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 MaddinI 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 MaddinI 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 MaddinSome Jungian or Freudian would tell me I'm just trying to go back to the womb... at gunpoint, if necessary.
Guy MaddinIt'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.
Guy Maddin