47+ Guy Maddin Quotes On Society, Politics And World

Guy Maddin is a Canadian screenwriter and filmmaker. He is known for his unconventional style of filmmaking, which often uses techniques such as silent film, black and white, and archival footage. He has written and directed several feature films, shorts, and documentaries, and has received numerous awards for his work. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Guy Maddin on love, society, life.

Top 10 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. Some Jungian or Freudian would tell me I'm just trying to go back to the womb... at gunpoint, if necessary.
8. Thank God I've never been taken to task on a talk-radio show. I won't go on a talk-radio show.
9. I feel the need to chastise myself. A movie that's a partial musical, full-on melodrama, should require a tremendous amount of planning.
10. I like going out to popcorn-munchers.

Guy Maddin Short Quotes

• Hollywood isn't exactly dragging me, or even aware of me.
• Making the ballet really taught me how to get things moving. Ballet dancers don't stand still.
• Those are my goals, you know. To be smart, tasteless, and feeling. Something to shoot for.
• In many relationships that I've had people just try to own the other person.
• The bone-breaking thing is something that I put in many narratives.
• I've never made movies to reach millions of people.

Guy Maddin Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If I feel like crying, I'll just cry in a dream. Something I really try not to do in my waking hours. I like good melodrama because it's just an undumping of all these compulsions we feel that we work so hard to master during our waking hours. No wonder we crash to sleep in bed at night. We have to, otherwise we'd just spend our waking hours shredding the feelings from everybody else. — Guy Maddin

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

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

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

I like the way we get to be uninhibited in our dreams, we don't' need to repress our behaviours like we do in our daily lives. If we lust after someone in a dream we get to possess him or her, if we dislike someone we get to express it or even strike out at them. Something I wouldn't think of doing, I don't have the courage, and it's not right either. — Guy Maddin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life Lessons by Guy Maddin

1. Guy Maddin's work emphasizes the importance of experimentation and creativity in storytelling, showing that stories can be told in unique and unconventional ways.
2. He demonstrates that taking risks and pushing boundaries can lead to innovative and inspiring works of art.
3. He also emphasizes the importance of collaboration, often working with other artists to create his films, which can be seen as a lesson for aspiring filmmakers.