Guy Maddin: But in the act of attempting to imitate I discovered that...

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

narrators goes-on trying

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

be-kind want hands

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 inspire thinking

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

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

Guy Maddin

millions made people

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

lazy age lying

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

childhood long thinking

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

Guy Maddin

smart goal feelings

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

saying-yes shooting ballet

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

shooting eight six

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

film want years

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

shooting chicago moon

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 band would-be

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

daze confused remember

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

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

real memories mean

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

fuel feelings people

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

childhood home father

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 narrative different

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

drunk dream rivers

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.