“Whether a filmmaker or not, I can be a fan because it has so many symbols and situations that reflect life itself, growing up. Even growing up in the suburbs, you still have friendships the same way these kids have friendships.”

Guy Maddin on L’âge d’or: “I stumbled across it up here in Canada. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the French network, used to run silent movies on Sunday night. For some reason, I was in the habit of tuning into the French channel because they also ran a lot of nudity. It was something you kept trying to dial on your TV like a slot machine, just to see what kind of jackpot you could hit on the French channel. Every now and then, it was remarkable what you could come across. This is what I came across one night. Yeah, it literally is like a slot machine sitting in the corner of your living room, and when you were alone, you would just go over there and spin the channel selector and hope it comes up cherries or whatever. It was a tradition that I’d forgotten about until just now.”

“When you fly with the camera you don’t have any sense of danger because you’re focused on what you’re doing. Like when I did a video for Björk in the Icelandic landscape, ‘Joga.’ We had small planes and a helicopter, and I was hanging out of the helicopter. Ordinarily, I would never do that. I’m really scared when I fly, and I had just a safety rope with a little hook. If I forgot to put the hook on, I would just be dead, basically. When I was shooting, I was never afraid of anything. But when the film would start to run out, I would realize, ‘Whoa! What’s happening here?’ and panic.”

“I was hooked on Persona from the first images: a projector being set off and the arc light coming to life and then a very fragmented sequence of very powerful images—Christ’s hands being nailed into the cross and a strange puppet play. It was like nothing I’d ever seen.”