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“It’s probably the most pessimistic, downbeat film about America ever made, because no one wins anything, everything’s sad, there’s no happy ending. On any level. [laughs] And it’s just bleak. And yet the technique through which this bleak story is told is so dynamic and exciting that it actually makes you feel the opposite of what you would feel if you just go by the story. And that’s the interesting tension in that movie.

Guy Maddin on L’âge d’or: “I love when you can hear the tape recorder or whatever they used, the big discs, when they started recording the sound. You can hear the stylus digging into the grooves and you could hear the silence ending, the records being changed in the soundtrack. I loved the feeling, the clunkiness. It’s like looking at a painting and loving the paint and not what it’s representing.”

“It has the shape of boy meets girl, gets girl, and loses girl, and then gets to go magma-headedly, mad love crazy…The real connection for me comes from the climax of the movie, when Gaston Modot has lost Lya to another, even older man. He’s just completely molten-headed with jealousy and despair, and he starts throwing flaming pine trees out the window. He starts ripping apart pillows and walking around with handfuls of feathers. He’s doing all the things that I felt I had just done just earlier that year when I had been dumped and walked around with a plow in my living room”

“There’s something very alive about this film. What it’s about and the degree to which the filmmaker courageously put herself into a situation that she was not from. You don’t have to have known her history to know that she was an outsider. She had the courage to go into a situation, spend the time there, and really try to understand it. You feel that all through the movie.”