Latest Guy Maddin Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• If you sit in on a film class with students, their big complaint is "That's not like real life." They don't realize that they don't really want to watch real life. They don't want to sit and watch a security camera. There's a strong gravity in all of us as viewers - even in myself now and then - to want to see real life depicted. But you're looking for it in the wrong places. It's in little allegories, in something removed.

  Guy Maddin

  Strong, Real, Students

  Source: film.avclub.com

• No one ever gets to see Foley artists at work, and they're so strange. They see the world differently: things as things that might make sounds that sound like other things. They see the whole world that way - like when you're a house painter, all you see is a bunch of houses that need painting.

  Guy Maddin

  Artist, House, World

  Source: film.avclub.com

• I define melodrama as truth uninhibited. It's the kind of truth we dream about. Rather than melodrama being exaggerated, it's actually uninhibited. And it's a big difference - people look down on exaggerations, but I think they should look up to the un-inhibitions.

  Guy Maddin

  Dream, Thinking, People

  Source: www.avclub.com

• I've long believed that anybody who is in the act of remembering childhood is a poet, because you're thinking back on times when you were making false models of the universe. Everything is kind of irrational and poetic then.

  Guy Maddin

  Thinking, Long, Childhood

  Source: www.avclub.com

• Silent films are fairytales. All stories are more or less fairytales, and removing speech makes everything more universal. It makes specific characters stand in for everybody, so actions take on fairytale significance. And the writing has to be pared down to represent people as types, too.

  Guy Maddin

  Character, Writing, People

  Source: www.avclub.com

• Hollywood isn't exactly dragging me, or even aware of me.

  Guy Maddin

  Hollywood

  Source: www.avclub.com

• Thank God I've never been taken to task on a talk-radio show. I won't go on a talk-radio show.

  Guy Maddin

  Taken, Thank God, Tasks

  Source: www.avclub.com

• I probably live in the best province for independent filmmakers. Manitoba has a sort of thieving-magpie approach, trying to lift productions from other provinces as well as from other countries. It makes it very hard for me to leave.

  Guy Maddin

  Country, Independent, Trying

  Source: www.avclub.com

• If I hope to survive, I have to acknowledge the natural selection that goes on when film stocks and cameras are eliminated from the world. And film viewers won't want to watch the same thing over and over again from me.

  Guy Maddin

  Want, Cameras, Watches

  Source: www.avclub.com

• I like going out to popcorn-munchers.

  Guy Maddin

  Popcorn, Going Out

  Source: www.avclub.com

• Some Jungian or Freudian would tell me I'm just trying to go back to the womb... at gunpoint, if necessary.

  Guy Maddin

  Trying, Womb, Ifs

  Source: www.avclub.com

• If I want to keep making films for a few more years, I probably should be willing to adapt. I've sort of evolved into the filmmaker that I am because of natural selection anyway.

  Guy Maddin

  Years, Want, Film

  Source: www.avclub.com

• Older recordings just seemed to take me somewhere into my own pre-history. That's always been an interesting, sort of sphinx-like territory for me to wander around in.

  Guy Maddin

  Interesting, Sphinx, Territory

  Source: www.avclub.com

• I think I've indulged in a pathological, chronic nostalgia over the years, which I've traced back to my childhood. I was the last of four children, born well after the other three, so I was left on my own in a big, quiet house where most of the people had left, and even the echoes of a happy family had all died out.

  Guy Maddin

  Children, Thinking, Years

  Source: www.avclub.com

• I was too lazy to read, and I was even too lazy to imagine scenarios drawn up by the pictures. They just suggested a flavor to me. I swallowed them whole, like hosts. It was a form of worship.

  Guy Maddin

  Lazy, Flavor, Worship

  Source: www.avclub.com

• The spirit of my films... I always want them to be kind of contrarian. Meticulous on the one hand, but unbelievably sloppy and careless on the other. I guess that's what you get anyway, if you're not planning very much.

  Guy Maddin

  Hands, Be Kind, Want

  Source: www.avclub.com

• I've never made movies to reach millions of people.

  Guy Maddin

  People, Made, Millions

  Source: www.avclub.com

• I went to see Chicago after I finished shooting, and say what you want about it, but that thing was so meticulously planned. It was planned like NASA planned its trips to the moon. It made me feel like some sort of horrible dilettante.

  Guy Maddin

  Moon, Chicago, Shooting

  Source: www.avclub.com

• I'm starting to frighten myself, because I'm backsliding into my devil-may-care attitude. I'm sure it's going to catch up with me.

  Guy Maddin

  Attitude, Devil, Care

  Source: www.avclub.com

• I feel the need to chastise myself. A movie that's a partial musical, full-on melodrama, should require a tremendous amount of planning.

  Guy Maddin

  Musical, Needs, Planning

  Source: www.avclub.com

• I literally designed and built the sets myself, and I kind of liked it. I always gave myself eight weeks to do that - sometimes even 10 - and the shooting took five or six weeks.

  Guy Maddin

  Eight, Six, Shooting

  Source: www.avclub.com

• I'm a nervous wreck. If it's a 20-day shoot, at lunchtime on the first day, I'm thinking "Only 19 and a half days to go... I can make it!"

  Guy Maddin

  Thinking, Half, Wrecks

  Source: www.avclub.com

• Making the ballet really taught me how to get things moving. Ballet dancers don't stand still.

  Guy Maddin

  Moving, Dancer, Ballet

  Source: www.avclub.com

• I've usually never felt comfortable shooting until things were kind of claustrophobic, but ballet dancers need a lot of space, so the sets that I designed had to be big. Normally, I'd design a kitchen that was half the size of a normal kitchen, just to make everything feel kind of womb-like, but the kitchen in a ballet would have to be like 100 feet wide and just as long.

  Guy Maddin

  Feet, Space, Long

  Source: www.avclub.com

• I guess to the outside observer, all my movies look like musty old black-and-white artifacts, but my earlier movies had been more static and tableaux-ish.

  Guy Maddin

  Black And White, Looks, Static

  Source: www.avclub.com