Guy Maddin Quotes

Quotes about:

• 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

  15 Copy quote

• I just respect audiences to understand that that's what goes on in movies. I just try to make movies that respect the intelligence of the audience. Respect that they understand that the narrator is always unreliable and respect that they understand that the medium can do whatever it wants.

  Guy Maddin

  Trying, Narrators, Goes On

  Source: thequietus.com

  14 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• Whenever you take a subject you're obsessed with or that haunts you, and make a movie about it, you're converting it into work units that need to be completed. You gotta turn it into a treatment, a script, a grant application, a bunch of forms to be filled out, a shooting schedule, casting sessions, auditions, shooting, editing, music compositions, the film festival circuit, interviews even. And by the time you've finished the process you're so sick and tired by something that was once very precious to you that you're done with it.

  Guy Maddin

  Tired, Editing, Filled Out

  Source: thequietus.com

  4 Copy quote

• I guess what inspires me most is the desire to draw out feelings that feel best expressed on the written page by really good authors, and I'm not a really good author. I feel like my job as a filmmaker is to eff the ineffable, to take feelings that only poets could describe with words and try to project them on the screen for viewers to feel. I don't think I've succeeded once but in the act of trying I've come up with all these other results which sometimes intrigue me.

  Guy Maddin

  Jobs, Thinking, Inspire

  Source: thequietus.com

  10 Copy quote

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

  Guy Maddin

  People, Made, Millions

  Source: www.avclub.com

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• In many relationships that I've had people just try to own the other person.

  Guy Maddin

  People, Trying, Persons

  Source: collider.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• But in the act of attempting to imitate I discovered that I had a voice of my own. Whether I liked it or not was another matter. I found that I was my best or that I pleased myself most or came closest to my goals when I was tapped into something autobiographical.

  Guy Maddin

  Voice, Goal, Matter

  Source: thequietus.com

  10 Copy quote

• Those are my goals, you know. To be smart, tasteless, and feeling. Something to shoot for.

  Guy Maddin

  Smart, Goal, Feelings

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• Shredded feelings are the fuel that feed the machinery of melodrama. And good melodrama just has honest feelings and is honest about the way people interact.

  Guy Maddin

  People, Feelings, Fuel

  Source: thequietus.com

  6 Copy quote

• You also convert real memories, whatever that means, into film versions of those memories. Because by the time you've finished the project you can't remember the real memories anymore, you just remember the film versions of them. And then if the film failed you have distaste for them. So I don't think about that stuff anymore.

  Guy Maddin

  Memories, Real, Mean

  Source: thequietus.com

  7 Copy quote

• I've been so lazy all my life. I used to literally lie on the couch, up until the age of 35, fearing that my bones were dissolving like sugar cubes, from disuse.

  Guy Maddin

  Lying, Lazy, Age

  Source: www.avclub.com

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• It's funny how film is the slowest art form to adapt to freedom. It's had freedom all along. It could've done whatever it wanted to. You know the same freedom that do-it-yourself punk and post-punk musicians had in the late 70s and ever since. That's about the time I started getting interested in film, and I assumed that film would be moving along with the other pop culture forms. Its finally done it but it's taken decades for it to catch up just to basement band level.

  Guy Maddin

  Art, Moving, Taken

  Source: thequietus.com

  4 Copy quote

• Whatever experimental film aromas cloaked my movies were because I'm a gleefully clumsy, primitive filmmaker. I really like traditional pleasingly narrative films, but I also just couldn't resist throwing in the disruptive. It seems to me that art-house film is at its glorious zenith right now, maybe it can even get better? There's just so many good films, you know Cemetery Of Splendour, Arabian Nights, Miguel Gomes, just so much great work coming out.

  Guy Maddin

  Art, Night, House

  Source: thequietus.com

  4 Copy quote

• I was completely broke, so I started saying yes to everything. I said yes to a woman who approached me about shooting the Dracula ballet, even though I felt like I was probably going to sabotage it.

  Guy Maddin

  Ballet, Saying Yes, Shooting

  Source: www.avclub.com

  13 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  9 Copy quote

• Well, I had a wolverine. It was supposed to be a cat, but Jason (Patric) is allergic to cats. I can't remember where I got it. Some back alley taxidermy, maybe? But I think I got it at The Bay taxidermy department. Downtown Winnipeg. Next to the tumbleweeds.

  Guy Maddin

  Cat, Thinking, Back Alleys

  6 Copy quote

• I am no longer haunted by my dead father. I am no longer haunted by childhood home. There's so many things I've cured myself of without realising and now when I'm embark on a project I know I'm going to cure myself of it.

  Guy Maddin

  Father, Home, Childhood

  Source: thequietus.com

  6 Copy quote

• I just discovered that there were so many lost movies that were all mine to take if I wanted to take them. I was drunk on greed when I encountered this motherlode of utterly fascinating narratives that time's great river washed up on its banks for me to just scavenge, and not even rub clean, just repurpose and take credit for. It was kind of one of those weird dreams that where you keep finding free money.

  Guy Maddin

  Dream, Rivers, Drunk

  Source: thequietus.com

  7 Copy quote

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