I just saw 'Dracula: Pages From A Virgin's Diary' this evening. It was great. I really love Guy Maddin's retro style. I haven't seen any of his other films, other than a short piece of 'Gimli Hospital' and a few short works. I think I might pick up the boxed set of his films that Zeitgeist put out -- mainly because I'm dying to see 'Heart Of The World,' the short film he did for the Toronto film festival a few years back (does anyone know of a clandestine location from which I can download it?). Has anyone else seen any of his stuff, and how is it?
ive only seen his dracula as well. thought it was allright.
I'v seen a handfull of his films. They are all along the same sort of lines so if you like one, you'll probably like the others. I do. I think because he is so well established now, it works, but when he was a young man, I probably would have thought he was a little pretentious making German Expressionist films. Oh well. He's an extremely interesting guy. I watched a whole special on him on the Canadian IFC. He paints all of his story boards. He's not the kind of guy you would expect to be making expressionist films.
Trev
I wish I get the IFC...hopefully I'll get it in my dorm. Anyhow, I saw Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary at the Atlanta Film Festival. This just wasn't my thing. It's a only a little over an hour, I was nearly asleep. I haven't seen the original Dracula, so maybe that could've aided in understanding/liking the movie.
I've only seen a few silent movies, I can actually name them: Metropolis, Birth of a Nation, Man with Movie Camera, and this. Metropolis took me three days to watch because I could not get into it at all. The other two were pretty cool, especially MWMC.
It does help to know the Dracula story, since although it's followed very faithfully, it's also highly compressed. But as for old silent films, they really are wonderful, you just have to be prepared for them. It's a slightly different mindset. One thing you might try doing to keep yourself awake is watching them with an appropriate modern movie score. I watched a lot of German expressionist horror films with the Interview With The Vampire score, and it worked great.
Back to Guy Maddin, though -- I think I'll order that boxed set. He has intrigued me. I heard an interview with him on Fresh Air last month -- his next movie has Mark McKinney from Kids In The Hall and Isabella Rosellini in it.
The Heart of the World is great. It's like Baz Luhrmann c. 1921.
Meanwhile:
http://www.greencine.com/article?action=view&articleID=118&pageID=223
http://villagevoice.com/issues/0319/maddin.php
Definitely both worth reading.
I've recently seen his new film, The Saddest Music in the World, at a festival. It was pretty good. It's got Isabella Rosellini as a legless beer baroness during the 1930s or so. It was shot on Super 8, I think.
Quite. Interesting.
a guy at chud.com just reviewed it and liked it a lot. He compared it to "Moulin Rouge" but stressed that it was a film which stood in a corner all by itself. Im intrigued. I saw "dracula" and enjoyed it. I think it did some great stuff.
Dude, this thread should really be in The Directors Chair forum with all the other directors. I was going to create a Guy Maddin thread there but then I saw this one here. lol!
Anyways, I'll be seeing Saddest Music either tomorrow or the next day. I can't wait. I'm a huge Guy Maddin fan. He's probably second right after Lynch as far as my favorite filmmakers currently working. I think The Heart Of The World is 6 of the most perfect minutes of cinema ever. And Dracula: Pages From A Virgins Diary was my favorite film of 2003. Archangel and Careful are his masterpices as far as his feature films go. Some of the most intentive ways of experimenting with cinema and storytelling I've ever come across. But many people I've talked to said Saddest Music is his best feature film now. So I'm very excited. I'll be posting my thoughts on it as soon as I see it.
Yay, some one moved it. :wink:
Well, I finally saw The Saddest Music In The World last night and I loved it. I think all those Guy Maddin fans I talked to may be right. This probably is his best feature film. It has an even better (and the more I think about it, even deeper) script than Careful and I connected with the characters a lot more too. Isabella Rossillini is brilliant as an amputee who decides to hold a contest to find the worlds saddest music. It's hilarious at first and just seems like a great joke but then the more you learn about her character, as well as her ex husband and his two sons, you start to really care about what happnes to them all. It's a great film that takes place in Guy Maddins usual alternate cinema reality that seems to blend different eras of his favorite types of movies. Especially german expressionism. This is a man who loves movies and is inspired by them almost as much as Tarantino.
I think this, Kill Bill 2, and Eternal Sunshine are not only my 3 favorite movies so far this year, but 3 of my favorite movies of all time too. Come to think of it, this is becoming a great year for movies. I can't remember the last time this many great movies came out in the first half of a year. What with those 3, Dogville, The Dreamers and soon Coffee and Cigarettes, Before Sunset, etc. Usually all these great art house movies are saved for the end of the year.
Guy Maddin has another feature film out this year that is playing tomorrow at the Los Angeles Film Festival called Cowards Bend The Knee. It's getting really good reviews and some are eve saying that it's better than Saddest Music! They say it's his most autobiographical film. I already bought my ticket and I can't wait to see it. I don't know when this film will be released but hopefully some time this year if it goes over well at LAFF. Though I'm sure it won't be big since Saddest Music was considered his biggest film and that went nowhere. Oh well. I'll let eveyrone know what I think of Cowards Bend The Knee later.
Anyone here ever seen Maddin's The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity? It's a short, about 6 minutes I think. It doesn't get the love that "Heart Of The World" does, but I like it the best of what I've seen of his films (which would be: these two, Careful, and Twilight of the Ice Nymphs).
I really want to see Dracula and The Saddest Music In The World soon, though, as I hear they surpass everything he's done before.
2LB
Here's the page for his newest, The Brand Upon the Brain
http://www.thefilmcompany.org/BUTB.html
There are more pictures here (http://www.twitchfilm.net/archives/002450.html#more) and an interview here (http://reelchicago.com/inter.cfm).
Enjoy.
FEATURE - Maddin, Rossellini Make More Music
Filmmaker Guy Maddin and actress Isabella Rosellini's My Dad is 100 Years Old is a lot shorter than their first collaboration. But it is no less of a Toronto triumph. By Pam Grady, FilmStew.com
At first glance, the headline on the front page of Toronto's Sun tabloid - 'Guy and Doll' - said it all. But upon closer inspection, the photo was not of sublime Winnipeg filmmaker Guy Maddin and his current partner in cinematic alchemy, Isabella Rossellini, but rather of Guy Ritchie and his missus, Madonna.
Now, it is true that Ritchie's latest amped up thriller, Revolver, did take a bow at the Toronto International Film Festival. But since it is yet another one of Ritchie's over-caffeinated crime dramas, shouldn't truth in advertising have dictated that the headline read, 'Guy and Moll?'
In truth, the only covers that Maddin, that mad genius of Manitoba, will most likely ever grace are of serious film magazines, even with one of the world's most beautiful women in the frame. Yet had an editor at the Sun experienced some kind of glorious epiphany and put Maddin and Rossellini on the paper's front page, he would only be paying the pair their proper due. Their collaboration, My Dad is 100 Years Old, is a short, only 16 minutes long, but it is one of the best movies to come out of this year's festival. And that is saying something considering that there are some fantastic films here, including Neil Jordan's seductively vivid Breakfast on Pluto, Stephen Frears' amiable but pointed Mrs. Henderson Presents, the offbeat and irresistible mockumentary Brothers of the Head, and Ang Lee's moving cowboy romance Brokeback Mountain.
Written by and starring Rossellini in all of the parts (save one - her father's belly) and directed by Maddin, My Dad is 100 Years Old is a big, fat valentine to the actress' legendary father, Roberto Rossellini. Paired at the festival with his seminal work, 1945's Roma, Citta Aperta (Rome, Open City), the short pays tribute to the neorealist auteur through his daughter's memories and her imagined conversations with her mother, actress Ingrid Bergman, and some of his contemporaries, including Alfred Hitchcock, Charles Chaplin, producer David O. Selznick, and Roberto Rossellini's one time assistant Federico Fellini.
Rossellini himself appears only in photographs and as his daughter remembers him from her earliest years, as a large belly, a playground for his seven children. She theorizes that if her papa had been a fish, he would have been a seahorse, so that he might have given birth.
Much of the movie is framed as a debate pitting her dad's instincts to make his films as realistic as possible ('Probable films,' he calls them, because he is documenting things as they probably happened) against the Hollywood filmmakers' more commercial instincts and Fellini's erotic dreamscapes. It is an often hilarious and always affectionate portrait of a rigorous artist, but also sad, as Isabella wonders nearly 30 years after Roberto's death how well he is remembered and where his legacy stands. Is there anyone left to follow his rigorous example?
At first glance, Maddin - whose own movies are willfully archaic and whose expressionistic, often hallucinatory style Roberto Rossellini would no doubt disapprove of - seems like an odd choice to direct this project. Isabella first met him when she played an embittered, legless beer baroness in his Depression-era musical, 2003's The Saddest Music in the World. She was already casting about for some way to commemorate her dad's 2006 centenary and to renew interest in his work, particularly among the young who may not have even heard of him. She knew their would be a retrospective film series, but she wanted to do something different, as well, and hit on the idea of a movie.
Certainly, she was aware how different Maddin's style is from her father's, but through all her years in the business, she has grown used to that. "I remember always that working later on as an actress or being married to film directors that I would always get slightly nervous when a camera moved or went above the eye level, because I remember my father was so rigid about it," she laughingly tells FilmStew, adding that ex-husband Martin Scorsese was a particularly flagrant violator of Roberto Rossellini's precepts. "'Oh Marty,' I thought, 'Oh that camera movement is totally immoral.'"
But Maddin seemed like the logical director for the project for reasons that went beyond style. "There is a such a nostalgia in his films, in his images. In his films, there is a nostalgia of cinema, and so I thought it was a good marriage," she explains.
Not only that, but through working on Saddest Music, she began to look upon Maddin as something of a mentor, as she observes, "Guy has this incredible gift to make you feel like you could do it, you could write, you could make movies. Everybody else is so precious about their work. It makes you feel like you could never do what they do. That's how it started."
"That's what I've always done with young filmmaker pals. They ask if they should go to film school. Just start making movies. Just get out there," Maddin concurs, but he admits he was 'ludicrously flattered' when Isabella approached him, as well as impressed.
"Isabella had already gone out and written kind of an autobiography," he continues. "And she has her own unique writing voice and that voice was there in the script that she showed me, and I just thought it was such a neat balance of a little girl remembering, a grown woman remembering."
"It something playful; something frankly addressing death, a really nice mixture of things. That's something I've always tried to get into my work and here she got it so effortlessly, just in the way she speaks, just in the way she writes."
Maddin was moved that she wanted to entrust the Rossellini legacy to him, but he admits he also feared letting that legacy down. "I was doubly honored and doubly frightened, but I always work better when I'm frightened, though, so I felt that this was something that no matter how frightened I am of screwing up, I'd better do this."
The different characters worked their way into Isabella's script through her memories. She remembered a letter from Hitchcock she found among her mother's things after Bergman died, in which her Spellbound director berated her for falling in love with Rossellini. She recalls Selznick's admiration for her dad's work, even though it was so different from his own productions.
Fellini was Rossellini's best friend, but the two men would go through periods when they wouldn't speak to one another. "Especially when Fellini did those films - more than about dreams, about sex," Isabella avers. "I think my father was very embarrassed by Fellini's interest in sex. It wasn't Fellini. It was really a generation. Fellini was slightly younger than my dad. After the war, psychoanalysis, dreams, sexuality became things of great interest in the arts in general. Father and those men of his generation were embarrassed by it."
Conventional wisdom at the time Rossellini and Bergman began their storied love affair was that it was the director who ruined the star's career, as they scandalized Hollywood and as Bergman relocated to Europe to work with her new husband. In My Dad is 100 Years Old, the Bergman character insists it was the other way around.
Isabella explains, "All of a sudden [the world] saw this man who had gained a reputation of morality, of doing a film that - because Italy was the enemy, Italy was the fascist, and all of the sudden, he redeemed with his films, the enemy of the world. He made them accept Italians and separate them from their political ideology. All of the sudden he fell in love with my mom, and he was tainted by sex. So, it's true, Mama, in a way, the gossip around their love affair was very destructive, especially for my dad as a serious filmmaker."
Originally, Isabella and Maddin talked about other actors taking on some of the roles, but eventually they came to a realization about the nature of the project. Maddin recalls, "We agreed that since the thing was an expression of love and other thoughts from Isabella, that it made sense that Isabella play them."
Of course, there was one role that svelte Isabella couldn't play and that was her father's belly. She offered the part to Maddin, whose own belly tends toward the plush side, and who admits to a certain regret now in turning it down. He laughs "I was telling Noah Cowan that Isabella was insisting that I play the belly. I'm exaggerating. And he said, 'You turned that down? You could have had on your resume the belly of Roberto Rossellini.'"
Dracula was wonderful. I've become more and more attracted to ballet and intrigued by the possibility of using it extensively in a film, and I liked very much how it was used here. The combination of the beauty of the dance movements and the haunting quality of silent film just really worked well here.
I will be catching up on Guy Maddin's other films.
Quote from: matt35mm on September 24, 2006, 09:13:17 PM
I've become more and more attracted to ballet and intrigued by the possibility of using it extensively in a film
yes, its power to bore is boundless.
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimages.amazon.com%2Fimages%2FP%2FB00004XPPD.01._SS500_SCLZZZZZZZ_V1056676665_.jpg&hash=436b4dd119e979ccfed9f7fac767cd82746dd5a1)
A MAN, A PLAN, A CANARD: WINNIPEG!
Source: Time.com
After Sunday's screening of My Winnipeg, Maddin took some questions about his "docu-fantasia" on the Manitoba city he's lived in all his life. A man in the audience stood up and said he'd been born and raised there before moving to Toronto, and that he liked it. "Don't you like Winnipeg?" the man asked accusingly. Maddin smiled and replied, "You're the one who left it."
I suppose Maddin could make his movies anywhere. But no one else could make them. A crazy-smart mix of avant- and retro-garde, they address big topics (corporate greed, national identity, pre-adolescent lust, family betrayal) in a style that suggests an antique silent film rescued from a dump heap — on Mars. The film stock is scratched, the actors declaim in bombastic gestures, the canned music hits overly ominous chords, and the printed intertitles often read like the mutterings of obsession ("Force!" "Must escape!" "What if???"). If this sounds off-putting, jump back on, because Maddin's films — from Tales of the Gimli Hospital, his first full-length feature 20 years ago, to last year's silent feature Brand Upon the Brain!, and especially his magnificent 6-min. The Heart of the World, commissioned by TIFF in 2000 — are headlong, heartfelt, weirdly sexy and a hoot. I don't want to diminish his artistic achievement, but the Maddin oeuvre is a joy to sit through.
Before seeing My Winnipeg, all I knew about the city was that Maddin came from it. After seeing (and adoring) the movie, I'm still not sure how much of it is verifiably true. A ramble through Google tells me that, as the film tells us, Winnipeg did have a huge department store, Eaton's, where the locals did most of their shopping, and an iconic hockey venue, the Winnipeg Arena, home of the Maroons in the Senior Hockey League and the Jets of the NHL; both these historic sites have been razed. In 1942 the city really did hold an "If Day," dressing its burghers up as Nazis to show its citizens some of the terrors of life under the Third Reich. There was indeed a paddock fire in the winter of 1926 that sent horses fleeing desperately into the icy Red River, where some of them died, frozen, their heads and necks sticking out for months like, Maddin says, "11 knights on a vast white chessboard."
But considering that My Winnipeg was sponsored by Canada's Documentary Channel, you may wonder how many of Maddin's other assertions are factual? Does Winnipeg have "10 times the sleepwalking rate of any city in the world"? Is it really "the coldest city in the world"? I don't know. To me these sound like the boastful statistics that adults feed to an imaginative, impressionable boy, and that stick in his head forever — like the image of those frozen horses.
I also suspect that the portrait of his mother is partly fanciful. She has the melodramatic sulfur of the mad mom in one of David Sedaris' "memoir" stories, the domineering vindictiveness of a shrew-mother from 40s movies. In fact, she's played in the film by none other than Ann Savage, the virulent megabitch Vera in Edgar G. Ulmer's cheapo noir classic Detour. That was 62 years ago, and now, at 86, she is the icy Queen Maddin, standing in for all the city's overbearing women. (As narrator, he says, "Never underestimate the tenacity of a Winnipeg mother"). Still she pops up unbidden in her filmmaker son's memories. Again she quizzes her daughter Janet when the teen comes in to report that she hit a deer and a passing motorist helped put the creature out of its misery. Mother twists the story into an accusation that Janet had sex with a stranger. "No innocent girl stays out after 10 with blood on her fender!"
I do believe, because its recollections are stirred so powerfully here, that Guy and his family lived at 800 Ellis Avenue, with the ground floor a beauty parlor run by his mother and his aunt Lil, and the Maddin residence perched on the floor above. He says that a vent from the salon led directly into his bedroom, "bringing me every bit of gossip that roiled up from that gynocracy ... the smells of female vanity and desperation."
That home life, where father Charlie was off managing the Winnipeg Maroons hockey team and mother was clearly in charge, was so formative to Maddin that he's often recreated it in his films. Here, he decides "to vivisect his own childhood" by renting the old homestead for a month, casting actors as his three siblings and shooting scenes he remembers or imagines from his youth. Savage continues to impersonate his mother; his girlfriend's dog appears as Guy's long-dead pet chihuahua; and since, just before shooting starts, the woman who rented the place to Maddin decides she doesn't want to leave, she becomes an amusingly extraneous figure of the family portrait.
The open scabs Maddin keeps picking at after 40 years; the story of the man hired by the city to exorcise haunted furniture; the seances held in government buildings; the homoerotic camaraderie of the all-boys' swimming pool or the hockey-rink locker room — all these gave me the giggles and the creeps. I haven't laugh so hard, or with such good reason, since seeing Borat in Toronto last year.
And I haven't often found such a cockeyed, clear-eyed justification for nostalgia — which for Maddin can mean both homesickness and sick-of-homeness. His movie, whatever the man in the TIFF audience thought, has a passion and poignancy that can come only from an artist who loves his city, and its people, and his family, for its failings no less than for its chilly charms. An aging prairie town that has lost some of its grandest relics, Winnipeg is like any person, middle-age or older, who cherishes what he once had every bit as much as he regrets what's vanished. As Maddin suggested in the Q&A, home is a place that never leaves you.
I think My Winnipeg is the finest, funniest, saddest film I've seen in Toronto or at any festival this year.
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fgraphics8.nytimes.com%2Fimages%2F2008%2F06%2F08%2Farts%2F08ande-600.jpg&hash=2549d2c2c6edd5ebd9fd08c1194e9cb24f89b269)
Old Stomping Grounds, Hallucinated
By JOHN ANDERSON; NewYork Times
THE documentary form has been twisted in recent years, but few filmmakers have given it as many tortuous turns as Guy Maddin, the Canadian fantasist and director as pretzel maker, does in "My Winnipeg."
Like all of Mr. Maddin's work, this hometown portrait — commissioned by the Documentary Channel in Canada — skates along an icy edge between dreams and lucidity, fact and fiction, cinema and psychotherapy. A baroque survey of his childhood, spent growing up over a hair salon (his memories, Mr. Maddin narrates, are redolent with "the smells of female vanity and desperation"), "Winnipeg" also marks a cosmic collision between man and mother. As played by the film noir legend Ann Savage ("Detour"), the director's mom is imperious dictator and guiding gorgon.
"My Winnipeg" must be approached with wariness. Likewise his claim that, this past Mother's Day, he gave his mother a stroke. "I turned her into a pile of laundry," he said, perhaps ruefully. "It was during a long car ride out to our summer beach cottage. I yelled at her, and she silently and slowly settled down, like a pile of unbagged laundry. I thought she was faking death or something, then I realized, about 90 minutes later, that she had, in fact, had a stroke.
"It was a strange scene, that's for sure."
Strange scenes abound in the films of Mr. Maddin, which are usually described as nostalgic, hallucinatory and/or weird. From the time his horror short "The Dead Father" appeared in the mid-'80s, followed by his feature "Tales From the Gimli Hospital," this prairie poet has been acclaimed as one of the more original minds in contemporary cinema. His oeuvre includes the mock-gothic "Archangel," "Careful" and "Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary," a ballet take on the Bram Stoker tale, rich in the vocabulary of silent cinema.
"There's no point in exhuming 'Twilight of the Ice Nymphs,' " the 52-year-old Mr. Maddin said by phone from Toronto, where he was visiting his daughter and infant granddaughter. "But I just couldn't get myself into a trance. Somebody kept waking me up. I felt no love for the movie before, during or after. I felt like I was part of a sleep-deprivation experiment."
Dreams, and Freudian nightmare, have always been part of the Maddin experience. Whether or not Mrs. Maddin really suffered a stroke ("I think 'stroke' is a regular occurrence," said Mr. Maddin's editor, John Gurdebeke, chuckling), is unclear.
"Luckily for me," Mr. Maddin said of the unfortunate car ride, "she has no recollection of the day." And she hasn't seen the movie either.
Part of the inspiration for making the film, Mr. Gurdebeke said, was Mr. Maddin's custom of picking up his visitors at the Winnipeg airport and then regaling them with a tour of the city, replete with arcane facts and elaborate narration.
But it didn't translate. At first. Michael Burns, the Documentary Channel's ex-programming director, who commissioned the film, "was listening to the narration and saying, 'Where is that guy?' " Mr. Gurdebeke said, referring to Guide Maddin. "He was writing to a certain style. He was trying to find a style. I'm not sure he was that comfortable being the narrator. So there was a lot of stuff that didn't survive."
Mr. Maddin credits Mr. Gurdebeke with goading him into being more personal than he might have been.
"I always feel like I'm breaking at least one commandment, and perhaps some yet-to-be-written commandments, whenever I start Tourette-ishly blurting out things about myself in my movies," he said. The blurting is framed by an elaborate conceit: in addition to an ornate portrait of Winnipeg itself, complete with hockey history, weather reports and the American Indian mythology of its fabled "Forks" (the convergence of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers), the film is a Grand Guignol sitcom. Renting his family's old apartment over the hair salon, Mr. Maddin cast actors as his siblings. His long-dead father is represented by a rug-covered mound in the living room. And his mother is Ms. Savage, although he claims in the film that the actress is really his mother.
Ms. Savage (who was unavailable for an interview) is one of Mr. Maddin's muses. Another is Isabella Rossellini, the model-actress and star of his "Saddest Music in the World" (2003), as the legless Lady Helen Port-Huntly, whose prosthetics are filled with lager. Mr. Maddin directed Ms. Rossellini's film tribute to her father, Roberto, "My Dad Is 100 Years Old" (2005).
"Guy and my father," she said, referring to the neorealist giant, "are very different stylistically. But like my father Guy works with small budgets. He is adored by other filmmakers." She added of her father, "He might not have had a huge audience, but he was very influential, and I think Guy is the same.
"In a way they are freeing you," she said. "Ultimately, when you go see a Guy Maddin film, you go home empowered. You can say what you want to say, the way you want to say it."
Mr. Maddin's influence on anyone, particularly women, is something he plays down. "I've allowed myself, Tom Neal-style," he said of Ms. Savage's "Detour" co-star, "to be buffeted about by very strong women. And it's my fault. From cradle till, I presume, grave."
Has he ever been psychoanalyzed?
"I never have," he said. "I almost feel it would ruin everything. I kind of like poking around in my own little cesspool and every now and then making a film. It's therapeutic enough for me."
Exclusive: Guy Maddin on His Winnipeg
Source: Edward Douglas; ComingSoon
The films of Guy Maddin are certainly an acquired taste, because they're often so bizarre that they're not movies you soon forget, and once you're hooked, there's no going back, even if it's impossible for anyone to fully understand from what demented recesses of this crazed mind comes some of his wilder ideas.
In the past, he's been compared to the likes of David Lynch and John Waters in the way he mixes whimsical and perverse fantasy in with the mundane and yet his new movie My Winnipeg may be his most accessible film to date, a loving travelogue and tribute to his home city of Winnipeg, Manitoba. Like his previous film, the silent movie Brand Upon the Brain!, it's filled with semi-fictionalized auto-biographical memories of his youth, showing his childhood home and haunts, as well as a recreation of some of the city's most fascinating urban myths and legends. It might not turn Winnipeg into the next big tourist vacation spot, but it certainly gives a better idea how Maddin has become one of the city's most well-known filmmaking exports.
ComingSoon.net met up with Maddin at the Soho Grand Hotel where some high fashion photo shoot was taking place and all the beautiful young people in the restaurant made us stand out like a sore thumb. As we learned the last time we interviewed Maddin, he is a naturally funny guy with lots of great stories to share, which may be why his films are always so entertaining.
ComingSoon.net: I believe the last time we spoke you mentioned that "My Winnipeg" was a commissioned film, right?
Guy Maddin: It was kind of commissioned. I had made a short film with Isabella Rossellini called "My Dad is 100 Years Old" for the Documentary Channel in Canada, and then I heard a rumor that the guy who runs the Documentary Channel--ran it, he's been fired since--Michael Burns, I heard a rumor that he was so pleased with that movie--which made me happy to hear--but he wanted to invite me to make a longer documentary. I'd never wanted to make a documentary; it just requires too much discipline. Isabella's was a documentary, but it was more of a "docu-fantasia." The only research she had to do was her memory and in her heart, but Michael invited me, said he would pay for the documentary if I made one about Winnipeg, and he said, "Make it very personal." Once again I realized, "Hey, if it's personal, I won't have to do any research. I could just research my memory and my heart and go from there because I hate research." I also tried to cheat in other ways because a documentary requires a filmmaker be disinterested, objective, usually, or at least traditional documentaries. There's plenty of exceptions we know about, but the most daunting aspect of the traditional documentary is the shooting ratio. (That's the amount of footage shot compared to the film's running time.) An indie picture usually has a ten or twelve to one shooting ratio and a documentary has hundreds to one shooting ratio.
CS: Yeah, it can be anywhere from 400 to 600 hours of footage sometimes.
Maddin: Yeah, then it takes a year just to log the footage and I didn't want to do that, so I figured I would come up with my agenda, my stories, my anecdotes, either find the footage, whatever it was, whether it was found footage or recreations, or whatever. Then I would treat it like a fiction film even though it was a documentary, or "docu-fantasia," so I tried cheating it. I kept the shooting ratios down, but you still had to find your subject in the editing, so it is a documentary in those respects, or some kind of hybrid anyway.
CS: It seems that style in general involves a lot of footage and images and a lot of edits. Did you have some idea what stories you wanted to tell?
Maddin: It's kind of funny, the day after I made that call and got the project I found myself in Paris showing "The Saddest Music in the World" at the Pompidou center, and someone just said, "What's Winnipeg like, what's with the water there, what's going on," and so I decided to just describe the Winnipeg for this audience, and I spent about ten or fifteen minutes describing Winnipeg. It really went on for some reason. I'd never really done that before and I found myself touching on most of the subjects that ended up in "My Winnipeg," and so I just turned straight back to my hotel room and wrote an email to Michael Burns saying, "This is a kind of proposed outline for 'My Winnipeg'" and he said, "Go ahead."
CS: Did you still do any kind of research at all?
Maddin: A little bit. I ended up accidentally chancing upon some things as friends of mine in Winnipeg found out I was making a movie about it they would suggest other anecdotes, "Did you know this happened, or did you know that," the oddest thing is that one episode in the movie that seems the most implausible of all, I didn't know about at all, is the "If Day" episode about the fake Nazi invasion, it was part of a war bonds campaign, I didn't even know about that until halfway through shooting, it's strange, and that's a good example to find out what's different between Americans and Canadians, for some reason. Canadians have always fought with their national identity and if you ask a Canadian what they're like or what their national identity is--define a Canadian--they'll always describe as what they're not. We're so similar to Americans--we always watch American television and things like that--so we say, "Well, we're not Americans." Well, what does that mean? "We don't boast, we don't exaggerate" so we have our historical figures and historical events, but we present them in life-size terms as accurately as possible. Nothing is mythologized, nothing is boiled down, reduced, exaggerated, nothing is heightened...
CS: Until this movie...
Maddin: (laughs) Until this movie... but every other country in the world except Canada, because we're shamed into being so literal-minded in Canada by just how well Americans self- mythologize. Every other country does too I'm sure. It's the nature of the campfire story. From every culture humans have ever been involved in, except for Canadians... so I just decided to give Winnipeg myths the same treatment that every other country gives them.
CS: We've seen a lot of biographical movies about yourself and your childhood and your mother. Were any of those pictures real family photos from your childhood and family home?
Maddin: That's true. It had been an obsession of mine to go back to my house. My childhood house actually had been subdivided into four residences, so I was only able to sublet part of it, but luckily, the part that had my bedroom and the living room.
CS: You actually went back and did shoot in your old house?
Maddin: Yeah, I went back there. It was great... and depressing.
CS: I can imagine. Some of these stories are obviously urban myths and have been fictionalized, but some of the stuff actually did happen to you?
Maddin: Almost everything happened actually, but some of the things are presented as... I break the movie into three parts: opinions, like emotional, childish opinions, about the arena, like that; myths that other people believe, like there's forks beneath the forks or the séances. I don't believe in séances. I don't believe in that paranormal stuff, but Winnipeggers do. And then facts, and then some perhaps improperly-remembered family episodes, but I'm putting them out there as emotionally true anyway. They're remembered as well as I can. In other words I guess I'm an unreliable narrator in a literary traditional sense, but I'm at least honestly telling you right now that I was trying to be as reliable as possible, but still trying to be enchanting.
CS: I was going to ask about "Ledge Man," because I can't imagine that's a real show.
Maddin: It's not on IMDb, but it was actually a local show, but local public access television shows aren't all on IMDb either. So my mother went off and worked on "Ledge Man" every day and things like that. I could've used actual footage of my mother, but I wanted to be consistent in using Ann Savage. I was so proud of tricking Ann Savage out of retirement, she's my favorite femme fatale of all in "Detour" and she hadn't heard the slate crack in fifty-one years. So I was pretty thrilled, and every episode of "Ledge Man" that I remember seeing was exactly like that, and I was able to go on the old set of it and just use the old set.
CS: Really? The show was actually filmed in Winnipeg?
Maddin: Yeah, it was shot just down at the TV station which is actually right next to the Winnipeg Arena. There were so many things to mention that I had to keep it down to eighty minutes, and the TV station is also being torn down now.
CS: You've had so many people play you and your family over the course of years, and you had all local people except for "Brain Upon the Brain!" obviously.
Maddin: Yeah, a Seattle guy, the Seattle version of me. I even had a person play me in a live event in Chicago once. A guy overbooked me into a bunch of events in Chicago and I finally just put my foot down. I was brought in and paid a thousand dollars to talk one night and the guy booked me to five events, so I just quit and went home, and he hired an impostor to play me. I read reviews of the event afterward and he got away with it. I met this guy before and he had more hair than I do. I mean he was ten years younger than I, but he weighed at least hundred more pounds than me. He was like a cartoon version of me or something like that, but it passed and that was the heartbreaking part.
CS: Did he just do a lot of research?
Maddin: No, he just showed up. I'm not exactly a household name, so if I ever molest you, or say anything wrong to you out there, it's not me, it's the other guy.
CS: Wow, he might still be out there pretending to be you.
Maddin: I hope he's having more fun than I am.
CS: I wanted to ask you about the found footage because I honestly couldn't tell which footage was found and which you created.
Maddin: There weren't many movie cameras in Winnipeg over the years, but there was one great still photographer. I didn't want to make it one big montage of too many still photos, so I took every bit of moving motion picture there was in the Manitoba Archives and used it, so the horse heads are there, the Holly Snowshoe Club. There's a little bit of the train track footage just outside Winnipeg, leaving Winnipeg, from part of a documentary account of heading out of Winnipeg and up to the Hudson's Bay. I just used as much as I could because I wanted it, and then I had to recreate some things through animation, and then just actors and stuff like that.
CS: What did the Documentary Channel and the government of Winnipeg think when they finally saw your movie?
Maddin: The documentary channel, the guy who commissioned it, was super tickled and really supportive, Michael Burns, he loves it. He's since been fired, possibly because of this for all we know, but he's very proud of the two pictures we've made together: the Isabella Rossellini one, and this one. I think he's working for the Olympic Games and he's working on commissioning a bunch of other filmmakers to make the city diaries.
CS: There seems to be a lot of anger in this movie, like the arena is one thing you mentioned, as well as bit of sadness. Have you ever thought of leaving Winnipeg or is it just sort of what it is?
Maddin: Oh you bet. No, that part of the movie is literally my creed. I literally am always talking about leaving. I feel I should, mostly because my daughter moved to Toronto when she was ten, and I still saw her often. I would go to Toronto three or four months at a time and have her back at the summer cottage for two months every year, so it's just six months of the year, but I always sort of felt I should be there. Torturously enough, the Province of Manitoba (where Winnipeg is) really aggressively supports filmmaking, and the Province of Ontario (where Toronto is) doesn't, so I'm kind of stuck there by my career, luckily my career has lots of off-time so I could go there a lot, but it just sort of seems like I should just live there permanently. Lately, I've been renting apartments in two places, but that's just cost prohibitive. Toronto is not quite as expensive as New York, but I already feel bad enough I don't own a house and here I am renting in two cities.
CS: When you talk to a New Yorker they mention everything they hate about New York, and then of course they'll never leave, and I got the same vibe from this movie.
Maddin: I think it's actually kind of universal that way. I guess everybody's got to go on a neverending rant about his or her own home.
CS: What would you like non-residents of Winnipeg to get out of this movie? Obviously tourism might pick up.
Maddin: (laughs) I'm not counting on the tourism.
CS: People can now go visit your childhood home when they pass through Winnipeg, I guess.
Maddin: Yeah, and I met the Minister of Culture in Manitoba and he said, "What can I do for you, Guy?" and I said, "I want my home at 800 Ellis protected as a heritage building so that no one could tear it down." Then he called back two weeks later--he actually followed up on it--and he said, "Bad news, you actually have to be dead before we can protect your childhood home."
CS: So someday.
Maddin: Someday. It's a race between which structure falls apart first, me or the old house.
CS: I wanted to ask you about the hockey thing. We haven't seen your love for hockey in any of your other movies, and I was curious about that...
Maddin: It's hard to shoot sports movies, I guess I cut off your question.
CS: Actually, that's kind of where I was going with it.
Maddin: I don't like many sports movies, I like "Fear Strikes Out" with Tony Perkins and Karl Malden, but that's got other stuff going on, it happens to be a sport, it's a coincidence, it's really about the father, son dynamic, sports to me just have to be watched live and fictional sports don't really interest me that much, but I love sports, Ron Shelton made all those great sports movies and he's kind of figured out a formula, so I'll just leave that to him.
CS: What's it like living in Winnipeg as far as being one of the preeminent filmmakers there? Do you get recognized on the streets a lot?
Maddin: Just lately my celebrity quotient has ratcheted up just a little bit, as a matter of fact. I went to my corner video store recently with some overdue DVDs and all the late fees were completely forgiven because I'm Guy Maddin, so that's one of the big perks.
CS: It wasn't a big headline in the local newspaper: "Guy Maddin Returns His DVDs late"?
Maddin: (laughs) Controversy! Every now and then it feels exactly the same as it always did, but every now and then someone lets on that they've known who I was all along during a conversation that I've had... when I meet someone.
CS: I see, so they act normal like, "Hey, nice to meet you" and then later on they admit knowing your work.
Maddin: Yeah, Missouri is the Show-Me state, but Winnipeg is a real hard-boiled, very difficult to impress populace. It's the town that booed Neil Young off the stage early in his career.
CS: Wow, it's a good thing he didn't give up the music business.
Maddin: (laughs) Yeah, when he comes back now he's cheered, but it's tough. When I showed my last picture "Brand Upon the Brain!" there just this winter, there were sixteen hundred people in the house, and I finally said, "Okay, you've got me. You could squash me right now if you want. You are the very same people, and I know because I'm one of you, that booed Neil Young off the stage. I know how we're wired, so now I'm the vulnerable one. I'm at your mercy."
CS: Have you showed them "My Winnipeg" yet?
Maddin: No, in late June they could squash me. I'm going to try to get them first.
CS: Do you like you've gotten everything you have to say about Winnipeg out of your system with this movie?
Maddin: There was much more to say. I literally could have done "Winnipeg Alexanderplatz" with this, but I didn't want to try everyone's patience. There was just so much, because the history and the folklore and the myths of the place had been ignored for a hundred and twenty years. A funny thing happens when I make a movie about something. It's usually something I'm obsessed with in the first place, but I take something that's real and true and worthy of obsession and I just turn it into a job that has to be done. So much footage that has to be edited, and stuff that has to be screened and then eventually talked about, and by the end of the whole process I usually get so sick of it that I've cured myself of it. It's not a kind of therapy where I've identified a problem or a trouble area and work myself through it. I don't solve anything. I just bury the whole thing in ennui, so I will be cured of Winnipeg.
CS: I remember you went to Seattle to do "Brand Upon the Brain!" I was curious if you are still traveling more and trying to find other places to shoot.
Maddin: I like the idea of shooting other places and I love the idea of shooting in New York. I was this close to shooting at Bard College; I would've been just wrapping yesterday on a project but it fell through at the last second. I'd like to shoot something in Paris, another city I like, and I have some friends there, so I could see myself shooting in New York City next actually.
CS: Last time I talked to you, you had a few things in the works including another movie with Kazuo Ishiguro (co-writer of "Saddest Music"). How's that going?
Maddin: Yeah, it's moving slowly and it's all tied to me; it's all my fault. I'm just not writing it as quickly as I should, but I'm really lucky that I have this. In a way, talking about "My Winnipeg" is slowing me down on that. I'm really lucky I have a film to promote, but it's preventing me from daydreaming uninterruptedly about other projects, so it's just slowing me up, but in the next month or so I should be able to give myself to it entirely.
CS: You've become really intrinsically linked with Isabella Rossellini. Even when they showed this movie at Tribeca, they showed her short movies about bugs beforehand. Could you talk about your relationship with her? Most people know her from working with David Lynch on "Blue Velvet" and many call you the "Canadian David Lynch."
Maddin: Yeah, I'm always getting David's sloppy seconds, but I adore Isabella and she and I think alike in many ways. I really admire her writing voice. The bug movies are very clever and smart and stylish, and she's got a really playful tone. She's also unapologetically pornographic and raunchy, but she's elegant and charming. She's everything I'd love to be. In her own autobiography "Some of Me," it wasn't ghostwritten. I think it was originally planned to be ghostwritten, but she handed all of her notes over to a ghostwriter and the editor just said, "No, you've got your own writing voice," which is similarly a simultaneous hybrid of childishness and sophisticate and bawdy and innocent and morbid and touching. These are qualities that great writers have actually, and while she doesn't have a mastery of English--she's got sort of a slight Zsa Zsa Gabor mangling of words now and then--but she actually has a great writer's voice.
CS: Did you guys meet when you were making "Saddest Music in the World" or did you know each other beforehand?
Maddin: I met her in Central Park actually. We were both petting the same dog, and our hand ended up... well, I admit I saw her petting the dog, but I went over to pet the dog. I'm a dog lover, too, and I noticed the dog was holding her hand in it's mouth, so I let it hold my hand in it's mouth too, and so our hands were sort of held in place by this drooling Labrador retriever. Then the Lab went away and then there were just these two sort of spit-covered intertwined hands and we just struck up a conversation.
CS: I think that's the most romantic story I've ever heard in my entire life.
Maddin: Yeah, it was really hot. (chuckles)
CS: Are you two going to try to do some more stuff together?
Maddin: We talk about it always. She's busy right now making her own movies, but I think I can convince her to be in something. I want to write something really nice for her.
CS: Since I just interviewed Werner Herzog earlier, I wanted to make things interesting and swap questions, so I'll ask you one of his. Would you ever consider pulling a boat up a mountain?
Maddin: (laughs) I adore Werner Herzog, we'd never met, I posed for a picture once at the San Francisco Film Festival, we both got awards at the film festival, but I could tell all the photographers, all the paparazzi were framing me out of the photos. (laughs) But anyway, he's the greatest raconteur in movies, if not in movie history.
CS: It's kind of odd, you both have very different movies in cold places. I asked him about his mother but he didn't want to get into it.
Maddin: Yeah, I don't want to talk about the boat, actually I'd prefer not to discuss it.
Sparks' 'The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman' moves ahead with Guy Maddin
QuoteA film translation of "The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman," a 2009 radio drama by L.A. pop duo Sparks turned 2010 concept album turned 2011 sparsely staged theatrical production, is moving forward with Canadian director Guy Maddin at the helm.
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/posts/la-et-ms-sparks-seduction-ingmar-bergman-film-guy-maddin-20131112,0,7133922.story
it's possible to youtube "A short sizzle reel of the premiere performance of Sparks' 'The Seduction Of Ingmar Bergman' at the Ford Amphitheatre on June 25th 2011 as part of the Los Angeles FIlm Festiva"
and this has a secret link to another creative person named david lynch. why you ask? excellent q, let's go ahead and see what lynch has directed:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=5lTVohhONFg