Guy Maddin Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

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

Guy Maddin

#4. I love Toronto's long autumns, warm with windy swirls of golden spores, redolent with giant, sun-roasted leaves flapping up and down the streets, and horrible winter always seeming far, far off!

Guy Maddin

#5. I love melodrama. I love the simple fact. When you read Euripides he's a page turner. It's like reading a Mexican comic book romance.

Guy Maddin

#6. Sadness is just happiness turned on its ass - it's all showbiz!

Guy Maddin

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. It feels good to finally stand on top of vanquished sloth, and actually impress some people as a hard worker.

Guy Maddin

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. You get to have some mischief before you're basically a blackened banana, impotent, and nothing to be afraid of.

Guy Maddin

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

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

Guy Maddin

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

Guy Maddin

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

Guy Maddin

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

Guy Maddin

#28. I like going out to popcorn-munchers.

Guy Maddin

#29. The bone-breaking thing is something that I put in many narratives.

Guy Maddin

#30. 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

#31. 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

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

Guy Maddin

#33. 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

#34. 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