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 saddest, music and/or world:

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

    “Franceska: I was happy in the life I built up for myself. I put a fine high wall of music around me and nothing could touch me. I was safe and secure. And then you had to come along and knock it all down and I hate you for that.
    Maxwell: On the contrary, you love me.”
    —Muriel Box (b. 1905)

    “You may drive a dog off the King’s armchair, and it will climb into the preacher’s pulpit; he views the world unmoved, unembarrassed, unabashed.”
    —Jean De La Bruyère (1645–1696)