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 saddest, music and/or world:
“We look before and after,
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)
“I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man: wine is not so noble a liquor; and think of dashing the hopes of a morning with a cup of warm coffee, or of an evening with a dish of tea! Ah, how low I fall when I am tempted by them! Even music may be intoxicating. Such apparently slight causes destroyed Greece and Rome, and will destroy England and America.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Only a philosophy of eternity, in the world today, could justify non-violence.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)