Gus Van Sant Quotes

And later I thought, I can't think how anyone can become a director without learning the craft of cinematography.

You have to give directors and cinematographers a word blueprint for visuals, but I had to learn that from experience.

Great art direction is NOT the same thing as great film direction!

The cinematographer's basically translating the director's vision into imagery.

I do like being in front of the camera more and more. Having experience behind it has taught me about lighting and angles, how to move, and what looks good and what doesn't.

Being a cinematographer taught me a lot. I got to expedite the visions of many directors and learned how to navigate many styles and worlds.

There are lots of different parts of movie-making that I participate in, but my favorite part is the making of it. I'm scared, every day. I keep thinking someone's going to throw me the ball and I'm going to go, "Oh, wow. Oh, god. I just messed that up."

I did a good bit of episodic television directing, but directing a movie is so much more complicated. And there's so much more responsibility because the medium is very much a director's medium. Television is much more of a producer's writer's medium so a lot of the time when you're directing a television show they have a color palette on set or a visual style and dynamic that's already been predetermined and you just kind of have to follow the rules.

Designing the technical aspects of my camera movement for me is very important. I want the camera to be a big part in telling the story as well, like what I really believe in with all the films I make.

I think maybe making films is something innate you can't really teach to begin with.

I'm a visual filmmaker so the camera is a big part of my storytelling tool and it's something that I really rely on to tell a scene or create the suspense that I need and create the emotion of a scene or a sequence.

When you're making a film you're thinking about how to tell the story visually.

I like photography and I write; I also write music. One day I would like to direct [films] as well.

I would love to be able to get behind the camera and direct actors. I think that would be a lot of fun.

I've watched other directors as an actor and I picked up little things here and there about cameras, [but] I wouldn't consider myself the guy you'd want to hire to do Star Trek.

All film directors, even the ones using 3-D today, want you to look at what they chose.

Every year or so, I try to do something; it keeps me refreshed as to what's going on in front of the lens, and I understand what the actor is going through.

Films are not mathematics - that's the first thing you need to understand. At least, that's how I feel. They are not words on paper. Films are made with people, with teams and with individual bundles of creativity coming together to fulfill the vision of an individual who is the director of the film.

Most screenplays depend primarily on the vision of a director.

In my films that I've directed, and my work in commercials and videos, I've rarely used handheld. It's just not something I'm drawn to, but I've seen it done very well.

When you make a movie, you do it so piecemeal. You're doing it, not only scene by scene, out of order, but shot by shot, line by line. And there's this idea that the director has the whole thing in his or her head and they're going to somehow weave it all together in the end.

I was very glad later when I was directing that I wasn't in the hands of a cinematographer and hoping that he would do it well. I would know what he was doing, and we could discuss how that scene would look.

I think the camera was always my obsession, the camera movements. Because for me it's the most important thing in the move, the camera, because without the camera, film is just a stage or television - nothing.

Right before 'American Dreams,' I started to pursue these avenues, like short films and getting into a couple night courses to really study photography and cinematography, and the language of visual storytelling.

The notion of directing a film is the invention of critics - the whole eloquence of cinema is achieved in the editing room.