The Saddest Music in The World

The Saddest Music in the World is a 2003 Canadian film directed by Guy Maddin, budgeted at $3.8-million (a large budget in Canadian terms) and shot over 24 days. The film was Maddin's first collaboration with Isabella Rossellini, who subsequently appeared in a number of Maddin's films, and co-created a film with him about her father Roberto Rossellini.

Maddin and co-writer George Toles based the film on an original screenplay written by Booker Prize-winning novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, from which they kept "the title, the premise and the contest – to determine which country’s music was the saddest" but otherwise re-wrote. Like most of Guy Maddin's films, The Saddest Music in the World is filmed in a style that imitates late 1920s and early 1930s cinema, with grainy black-and-white photography, slightly out-of-sync sound and expressionist art design. A few scenes are filmed in colour, in a manner that imitates early two-strip Technicolor.

Read more about The Saddest Music In The World:  Plot, Cast, Release, Awards and Honors, Critical Reception

Famous quotes containing the words the world, saddest, music and/or world:

    The population of the world is a conditional population; these are not the best, but the best that could live in the existing state of soils, gases, animals, and morals: the best that could yet live; there shall be a better, please God.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
    The saddest are these: “It might have been!”
    John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892)

    Yes; as the music changes,
    Like a prismatic glass,
    It takes the light and ranges
    Through all the moods that pass;
    Alfred Noyes (1880–1958)

    We used chamber-pots a good deal.... My mother ... loved to repeat: “When did the queen reign over China?” This whimsical and harmless scatological pun was my first introduction to the wonderful world of verbal transformations, and also a first perception that a joke need not be funny to give pleasure.
    Angela Carter (1940–1992)