Gus Van Sant Quotes

Raman Raghav' was shot on location, but there are many stylistic things in it. I like this mixture of documentary and extreme stylization.

I've heard it said many times, 'Let's work on the look of the film,' but that doesn't work with me.

With the dramatic canvas, I found you could still operate with the documentarist's observational eye.

I came from the school of cinema verite documentaries, which was: Do not manipulate reality as it was happening but create a narrative in the editing room.

When we made 'Primary,' it was just one camera. We were trying to make ourselves inconspicuous.

Critics can say what they like about the films, but very often, there's a certain expectation of documentaries that they're supposed to be like PowerPoint presentations. I see documentaries as movies. So when I see some critics writing that we could have done without the recreations altogether - well, perhaps.

You should bear in mind that almost all my documentaries are feature films in disguise.

When I'm making documentaries, I think a lot about how fiction films play. I want them to have the pacing, the twists and the character development of fiction films.

The best director is the one you don't see.

When people come to me with an idea and they say, 'We can do it found footage or traditional,' I always say to do it traditionally.

My background is in filmmaking, and my mentor is Dusan Makavejev, who combined fiction and documentary.

My favorite way of making films - and what has allowed me to get key scenes in 'Cartel Land' and 'City of Ghosts' - has been when I've been able to operate alone.

I think Direct Cinema's trying to be insightful by looking at reality in a very close way while, in fact, much more is staged than we like to think. In cinema verite, it's about trying to make something invisible visible - the role of fantasy and imagination in everyday life.

There is a porous membrane between a documentary that doesn't use interviews and what you would call a neorealist hybrid film.

When I think about the new film, I think I can do whatever I want with fiction, but the more documentary it is, the better it will be because that's what I'm good at. I'm good at observing people's behavior and putting these unspoken things into movie contexts in ways that other people can sometimes miss.

We are not documentarians, we are filmmakers.

I'm a documentary filmmaker by training. You got to start with the real people and the real place.

I'm always reaching for something we really haven't done, and War of the Worlds has a lot of this sort of documentary look to it and first-person camera view that is a new thing for me. I've done some stuff like that before, but nothing like the extent of this and digitally.

It slightly depends on your perspective, sort of how you look at these things, but when I sit down to write a script, I'm not planning to write a script; I'm planning to make a film, and so I only see the script as being just a step there.

I try to learn from both, from features and documentaries. In both cases you have to find a way to make the camera as discreet as possible, and flexible enough to be able to capture the moment when it happens. I know from documentary how to not have a preconceived idea of what the scene could be.

For seven years, I made films in the cinema verite tradition - photographing what was happening without manipulating it. Then I realised I wanted to make things happen for myself, through feature films.

So much of art-making is about reducing things to the essentials, so I don't feel particularly crippled by this. I don't want it to look natural because then I would be making a documentary film.

The message films that try to be message films always fail. Likewise with documentaries. The documentaries that work best are the ones that eschew a simple message for an odd angle. I found that one of the most spectacular films about the Middle East was 'Waltz With Bashir,' or 'The Gatekeepers,' or '5 Broken Cameras.'

I'm drawn toward filmmakers who have a very distinctive voice. I really appreciate people who push themselves and, therefore, push the medium forward.

I never thought I was doing the same thing as directors like John Carpenter, George Romero, and sometimes even Hitchcock, even though I've been sometimes compared to those other guys. We're after different game.