the course of 14 films, I'm returning to a place that I know to tell a story... the same way Spielberg returned to fantasy, Lucas returned to the 'Star Wars' saga, or John Ford returned to the western.
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.
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.
