Sant'agostino Quotes & Sayings

My department is to get actors to do stuff. — Gus Van Sant

Being amongst rough lives and confusion does not make you less, it only makes your beauty shine out more clearly. — Sharon Sant

It was a room full of ghosts, arranged in readiness for days that would never happen. — Sharon Sant

There's always a risk if you don't do things the way you've done things before. — Gus Van Sant

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. — Gus Van Sant

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 Van Sant

Jacob glanced across at the woman. 'She'd have you for breakfast, mate.'
'Yeah,' Luca countered, 'maybe I want to be had for breakfast. — Sharon Sant

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. — Gus Van Sant

Movement provides life's questions and life's answers simultaneously. — Gus Van Sant

I'm not being analytical. I just create everything intuitively. If you're too analytical, what you're doing probably ends up being too specific. — Gus Van Sant

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. — Gus Van Sant

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. — Gus Van Sant

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. — Gus Van Sant

I'm a junkie. I like drugs, I like the whole lifestyle, but it just didn't pay off. — Gus Van Sant

Moving provides meaning for our humble (if still vicious) life of four-dimensional existence. Four-dimensional existence makes the frightening fox hunt into an entertainment, or war into a pastime or a sport. Even when evil is dull and monotonous, there tends to be a lot of movement, action and entertainment involved.
Maybe movies are evil. — Gus Van Sant

Casting the locals is my primary concern because all the other things you assume will be manageable. — Gus Van Sant

For all the boredom the straight life brings, it's not too bad. — Gus Van Sant

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

Everything's changing so fast that it's sometimes hard to keep up. — Gus Van Sant

You know, I don't think I had a concept of what I would be or do. — Gus Van Sant

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. — 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. — Gus Van Sant

Sadie gave her head an exaggerated scratch. 'Don't come too close if you know what's good for you, these nits are on steroids. — Sharon Sant

Sometimes he was weird, sometimes he was Captain Douchebag, but he was always my best friend. — Sharon Sant

That was when I realised a sad but incontrovertible truth: I was a geek, and there was no getting around it. I could dress in Kate's clothes, but it didn't make me Kate. — Sharon Sant

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. — Gus Van Sant

Upon entering my vein, the drug would start a warm edge that would surge along until the brain consumed it in a gentle explosion.It began in the back of the neck and rose rapidly until I felt such pleasure that the world sympathizing took on a soft, lofty appeal. — Gus Van Sant

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. — Gus Van Sant

Free time keeps me going. — Gus Van Sant

It's easy to keep score at a football game because it's just how many times you get the ball over the goal. But, when you ask an audience to tell us how many times the invisible ball got over the invisible goal, and they go, "Well, it was 46," they're just making it up. So, if you're listening to that, as though you're actually listening to the score of a football game, you're misleading yourself. — Gus Van Sant

And that fear I'd felt, the disembodying confusion, seemed to be a drug I was now addicted to, because moving through the ordinary world- watching CNN, reading the Times, walking to Sant Ambroeus to have a coffee at the bar- made me feel exhausted, even depressed. Perhaps I was suffering from the same problem as the man who'd sailed around the world and now on land, facing his farmhouse, his wife and kids, understood that the constancy of home stretching out before him like a dry flat field was infinitely more terrifying than any violent squall with thirty-foot swells. — Marisha Pessl

On some deep, unconscious level, he had always known it to be true. He was an invention, a fictional character. Jacob Lightfoot didn't exist. — Sharon Sant

I've always been attracted to temporary families. — Gus Van Sant

Jake's in trouble.'
Luca rolled his eyes. 'What now?'
'He's gone off somewhere, I think I know where, and I don't think it's good.'
'Cant that boy ever stay in and watch telly like the rest of us? — Sharon Sant

I don't know why Kate was trying to impress him, as far as I could see the guy had all the allure and social grace of a psychotic slug with halitosis and a bad head cold. — Sharon Sant

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. — Gus Van Sant

Be Good-Do Good-Be One — Kirpal Singh

Qualifying an opportunity at the outset helps you determine whether it's worth pursuing at all, and, if it is, with how much effort. — Tom Sant

I try to shoot the first rehearsal because people are more spontaneous. People in real life don't really know where they are going to be either positioning themselves or how they will be saying their words. When people goof during the first take, it usually looks realistic. — Gus Van Sant

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. — Gus Van Sant

I think that in some cases, I've made films that have a sentimental quality, at least as part of the film. — Gus Van Sant

They despise one another, yet they flatter one another;they sant to get above another and get they bow down to one another. — Marcus Aurelius

Now the music industry is sort of like a Craigslist venture, right? Where you're making your own records and selling them online. — Gus Van Sant

Silent is about needing to make a scene shorter by having physical things to cut to. That way, you can manipulate a character to the other side of the room. But, if they say the wrong thing, it might locate that action in a particular part of the scene. It's a mechanical need. — Gus Van Sant

With 'Good Will Hunting,' Miramax made certain the recruited audience wasn't expecting to laugh at Robin Williams like they normally do. From my limited experience, you can really blow test screenings by conducting them in the wrong way. — Gus Van Sant

Sometimes getting upset with yourself is necessary when you face the truth. — Gus Van Sant

I find it interesting, the different rules that apply to journalism and drama, even though journalism has become more and more about entertainment, and entertainment has become more and more about journalism. — Gus Van Sant

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. — Gus Van Sant

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. — Gus Van Sant

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. — Gus Van Sant

I don't think American independent films have ever really been particularly experimental, except for the original guys from the '60s who were huge influences, like Stan Brakhage, Robert Breer, and Stan van der Beek. They were the true independents. — Gus Van Sant

Usually people just hire me. — Gus Van Sant

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. — Gus Van Sant

Joanna Priestley is one of the most interesting and adept personal animators and filmmakers. I have enjoyed her work for years and been amazed at how she gets into her own thoughts onto the screen in a very elegant and focused way. You have to see this. — Gus Van Sant

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. — Gus Van Sant

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. — Gus Van Sant

I was petrified because all my friends would be going to Washington, DC, to protest. I was sixteen, and I was like, "I don't think I'll be going with you guys," just because I was scared. Then you saw the news, and cops - not students in schools with guns - cops are killing sixteen year old protesters on the news. To me that was more horrifying, to have the authority figures actually killing people on the evening news, than to have another student firing a gun. — Gus Van Sant

Apparently there's this kind of songbird that thinks it dies every time the sun goes down. In the morning, when it wakes up, it's totally shocked to still be alive - so it sings this really beautiful song. — Gus Van Sant

No construction stiff working overtime takes more stress and straining than we did just to stay high. — Gus Van Sant

I'm going in a really weird I-don't-know-where direction, but I prefer anything [different] from how standardized filmmaking has become. — Gus Van Sant

Modern-day cinema takes the form of a sermon. You don't get to think, you only get to receive information. — Gus Van Sant

Well, I want to do everything in sort of a documentary style, ever since I started in the '80s. — Gus Van Sant

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. — Gus Van Sant

With the warmth of an alien sun on his back, Jacob took a deep breath at the door and knocked. — Sharon Sant

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. — Gus Van Sant

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. — Gus Van Sant

I knew about Heatmiser, and I saw them one time at Pine Street [later changed to La Luna], which was the center of a lot of alternative bands during the 80s. But I didn't really know too much about their music. — Gus Van Sant

My art teacher in junior high was a very out gay man and a mentor to me. He would tell us about Greenwich Village and show us the 'Village Voice' and describe his life, but it was all sort of subversive and below the radar. — Gus Van Sant

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. — Gus Van Sant

A sant is a person who apprehends that truth and reality converge. — Unknown

Elijah blinked in dazzling sunlight and took a deep breath. The sweet-pepper scent of meadow grass told him immediately where he was. Winded, he skidded to a halt as the portal spat him out. Above him stretched skies of cornflower blue, dotted with threadbare white clouds sailing over like cotton galleons on the summer breeze. — Sharon Sant

When you're on a film and you're doubting something, it's usually because you don't think the audience is going to like it. — Gus Van Sant

Yeah, I try to be really calm. — Gus Van Sant

It's not hard to understand why an accomplished director like Gus Van Sant (whose most recent success, Good Will Hunting , gave him mainstream clout) would be interested in making this film. The lure of an exact remake presents a tremendous challenge. Unfortunately, it was undoubtedly a lot more stimulating for Van Sant and his crew to make Psycho than it is for an audience to watch it. [C]uriosity is going to be one of the primary reasons why people pay money to see this movie; boredom will be the predominant result. — James Berardinelli

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. — Gus Van Sant

It doesn't seem right to throw dirt at you when you're dead ... — Sharon Sant

Narcotics have been systematically scapegoated and demonized. The idea that anyone can use drugs and escape a horrible fate is ananathema to these idiots. I predict that in the near future, right wingers will use drug hysteria as a pretext to set up an international police apparatus. — Gus Van Sant

I'm usually trying to react to what the actors are coming up with. And then the environment, and then the story. — Gus Van Sant

What are we doing tonight, Spock?' Luca grinned at Jacob.
'Apparently, he's going to New Zealand,' Ellen replied with heavy sarcasm.
'New Zealand?'
'It's code for Outer Space. — Sharon Sant

Digital information, for every type of storage, is unfounded. If everything is on a hard drive and the hard drive freezes up, your whole photography collection could just go away. We can still look at printed photographs of our grandparents. We can physically hold them in our hands and look at it. — Gus Van Sant

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. — Gus Van Sant

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. — Gus Van Sant

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. — Gus Van Sant

I used to take photographs just to remember people. — Gus Van Sant

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. — Gus Van Sant

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. — Gus Van Sant

It's when you start doing things for free, that you start to grow wings. — Gus Van Sant

I'm fading, Bethany, I know it. I think that's what happened to my dad, that's why I can't see him. One day I'll be so see-through that you'll forget I was ever here, just like everyone else has. — Sharon Sant

When you get to be 23, 24 or 25, you start to freeze up and become an adult. — Gus Van Sant

Nightingale
Did I wound you, mutilate. Take away your voice. Did I cut something from you. Leave you locked in silence?
This is what you do: you sing. Every part of you. Your locks of hair sing, your eyes, your hands, your smile. If I listen closely I can even hear your blood.
Was I the one that took that away?
Go down to the water where we used to swim. Stand under the sky at dawn when the sky is streaked with blood. Open your mouth and shout our secret to the waves. The ocean will be your voice. You won't have to carry anything alone. Little Sister, my Spring, April. Little nightingale. Sant at the edge of the water. Your voice will come back to you. Maybe. If I am silent. — Francesca Lia Block

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. — Gus Van Sant

If you never want to work, love what you do. — Lily J. Sant

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. — Gus Van Sant

I like so many different directors: Scorsese, Coppola, Cassavetes, Jarmusch, Gus van Sant, Woody Allen and the greats like Fellini, Bergman, Tarkovsky and among current filmmakers von Trier, Ang Lee, Wong Kar-wai. — Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

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. — Gus Van Sant

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 Van Sant

I mean, I think I'm pretty sentimental. — Gus Van Sant

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. — Gus Van Sant

I've had the opportunity to work with so many great directors. Different styles, as well, like Gus Van Sant. He just does the casting and the milieu and let's you do your thing, quietly. Bertolucci, who can talk to you about your internal world in quite a creative way or just say, 'Well, put your hand over here.' — Keanu Reeves

If it were up to the executives, they probably wouldn't have directors at all. — Gus Van Sant