Quotes By Gus Van Sant

Everything's changing so fast that it's sometimes hard to keep up.

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.

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.

Even if you try to copy a film shot by shot, you still can't. It's still your own film.

I've always been attracted to temporary families.

Yeah, I try to be really calm.

Gay marriage is the last bastion of, to me... as a legal, ceremonial, sentimental and religious side, it's one of the last steps. Retaining your job being one of the earlier steps, like, not getting kicked out of your job because you're gay.

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

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.

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

I had wanted to do a comedy.

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.

Usually people just hire me.

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.

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.

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

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.