Catching Up With... Guy Maddin

It's safe to say that Guy Maddin's films look like no one else's. A throwback to early American and Weimar films, his avant-garde features show what has been lost by the current cinematic grammar while remaining extremely contemporary. His newest film, My Winnipeg, was released in New York last week and will soon be available nationally through IFC on demand. Paste spoke with Maddin about showing his movie to his mother, sticking with short films and what he plans on working on next.

Paste: You’ve said that your last film, Brand Upon the Brain, is 97% true. Since My Winnipeg is a documentary, how true does that make it?
Guy Maddin: 100. I achieved 100 percent veracity with this. But it deserves some explanation. The movie basically breaks down into three kinds of truths: there’s facts, there’s opinions (or it’s true that I hold these opinions), and then there's legends (it’s true that people believe these legends). I guess I’m guilty of a professional lie when I represent Ann Savage as my mother. I just couldn’t let go of the desire I had to put my real mother in, but I also really wanted to have Ann Savage play her. At one point a pressure ridge kind of happened, like when ice freezes in a glass and something’s got to give, so I just couldn’t come clean that it was Ann Savage. And I was so proud of it being Ann Savage; I wanted people to know.

The first few versions that circulated had no end credits and it confused people like crazy and I went with the confusion. At one point I was thinking of reconciling things by saying that I was Ann Savage’s son, but that was yet another lie. Two lies don’t always make a truth, though, let’s face it. What did Werner Herzog say? He has this term, the “ecstatic truth.” That’s a pretty good term for it.

Paste: He’s well-known for constructing things—some might say lies—in his documentaries, while the films still pretend to be a stricter form of realism.
Maddin: Well, every documentary is a docu-fantasia, you know. [With] Michael Moore, there’s so much opinion and luster. Even John Grierson documentaries come with a contaminated viewpoint. It’s almost axiomatic to say so.

Paste: Do you think you’ll return to documentaries again, then?
Maddin: The editing process was a bit terrifying, but it turned out okay. I’ll see. I’m going to daydream about what kind of stuff to do. I like the results of just searching inside my own memory, searching inside myself, the feelings of people that I really and dearly love. The stakes just seem higher somehow. But all sorts of artists have used that as a starting point and gone on to create conventional fiction, so I’m not sure what to do. But it’s really exciting how popular documentary has become and how flexible it is as a genre. In literature, too, you have W. G. Sebald writing fictional memoirs or whatever. He was a real emboldening example for me. I’m no Sebald, and no one is, but the idea of his existence made this movie possible.

Paste: Again you ended up focusing so much on your mother in the film. Have you worked out all your issues with her yet, or is this just the beginning?
Maddin: Hitchcock had at least 17 movies with a strong mother figure, so I forgave myself. But my mom’s strong enough. It would take at least 18 movies to deal with her. But I’m going to take a little break from her, I think. She’s 92 years old now, and she deserves a break from bashing. I showed it to her yesterday for the first time and I braced myself. She doesn’t like shots of exposed vaginas that much, and there’s certain things—she obviously has a gigantic relationship with her dead son. I didn’t want to hurt her, but I realized I was hurting her by not showing her the movie. I just laid down on the couch and she sat very close to my TV and didn’t blink once. She was a good sport about it, actually, pleased. I half-expected her to be more like Woody Allen’s parents: “We always wanted you to be a dentist.”

Paste: The film’s other focus is on getting out of Winnipeg. It’s unresolved whether you end up leaving.
Maddin: I’ve made a number of escapes, but I always find myself sleepwalking back somehow. I did have an apartment in Toronto the last five months, but I had a lousy landlord, and then I realized I wanted to spend the summer in my Manitoba cottage, so I came back. I never did get rid of my apartment in Winnipeg. I don’t know what I’d have to do. I might have to commit a crime in Winnipeg and have them kick me out. I think that opportunity may arise when I finally show this movie in Winnipeg at the end of June. I’m hoping all my vacillations will be ended when I’m run out of town on a rail. A tar and feather experience.

Paste: For how stylized it is, so much of My Winnipeg seems improvisational. Did you end up changing the project a lot?
Maddin: The movie was edited along structures that were improvised. I was too paralyzed by the task of having to write an 80-minute narration while shooting it, so I went to a recording study for five or 10 minutes each day and would just riff, would improvise and a kind of radio show version was put together from that. Then the picture was cut to that. A lot of the connections happened through verbal accidents. One scene is linked to another through verbal accidents, so the order of the film is very accidental.

Paste: Was this different from your previous films?
Maddin: Yeah, normally I’ve just had a script. When you edit it, you just change the order of a couple things. This is that intimidating aspect of documentary filmmaking that I’ve always feared, that you have an infinite number of ways to put things together. The shooting ratios are notoriously large, 100-1, 200-1, 300-1. A typical indie film has maybe a 10-1 ratio.

Paste: What made you decide to narrate this film yourself instead of having multiple narrators?
Maddin:I was toying with the idea of having someone narrate for me. I never really liked my voice much; I’ve always been a person who couldn’t stand hearing myself. But my producers wouldn’t let me use someone else. I thought, “If only we can get James Mason or someone,” to just be me, but it had to be me, finally. They just said that the movie is so mythic-seeming that already people are going to disbelieve so much of it that if you put in a fake voice it would be a debacle. So it had to be me, whether my voice is good or not. Ironically, when you make a film, it takes about a week to do the sound mix. You end up hearing yourself over and over again, the same sentence sometimes 30 times. At first I was very uncomfortable, but by the end of the week I kind of got a crush on myself, I loved the sound of my voice.

Paste: Why did you use so many different narrators for your last film, Brand Upon the Brain?
Maddin: It was the first movie I made where I felt I was an entertainer as well as a filmmaker. Or even moreseo, more a showman. There’s a live element to it that was different each night. It got me thinking about how plays are different each night, dependent on who’s performing them. It’s up to the narrator to set the tenor for the evening. If the narrator had a really good handle on melodrama and wasn’t embarrassed about embracing it, then it worked, and if they felt uncomfortable about it, it died. The movie stayed the same, it was unchanging, but the movie was completely altered by this factor.

Paste: Unlike most other feature directors, you keep returning to short films.
Maddin: Some of them are pretty terrible. I made five this year, I realized. I make short films whenever I get lonely. It kind of reminds me of when Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland decide to put a musical on in a bar somewhere; I just call some people up and make something.

Paste: Why do you think this is so rare for feature directors?
Maddin: For other people, they’re like calling-card films. I just like to practice. Between feature films, a number of years can pile up, and boy can you get rusty. I’ve just experienced it too often where I haven’t been behind the camera too long and I can’t remember how to operate it, or I can’t remember how to formulate sentences or anything. It’s normally been a big petri dish playground for me; it’s kept me limber. And if they stink, you just don’t release them. There’s almost nothing to lose.

Paste: Have you thought of doing a studio-backed film?
Maddin: Yeah, I’ve been working on it a bit the last couple years off-and-on. It feels like I’m maybe one more picture away from getting my calls returned more promptly. I have been in negotiations, and it’s fine, but also the script is never quite the right one for me, or if it’s right for me, it’s not right for the studio. We’re making all those marshland mating ritual noises, and we’re starting to hear each other a bit better, so I think something’s going to happen. But it will have to be something on my terms.

Paste: Few studios offering scripts for silent films these days?
Maddin: [laughs] Yeah, I’m going to back off from silent films for a while. I don’t mind operating in this sort of art-gallery world right now. The Wexler Center, which is a very wonderful art gallery in Columbus Ohio, just gave me a big grant to make a low-budget feature film, and I'll be able to parlay that into a bigger budget. I mean, not real big; it’ll still be under a million dollars for whatever I want, complete artistic freedom. It’d still be nice to make a 10-15 million dollar movie, or even just a five million dollar one. I sort of have these two branch lines going at the same time—the indie-world thing and the art-gallery world.

There’s one feature I’m developing now, it’s called Keyhole, which I’m co-developing with the poet John Ashbery. I’m determined to start that movie visually. All movies are started with scripts, but I’ve been struck by the fact that as visually strong as my movies are supposed to be, whenever it comes time to pick a shot from a movie for a poster there isn’t an iconic shot. So I wanted to develop a script visually first, so I’ve got a very basic idea for a script and I’ve been holding these collage parties with some of Canada’s greatest artists. I dictate some parameters to them and just let them create images for me. The collage parties last anywhere from one to seven days, and I’ve been getting an incredible body of work and some really good images. I’ll let those images compost into something verbal with Ashbery. That’s getting closer, but it’s a slightly different process, so it’s taking a bit longer to compost.

Paste: Will that be your next project?
Maddin: Yeah, but that would be in a lower budget, in the art-gallery world. That one would definitely have all the aromas of an art film. But I want them to have a narrative clarity, the kind of narrative clarity and playfulness that John Ashbery’s poetry has. We’re pooling a lot of our favorite influences and then, through our own, poor abilities as imitators making them our own.