Gus Van Sant Quotes

It's kind of dangerous to cut in the camera, but that's the only way I know how to direct.

The great thing about making an ensemble show is it becomes modular. It might work on the page to cut from one scene to another, but on the screen, it's more powerful to take that second scene and move it first or move it later.

But I suppose film is distinctive because of its nature, of its being able to cut through time with editing.

In editing, it's amazing how you choose the in and out points. What you cut on is everything for creating tension. It's amazing how expanding a shot by five seconds can just ruin the tension.

In certain fight scenes in 'Raging Bull' - for example, the shorter ones - I literally just took the head and tail of the shot and put it together, and it all worked beautifully.

When you're writing TV or movies your vernacular is time, it's all based on rhythms, a character takes a beat or two characters have a moment, like everything is about time. And when you're writing a comic, everything is about space. It's how many panels to put on a page, when should you do a full page splash, what is the detail that you see in any particular image.

Even other movies I wasn't involved with, I'd watch them edit 'cause I really enjoy watching them go through their process. It's a very economical, educational process.

I've never been a big fan of the music-video style of editing movies that crept in the last few decades. I like stuff that's able to take its time.

I like to shoot scenes where I can see the beginning, middle and end of the entire scene. But, when you edit a movie together, you can just cut right into the middle. You don't need to see them walk into the room and put their jacket on the chair. There's always a lot of shoe leather that you can remove.

There's something very strange and wrong-seeming about drawing realistic eyeballs in comics, at least in the mode of comics where action is carried more by the movement of the characters rather than where narration links disparately framed selected images.

I love revising. If you demystify the process, it comes down to four strategies: what can I do to make the draft better; what should I cut out to make it stronger; what do I need to do to clarify it; and finally, what should I reposition.

Let the cut tell the story. Otherwise you have not got dramatic action, you've got narration.

I was fascinated by the effects that could be achieved by editing. The cutting room became a magic workshop for me.

The most natural thing for us is drawing. The characters [in Persepolis] are hand drawn. We're not technical people. We don't know how to type.

My dream is to be a character in a Wes Anderson movie. I just love how interesting and eclectic and stylized his characters are, and I would love to dive into that world.

Whenever I get distracted or bored, my eyes wander over to that chalkboard and I read the words. Some of them grow on me, and others annoy me. I attack the latter with eraser and chalk, and keep nudging at them until I like the way they look and sound. Others never make the cut at all and simply get erased. Perhaps one day I will sell these on eBay to RPG players who need names for characters or alien races.

To age with dignity and with courage cuts close to what it is to be a man.

When we think about living donor transplant, what we're banking on is the ability of the liver to regenerate itself. Now, it's not the same sort of regeneration we think about with the starfish where we cut off the arm and it grows a new arm. With the liver, what happens is the remaining liver gets bigger, and your body knows the size of the liver that it needs, and when it recognizes that there is not enough liver, it sends nutrients and signals to the liver and says "get bigger."

[I watch] Fincher, Spielberg, Cameron, McTiernan. Just people who are good at staging action. I like to know where I am. I don't like the kind of cutting where you don't know where you are.

I was playing this sort of asshole actor [in The Jenny McCarthy Show]. And we shot the pilot, and it was a guaranteed go. It was going to be 24 [episodes] on the air. No questions from NBC. And we shot the pilot, and I was in Toronto doing a movie, and I got a call saying they cut the character, that I was off the show.

I try to see as much dance, theatre and films as I can because all of it feeds me in a way that I need feeding for what I do.

I've always tried to make the strip animated, even when the characters aren't moving, with expressions or perspectives or some sort of exaggeration. There's great potential for that which has yet to be fully mined.

When you manage to express something with a look and the music instead of saying it with words or having the character speak, I think it's a more complete work.

There is the need for someone against which our characters can measure themselves. Without a ruler, you won't make the crooked straight.

For me in a film, almost every scene you end up cutting a bit of the start of it out, and some of the end of it out because there's always...once you've rehearsed it and shot it, it feels like a couple of times and you can always get out sooner.