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

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.

cameras want watches

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

womb ifs trying

Making the ballet really taught me how to get things moving. Ball... by Guy Maddin

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

dancer ballet moving

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!"

wrecks half thinking

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.

devil care attitude

I feel the need to chastise myself. A movie that's a partial musical, full-on melodrama, should require a tremendous amount of planning.

planning musical needs

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.

children years thinking

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.

flavor lazy worship

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.

sphinx territory interesting

The bone-breaking thing is something that I put in many narrative... by Guy Maddin

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

breaking-things bones narrative

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.

space feet long

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

bananas mischief