Gus Van Sant Quotes

I really think the biopic thing so rarely works, because people's lives don't have a dramatic shape that can be satisfying.

The research period of a film is the most exciting part of the process, and filming is sometimes a letdown because when you're dealing with biopic material, the real thing is always much more intricate than the story told in the film.

I feel like biopics are so difficult to get around.

I don't get the point in a lot of biopics, they're boring. You know what's gonna happen. You're just watching actors show off.

I think the struggle, whenever you make a film or television movie based on a real person's life, is finding a dramatic arc that will hold an audience's attention.

A biopic would have required hiring an actor, and I always wanted to just let Bobby be Bobby. My thought was it would make it a more universal story to focus on ordinary people rather than this extraordinary man.

I've read the 'Public Enemies' script and, no, it's not 100 percent historically accurate. But it's by far the closest thing to fact Hollywood has attempted, and for that, I am both excited and quietly relieved.

Each movie you do about a real person is like a painting, and you choose certain things in the painting that you want to pull out and you want to show.

If there is a tendency in modern television I hate, it is the unstoppable march of the dramatic reconstruction to tell the stories of anything from an ancient Egyptian battle to the early life of Paul Gascoigne.

If you make a movie about Elizabeth I, how much of the dialogue is her real words? Audiences know when they go see a movie that it is fiction.

The novel succeeds on terms exclusive to literature. A good film succeeds on terms exclusive to the cinema. That's why so many bad novels can become good movies, like 'Jaws' or 'The Godfather.'

'Monuments Men' is not a docudrama. It's not a documentary.

I always thought that as much as I love 'White Jazz,' it became almost unfilmable at some point, because there are so many strands, so much, and it became so psychotic... that's what made it such a great book, but those things would not carry over into the filmic realm, I thought, with ease.

Biographies are, in their nature, far more difficult to make into films than novels, because novels come with plots constructed and dialogue written, whereas I don't invent dialogue for my subjects or plot their lives for them.

It's true that I don't rearrange that much in the fiction, but I feel if you change even one name or the order of one event then you have to call it fiction or you get all the credits of non-fiction without paying the price.

When you boil it down, most movies are message movies. And I think careers are made in message movies.

It's hard when you're doing a film based on a true story to really figure out what all those relationships were.

As long as 'Pearl Harbor' stays in the past, it's perfect; when it wretchedly changes gears in the late going, it becomes the wrong kind of same old story: Hollywood stupidity and callowness, writ large across the sky.

If you lined up 10 writers and asked them to write a movie about Steve Jobs, you'd get 10 very different movies.

I wouldn't let a biopic be made on me. That's because I don't believe in them. I don't like them.

I think there's been a tendency to place me in what has been characterised as the 'moral centre' of the film. In films like 'The Ice Storm' and 'The Crucible' and 'Nixon,' that's the sort of the persona that emerged.

Biographies never feel as real as the best fiction. There is such a discontinuity between the narrative and the material it comes from, which is always such a mixed bag of letters, recollections, and other data.

'Richard III' is a really difficult play to film - it's involved, often obscure. I felt it absolutely necessary to do more simplification than I've ever done before.

On the sets of the movie 'Manto,' I found that one of the challenges of embodying real-life stories is the mixed medium of facts and imagination, and how one's collage of experiences colour ones representation on celluloid.

It's always a challenge to adapt a novel for screen, a visual medium.