Guy Maddin Quotes About Film

Quotes about: Film

• The fact that you couldn't see Alfred Hitchcock's first film The Mountain Eagle, or that you couldn't see so many of F.W. Murnau's masterpieces, or that you couldn't see so many of Oscar Micheaux's really intriguing race melodramas, made with fierce independent spirit against all odds in '20s and '30s America. That stuff haunted me. They really did bring to life a sense of 20th Century history: cultural history, pop history, gender politics and race politics, socio economic history, all that stuff. It was bracing and instructive.

  Guy Maddin

  Independent, America, Race

  Source: thequietus.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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• When I started making films I just decided "I'm the filmmaking equivalent of a garage band and I'll just make my garage band movies." But even the same musicians from garage bands would go to my movies and you could tell what they liked from the way that they dressed and they would be the first ones to walk out.

  Guy Maddin

  Musician, Would Be, Band

  Source: thequietus.com

• 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

• Seances is an internet project where I intended to adapt at least a hundred and maybe three hundred lost films into ten and twenty minute long fragmentary versions. We then uploaded them to an internet archive that fragmented them even more. We treated them like shreds of lost movie spirits and allowed these spirits to interrupt each other in non-consecutive collisions that formed new movies.

  Guy Maddin

  Long, Twenties, Archives

  Source: thequietus.com

• 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

• The Forbidden Room and Seances are related. Both of them are made up of lost film matter adapted through the medium of me and Evan, but the way they present themselves is totally different. One of them is this big Russian nesting doll of movie narratives and the other is much shorter experience on the internet.

  Guy Maddin

  Dolls, Different, Narrative

  Source: thequietus.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 wandered around in a confused daze for most of the '90s unable to even remember why I wanted to be a filmmaker and somehow I found myself at the turn of the century. I used lost film as an excuse to express myself.

  Guy Maddin

  Confused, Daze, Remember

  Source: thequietus.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

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