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

Categorized in : Father Home Childhood

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.

back-alleys cat thinking

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!

autumn winter long

I like going out to popcorn-munchers. by Guy Maddin

I like going out to popcorn-munchers.

popcorn going-out

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.

independent trying country

Hollywood isn't exactly dragging me, or even aware of me. by Guy Maddin

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

hollywood

Thank God I've never been taken to task on a talk-radio show. I w... by Guy Maddin

Thank God I've never been taken to task on a talk-radio show. I won't go on a talk-radio show.

tasks thank-god taken

In many relationships that I've had people just try to own the ot... by Guy Maddin

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

persons trying people

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.

writing character people

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.

dream people thinking

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.

static black-and-white looks

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

feel-good hard-work people

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.

archives twenties long

I started making movies in my late 20s, that time in an artist's career that often sees artists just imitating things that he or she loves. I just wanted to be great like L'Age d'Or vintage Buñuel. I wanted to be Busby Berkeley, for crying out loud! I wanted to have chorus girls stomping their heels in my casting office. I wanted to be Erich Von Stroheim monogramming underwear for extras. So I started off my career doing that, and that was fun, but I realised I wasn't very good at it.

girl artist fun

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.

independent race america

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.

house night art

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.

taken art moving

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.

reading simple book

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.

dislike-someone dream thinking

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.

dream sleep night

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.

filled-out tired editing