The Saddest Music in the World | |
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Directed by | Guy Maddin |
Screenplay by | Guy Maddin George Toles |
Based on | The Saddest Music in the World by Kazuo Ishiguro |
Produced by | Niv Fichman Daniel Iron Jody Shapiro |
Starring | Mark McKinney Isabella Rossellini Maria de Medeiros David Fox Ross McMillan |
Cinematography | Luc Montpellier |
Edited by | David Wharnsby |
Music by | Christopher Dedrick |
Distributed by | IFC Films |
Release date |
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Running time | 99 minutes |
Country | Canada |
Language | English |
Budget | CAD $3.8 million (estimated)[1] |
The Saddest Music in the World is a 2003 Canadian film directed by Guy Maddin. Budgeted at $3.8-million and shot over 24 days, the film marks Maddin's first collaboration with actor Isabella Rossellini.[1]
Maddin and co-screenwriter George Toles based the film on an original screenplay written by British 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.[2] 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.