The Pleasures
of Melancholy:
An Interview
with Guy Maddin
By Marie Losier
and Richard Porton






Guy Maddin Introduction
A zany confection that combines Expressionist Weltschmerz, musical-comedy uplift, and melodramatic twists that might make Douglas Sirk blush, The Saddest Music in the World is instantly identifiable as an archetypal Guy Maddin film. Like his previous innovative work, Maddin’s latest (and, according to some commentators, most ‘accessible’) film both blends seemingly archaic genres and styles in a self-consciously “retro” fashion and manages to personify an iconoclastic sensibility that transcends his joyous pilfering of the cinematic past. His cinematic scavenging is not in any way aligned to some dreary post-modernist notion of pastiche but in fact reflects genuine, undiluted enthusiasm for the glories, absurdities, and submerged pleasures of film history.

From Maddin’s first experimental short— The Dead Father— to The Saddest Music, his infatuation with movies has also fueled a deeply autobiographical compulsion to mythologize his own life. The Saddest Music may have been inspired by every Thirties musical with a gung-ho impresario and a wide-eyed ingénue, but the fact that he sets this extravaganza in a fanciful version of Depression-era Winnipeg (his home town) instead of Broadway or Hollywood reflects both a profoundly Canadian sense of self-deprecation and a whimsical desire to transform frigid Manitoba into a locus of glamour and mystery.

Since Maddin has little truck with surface naturalism, he chose to create a gauzy Thirties Winnipeg on a set constructed within the city’s largest building, the Dominion Bridge factory. Jam-packed with convoluted plots, subplots, and ancillary narrative tributaries, this is one movie that almost defies lucid synopsizing. The cynosure is of course the protracted contest to reward the country either blessed or cursed with the world’s most melancholy music. A hyperkinetic Canadian expatriate and Broadway honcho Chester Kent (played by Mark McKinney and named after the Jimmy Cagney character in Lloyd Bacon’s Footlight Parade), returns home to claim the prize for the U.S.A., a country not noted for its ability to mourn. Kent shows up with his amnesiac, not to mention nymphomaniac, girlfriend, Narcissa, (Maria de Medeiros) and encounters an old flame—the imperious beer magnate and double amputee, Lady Port-Huntly (Isabella Rossellini). Complications abound in an invigoratingly over-the-top fashion when Chester’s brother Roderick, who has reinvented himself as a gloomy Serbian cellist, turns up as a contestant and we learn that he was once in love with clueless Narcissa. As the wacky proceedings reach their crescendo, Mexican mariachi bands engage in doleful battle with Scottish bagpipers, and Lady Port-Huntly achieves temporary bliss with glass, beer-filled legs designed by Chester and Roderick’s alcoholic father Fyodor. Fyodor’s soulful rendition of “Red Maple Leaves” on an upturned piano cheerfully sends up nationalist fervor; in Maddin’s world turned upside down love of country always loses out to l’amour fou.

Of course, a mere plot synopsis cannot do justice to Maddin’s intransigently idiosyncratic style. As Mark Peranson observes, “(I)n Maddin’s films, viewers are met by the constant changing of perspective, close-ups and long shots, the alternations of iris shots, occasional bursts into color, rapid fire micro-montages, all seemingly approached four sheets to the wind, with a shooting and editing approach more based on intuition than storytelling.” This sort of stylistic vertigo is actually somewhat more pronounced in Maddin’s earlier films. Yet The Saddest Music unquestionably reassembles many of the director’s most cherished motifs. Narcissa’s amnesia evokes the delirious , memory-impaired soldiers staggering off to battle in Archangel during the last days of World War I. Tributes to old movies that are both earnest and ironic (but never facetious) are also apparent in almost all of Maddin’s shorts and features: To cite one of many examples, the name of Archangel’s protagonist (John Boles, the bland leading man of Thirties Hollywood)—and that movie’s loving tribute to war movies such as Hawks’s The Road to Glory and “amnesia films” like Mervyn Le Roy’s Random Harvest—evoke an overheated melodramatic ambience that exemplifies Maddin’s desire to create a “cathartic” cinema. Men vying for the love of the same woman surface in, among other films, Tales of the Gimli Hospital, Careful, and The Heart of the World. Father figures, whether benevolent, malevolent, or tyrannical, loom large in The Dead Father, Careful, Odilon Redon, and Cowards Bend the Knee.

Equally steeped in classic literature and pop culture, (both respectable and schlocky) Maddin wears his erudition lightly. As the following interview makes evident, he is as smitten with The Ramones as with Nabokov, as tickled by Mexican genre cinema as by Carl Theodor Dreyer. A life long hockey fan, Maddin’s late father was the manager of the Winnipeg Maroons (winner of the Allan Cup for amateur hockey in 1963.)It also should be noted that this proudly individualistic director’s career was nurtured by one of Canada’s most resourceful film collectives, The Winnipeg Film Group.

Cineaste interviewed Maddin over French toast while he was in New York in March for a preview screening of The Saddest Music in the World, the opening night attraction of the Museum of Modern Art’s “Canadian Front” series. We then called him at his home in Winnipeg for a brief follow-up session. A charming conversationalist, Maddin’s interview patter seamlessly combines autobiographical directness with the flair of a seasoned performer. —Richard PortonCineaste: Although The Saddest Music in the World is your first musical, I gather that you’ve wanted to work in this genre for some time. Wasn’t your abandoned project, The Dikemaster’s Daughter, conceived as a musical?
Guy Maddin: Frankly, I don’t think I was ready to make a musical. So, when by chance that film fell apart, it was probably a stroke of good luck. I probably would have ended up dropping all the musical numbers. That actually happened with James Brooks’s I’ll Do Anything. It was actually shot as a musical and then all the songs were stripped from the movie before its release.

But I’ve always liked the idea of a musical. I’ve never felt that movies are obliged to represent reality. I do believe that, if they want to be good, they are obliged to represent reality transformed. This is true in many of the arts—not only musicals, but also mime, dance, painting, as well as silent films—anything that isn’t a literal document. They can transform reality in mysterious ways and take short cuts to emotion that more literal-minded documents have to work a lot harder to achieve. So my movies have always been as stylized as musicals without being musicals. And I remember trying to promote—if I’ve ever really promoted anything—my movie Careful as an opera without singing. It has the plot of an opera, the sets of an opera, the stylization of an opera; it just didn’t have any singing.

Cineaste: The musical number that recurs throughout The Saddest Music— Jerome Kern’s “The Song is You”—seems to sum up some of these short cuts to emotion.
Maddin: That song reduces the emotional experience of love to its basics. More than any other audio experience, music is most connected in people’s memories to romance. Every crush, every affair, every relationship you’ve ever had is welded to a song, or a number of songs, forever. No matter what happens to the relationship, that song will make it come alive for you—your chest, your fevered head. I still can’t endure listening to two 1976 Peter Frampton releases—“I’m in You,” and “Show Me the Way”— without having some morbid flashback. I’m immediately taken back to a urinal that I’m straddling, with both legs and a dripping heart, in a bar in Winnipeg. Those songs sum up the agonies of 1976 twenty-eight years later. And I suspect, any time some one wants to kill me, those songs could be a double-blasted pair of Frampton deathblows. “The Song is You” is a kind of uber-song; an anthem that signifies everything that music can do to the heart.

Cineaste: Of course, you’ve always specialized in melodrama—a very “operatic” genre.
Maddin: Right, it’s stylized—or as I was trying to explain last night at the MoMa screening, it’s life uninhibited as opposed to life exaggerated. It’s a legitimate genre, and done well it’s beautiful. By the same dictum that everything tastes more or less like chicken, every movie is more or less melodrama. Some aren’t very much melodrama. (laughs) But, when melodrama is well done, it’s gets you into one of those great, cathartic crying jags. I’d some day like to make a movie that works as a weepie.

Cineaste: Like a Douglas Sirk film, for example?
Maddin: Yeah, I just finished watching Imitation of Life again on video. The first time I watched it I was just delighted by it as a confection and thought it was rather funny, as well as a little bit moving. Now, it just wipes me out.

Cineaste: From what we’ve read, there’s not much of Kazuo Ishiguro’s original script left in The Saddest Music. Is there a residue of his original conception?
Maddin: Yes, his spirit is there, or some residue, or a smudge. (laughs) Whatever the words is; you have to choose the word carefully. But I can tell you what’s still there. His title—which I liked and the premise—to determine which country has the saddest music in the world. Political satire has never been my favorite muscle to flex; it often dates quite quickly. But his observations were pretty timeless, especially the sad fact that Third World nations , who are basically in need of alms from the ‘have” countries ,are forced to be in competition with other needy nations. They have to act worse off than they actually are—it’s sort of like competitive street begging. It’s a horrible, undignified routine they’re forced into to exaggerate their own privations when they’re already well worthy of sympathy and empathy. This was his chief concern, as well as the fact that there’s usually a winner. For example, in the Eighties, Ethiopia, with its world-famous drought, managed to get sexy for a few seasons when pop stars were singing all kinds of songs on its behalf. At the same time, many other needy nations could only look on in envy. But, like any other fashion, people get tired eventually. Hemlines drop, the Bolivians have an earthquake, and everyone clambers over to throw their charity dollars at that.

Cineaste: We read—perhaps it was in your diaries—that you consider The Saddest Music your “anatomy of melancholy” movie. This seems to key into Burton’s implicit assumption that melancholy can be a great source of pleasure.
Maddin: Yeah, you only have to listen to some of your favorite sad songs to realize that they’re putting you in a good mood. Dreyer’s Ordet delights me, as does listening to the boys’ choir sing in Day of Wrath as the old witch is tied up to the ladder. And listening to Paul Robeson sing “Gloomy Sunday,” that famous “suicide song”; that’s thrilling to me! I guess it’s just cathartic and catharsis always feels great.
I almost wished I pushed it a bit more in the movie. One brother, played by Mark McKinney, is always repressing his sadness with a George M. Cohan effervescence while the other gives in to sadness. I almost wished I had the McKinney character just breaking out and blubbering. Or when Roderick is admiring the glass legs for the first time, he could have cried at their sublime beauty, or cry whenever he fights. There’s just no end to it; The Anatomy of Melancholy is thousands of pages thick!

Cineaste: You’ve talked about Footlight Parade being an influence on the film. And there are similar impresarios in many other musicals—e.g. the Warner Baxter character in 42nd St.
Maddin: Yeah, it was dangerous to invoke those names to Mark McKinney. Then you run the risk that he’d imitate those characters, which ends up somewhere on the dial close to sketch comedy. My strategy concerning pastiche has always been to avoid it as much as possible, knowing that it’s going to be detected somehow anyway. But I like to make things as straight as possible and make a movie that seems completely unaware of any movie that has come before it. You can then let viewers decide for themselves whether this is pastiche or parody.

Cineaste: And you want to avoid the label of “camp.”
Maddin: I’ve never minded camp that much and I can watch—I don’t know if they qualify as camp—“Santo ” Mexican wrestling movies for hours on end. But it seems that it’s a term that’s not usually thrown around as a compliment. It’s sometimes hard to avoid that tag, though. I still get it of course. That means someone watched a bit of the films anyway, so I’m pleased (laughs).

Cineaste: Do you and George Toles often write with particular actors in mind?
Maddin: Yes, George Toles wrote the lines in The Saddest Music with Isabella (Rossellini) in mind—and this was long before we even approached her. It doesn’t mean that she still didn’t have trouble getting her tongue around some of them. She sort of feels her way into a role and doesn’t necessarily repeat the lines the same way twice. She just likes to get the meaning and say whatever comes to mind. She then leaves it up to her co-actors to respond accordingly; it’s more like a theater or Altman-like experience.
I also have a few favorite Winnipeg actors, who speak the way the lines are written. The lines are very stylized. My friend George writes most of the dialog in our collaborations and he actually speaks in this weird, mannered way. He has a strange command of the English language. He speaks like a book written many years ago. Since the dialog is very mannered, it brings actors with many degrees of talent into the film speaking with the same degree of stylization. While making melodramatic movies, it’s very handy to have melodramatically stylized dialog.
I had an out of town friend come to Winnipeg—the cinematographer Ed Lachman who shot Far From Heaven, Erin Brockovich, The Virgin Suicides etc. He’s in Winnipeg now shooting and I took him out last Friday night to meet some of my friends. He was slack-jawed with disbelief when he saw that these friends of mine speak like characters out of Footlight Parade. They wear spats and get into arguments that would pass the Hays Code, swearing at each other but not using the usual profanities that I like to use. They’re completely anachronistic and it’s completely unaffected. They’re fully functioning members of society—doctors, lawyers, and magistrates . They’re just living in another decade—verbally anyway.

Cineaste: How do you and Toles divide the labor while working on scripts?
Maddin: It varies from script to script and one, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, he wrote in its entirety on his own. We start discussing a basic idea and come up with a treatment (almost always on the phone, for some reason.) When we first became friends twenty-four years ago, we must have spent five or six hours on the phone every day. We were like teenage girls, each of us lying on beds on either end of the phone with cotton balls between our toes talking about movies. Now when we begin talking about treatments, we start bandying things back and forth. After I receive his script and transcribe it onto the word processor , I might add the odd scene or make an embellishment. I feel a bit guilty getting the screenplay credits that I have been getting. I fought, but a bit lamely, to have my named removed from the screenplay credit for The Saddest Music. He was fine with my credit. But I don’t mind saying, on the record, that he deserved full screenplay credit —with a story by Toles, Maddin, and Ishiguro. And even Nev Fichman, one of my producers, contributed some important story ideas.

Cineaste: Since the dialog in your films is so stylized, I assume there’s little room for improvisation.
Maddin: When I first started out, I didn’t really work that much with actors and kept them in the dark. I assembled everything through montage. In The Saddest Music in the World, it suddenly became different. I had a group of actors , many with theater backgrounds, who were used to playing off each other. They were good listeners as well as good actors. Since they listened to each other’s performances and responded to them, each take was drastically different. I let them do just about whatever they wanted to. I figured if I didn’t like it I could just cut it out during the editing. I usually forbid improvisation, because it would ruin George’s mannered dialog and it would sound inappropriately modern. But everything Isabella (Rossellini) says is so musical and mannered anyway that she got a special dispensation. She could say whatever she wanted. Most of the actors I’ve hired couldn’t improvise more than a few words in the Tolesian manner.

Cineaste: Your fondness for the transition from silent films to sound, and the intermittent Technicolor scenes from the period, seems to come out in The Saddest Music. Of course, you had to move the story up to the Depression era.
Maddin: I had to tweak it up to 1933 to find an analogy to what Ishiguro had in his original story. He set in London during the mid-Eighties, just on the eve of Perestroika. This brought down the Iron Curtain and opened up the huge exploitable market in Eastern Europe. The sponsor of the contest was a London-based distiller, who used the contest just to get a lot of free advertising for his business. I found an analogy in the eve of the dissolution of Prohibition, the fact that Winnipeg was near the American border, and the use of radio.
But it was close enough to the early sound period. It was still in the pre-Technicolor days. Color scenes were occasionally snuck in for musical numbers—e.g. Wedding of the Painted Doll, the Ziegfeld film from 1929, Glorifying the American Girl. Howard Hughes’s Hell’s Angels has a costume ball in Technicolor. It was just an excuse to put in a little bit of color. I do like the part-talkie for what it represents—when the camera couldn’t have been as mobile as people would have liked. They had the option to have people talk or not talk. In fact , they were adding these talkie scenes after they wrapped production—sometimes three or four months afterwards. In theory, it sounds great. If a scene doesn’t need dialog, why do you have to hear people saying “I love you, I love you too, I love you back and forth”?—the same way a scene only includes those sounds effects that are important or the novelist will only include the descriptions that are important. Anything else would be extraneous. It thrills me that you needn’t be so literal-minded in a part-talkie. You can go into mime when that’s appropriate, or into dialog when that’s absolutely essential. Of course, in 1929 it added up to mostly a gimmicky act of desperation. Adding talk actually saved the prospects of some pictures. I’ve chosen to look at it as a great opportunity rather than a horrible, crippling hybrid.
Hitchcock’s Blackmail from this period thrills me. For years, I didn’t want to watch early Hitchcock since Hitchcock is all about sophistication to me and I thought primitive Hitchcock would disappoint me. But I love how the sound goes in and out and there’s some mime. It’s a great period of invention. The world’s brightest filmmakers were making up a vocabulary as they worked. It’s not like children learning a language from their parents; these were children learning a language that they had created themselves. They learned quickly and it’s really exciting for me to observe what went on in that time. The amount of growth in that period from 1929-1932 is phenomenal. Mamoulian’s Love Me Tonight, the most sophisticated musical ever, came out just three years after talkies were introduced. It’s the equivalent of that great period when Picasso and Matisse were just getting going—so much fecundity and excitement. I try to put myself in that same curious childhood state of mind while making the movies. And I try to make my movies recklessly, as if I’m a child with a full box of crayons. The hope is that the films won’t be primitive for their own sake, but will seem enthusiastically primitive.

Cineaste: Do you usually have specific visual ideas in mind when working on your scripts?
Maddin: I always have a visual scheme in mind quite early in the project, but, mainly because of economic factors, it never works out in quite the way I had planned. Even in the early days when I made the sets myself, the fact is that I’m not a very good carpenter and things turned out differently. It’s just like when you sit down to write—you never know exactly what you’re going to say and one sentence leads to another. Things sort of evolve and I often have a piece of music that I’m really determined to get into a movie. It’s just so visually evocative and strangely enough, every now and then, I’ll shoot a whole scene with a piece of music and it doesn’t fit. But I’ll try the music in another part of the movie and it will fit perfectly. The way picture and music marry up is unpredictable—just as people’s marriages are unpredictable.
But it’s very pleasing when it works. My short, The Heart of the World, is the only movie I’ve ever made which looked and felt exactly as I hoped it would. By some fluke, it turned exactly as I had planned. Everything else has been very difficult to control. You just do damage control in terms of little nudges and steering along the way. I’ve used this comparison before, but I think of making a movie as being like trying to guide a missile while riding it bareback , using your thighs to change its direction. You can really only get it on target minimally. Once a movie is launched, a movie seems to be headed in one place and one place only. So it’s up to you to aim it correctly in pre-production before you launch—i.e. considering the casting and the other details.

Cineaste: Although you mentioned that you’re not fond of political satire, I suppose that there’s a certain satirical point embedded in the fact that your Cagney/Warner Baxter figure is a Canadian. An impresario of this sort seems quintessentially American. Is he repressing his “Canadian-ness.”?
Maddin: Well, there are so many Canadians who come down to American and are very successful. There are the secret tribe of Canadians who lived in Hollywood; Mary Pickford, for example. It’s a certain kind of Canadian, the Canadian who turns his back on Canada. And then there’s the kind of Canadian who embraces his heritage or ethnicity. There aren’t many patriotic Canadians, but in Winnipeg there’s a huge Ukrainian population . So someone named Danielle might adapt her Ukrainian name— Danishka. She might then start wearing traditional Ukrainian garb. You get a lot of that in Canada, much more than in America. America is called the “melting pot,” while Canada is considered a “cultural mosaic.” This sort of thing usually just emerges two or three generations into a family’s stay in Canada. People who have never been to their ancestors’ homeland are the most fiercely Serbian, Lithuanian, or Armenian. Good Armenian friends of mine, who have never been to Armenia, turn out to be the most intensely Armenian people.
I’m not making fun of it in the film, that’s just the way it is. It’s a fairy tale structure, but there aren’t three brothers as there are in most fairy tales. The father stands in for the third brother. He’s a patriotic Canadian, although it’s really hard to find patriotic Canadians. That’s why he ends up being pretty doddering and foolish.

Cineaste: But you manage to get the Canadian flag into a few of your movies.
Maddin: Yeah, my version of it. Our current Canadian flag was designed in 1965 and it just looks so “Sixties.” I just thought it should have a little more tradition. The maple leaf has been our emblem forever. I felt a big, veiny expressionist maple leaf would look much better than that sort of Sixties, Roy Lichtenstein flag we ended up with.

Cineaste: It’s like a logo.
Maddin: Yeah, that’s what it is. It’s like an oil company logo. That’s almost traitorous for me to say. I love the maple leaf. I just wish our flag had a few more veins in it! Less logo, more organic.

Cineaste: Did you find it far-fetched when Jonathan Rosenbaum termed Careful a movie about Canadian repression?
Maddin: It probably isn’t very far-fetched. I sort of even had this in the back of my mind, even though the film never actually states what country it’s set in. I guess I decided to make it when I ‘d been walking around in the Swiss Alps a bit and was reading some Robert Walser and other people who had taken a lot of mountain strolls. I’ve never spent that much time in those countries and I hate doing research. So it’s a Canadian film, I’m a Canadian, and it’s as Canadian as they come. It’s about me, so I guess it’s about Canada.

Cineaste: Was Leni Riefenstahl’s The Blue Light an influence on Careful?
Maddin: I hadn’t even seen it until I got this fan letter from Riefenstahl. She was very flirtatious. She sent me a photograph of herself taken many, many years earlier. Then some photos of some underage nude girls that she’d photographed—the Nuba. She said, “This is my little girl and it’s from me.” I was once in Munich, the city where she lived, at a film festival. I was there with an acquaintance of mine, George Hickenlooper. He was trying to get me to talk to her; “Wanna talk to Leni?,” he’d say. I didn’t want to; I just imagined her Teutonic thighs squeezing the brains out of my head. Sure enough, when I saw The Wonderful, Horrible World of Leni Riefenstahl, she had this sidekick—I think he was called Helmut—carrying around her oxygen tank. He seemed to be quite a whipped dog of a man; this 98- year old woman ordering this guy into sexual service. I’m just as glad that I didn’t get into that time machine! There’s time travel and there’s time travel. I never claimed that living that in the past would be better than living now. I like to look at certain women from the past in movies. And it’s also a matter of their inaccessibility— the keyhole stuck in the door that’s seven or eight decades thick makes them very alluring to me. But some periods are better not accessed. And, whatever prom of the mind Leni Riefenstahl evokes, I’m staying home!

Cineaste: How did you go from working in a bank to being a filmmaker?
Maddin: I just stumbled into this. It certainly wasn’t part of a master plan. Like so many twenty-something slackers, I just knew that I didn’t want to be working at a regular job. I was pretty lazy, but that banking job was not suited to my temperament. I spent a lot of time crying in the vault. Literally—I’d say , “I’m going into the vault,” and would put my head in my hands and weep for twenty minutes. When I quit, it felt good. I didn’t know I was going to start making films then. It was only the day I quit that I snuck into a very dark room at the university with a friend who said, “They play movies in here.”
I started watching films like Luis Buñuel’s L’age d’or and I was immediately hooked. I began to habitually sneak into movie screenings. I became a fixture and they eventually let me take the films home for the weekend so I could watch them on my projector. And eventually there were videos. Every now and then when I’m complaining a lot, I realize how lucky I am. It’s really great. I meet so many people who are dreaming of working in film. They want to give me their scripts or tapes of films they’ve done. They remind me so much of myself when I was starting out. You just can’t dismiss these people. You can watch their movies and then dismiss them. (laughs)

Cineaste: You really seemed to start from scratch with your first film, The Dead Father.
Maddin: Yeah, I didn’t have a visual style at all in my first film. I just wanted to get some images on film and tell a story. I thought that if I had any strength at all, I’d be a primitive. Usually being a primitive is a weakness, because people try to make a certain kind of film and fail because they’re not good enough yet. So I knew I wouldn’t be good enough and thought that I’d make an intentionally primitive movie; I’ll just make a kind of dream.
I had this autobiographical feeling that I was trying to get at. My father had died a few years earlier, but he frequently revisited me in dreams. I thought I would get the dreams—these fragmented episodes that dreams resemble—down on film and hopefully create in the viewer the same feeling that I had as the dreamer. I failed, I think. But during the course of making that movie, I accidentally stumbled across a few visual tricks. I just started to learn a little more about what can be done with light and shadows, and accidents. Mostly accidents—I decided to make all of my technological accidents happy accidents. So very early on, I was congratulating myself for embracing the primitiveness that proved inevitable. Now I’m more stubbornly sticking to it. It’s sort of like The Ramones. I just refuse to learn how to play my instrument. The Ramones will never go away, as far as I’m concerned. I work more slowly than they did, but I hope that by the time I go away I’ll have a nice body of work.

Cineaste: At some point, you began to consciously smear Vaseline on the camera lens.
Maddin: I was using Vaseline just to blur out Winnipeg. (laughs). I didn’t want anyone to see the world I lived in.

Cineaste: You don’t see much of the actual Winnipeg in your movies.
Maddin: No. And then finally I made it a point to mythologize Winnipeg. But that meant that I had to build a Winnipeg because you still don’t want to see the “real” Winnipeg. Other filmmakers are showing the real Winnipeg, including some friends of mine. Ed Lachman, the cinematographer, is shooting the real Winnipeg in his movie. It’s going to look pretty amazing, so maybe we’ll get that city the attention it doesn’t deserve. (laughs)

Cineaste: Did you feel at one point that all of your films include variations on a few themes? Many of them include father figures, brothers, and scenarios involving two men in love with the same woman.
Maddin: Yeah, those are autobiographical themes. I don’t know what it is with me. I was such a terrified child. I was always scared that my dad was just going to die on me. When he finally did, I was shocked that I wasn’t hit with the tsunami of grief that I thought I would be. I wasn’t even upset. I realized that some psychological mechanism had kicked in—the grief would overdraw me at the bank and I would have to pay on the installment plan. I make these weekly payments during my dreams, paying in tears for all of the loved ones I have lost. I don’t get happy at the appropriate moments, or in my dreams either. My father’s been dead longer than he was alive in my life. It’s a literary theme and fathers mean so much. I’ve beginning to get a better idea of how fathers resonate throughout literature: weak fathers, absent fathers, tyrannical fathers.
So much of literature is just the family.
And then sexual jealousy is a constant theme. For the longest time—it’ s almost healed over now—there was a huge scar on my psyche from my very first love and all of the jealousy that sprang from it. Everyone was jealous. There were all kinds of infidelity, all of those great melodramatic operatic, almost homicidal incidents. This relationship reminded me of those operas where people were falling on daggers, poisoning each other, hiding behind curtains, and climbing on ledges. It was very traumatic. I feel that I won the war, but I definitely came out of it with a lot of shrapnel. I feel these big incidents from my life can be illustrated in a sort of melodramatic shorthand quickly. Everyone has been jealous about something at one time or another.
And then competitive brothers also involve melodramatic shorthand. I actually have no competition with my siblings at all. When I was young, I began to understand some great works of literature by approaching them as fairy tales. There was a template placed upon literature by the Brothers Grimm and Victor Hugo. And then I started to understand Faulkner through these terms. Some authors are more approachable than others using these terms, but it was a way into certain moments in Faulkner. I began to understand more and more how he worked and discarded the fake fairy tale entrance. As a starting point for beginning a story, I’m just comforted by fairy tale structures. Maybe as I get a little bit older and more sophisticated, while maintaining “primitivity”, I’ll abandon the fairy tale structure and go for something a little more unpredictable. Like so many movies of the 1930s, The Saddest Music in the World has a fairy tale structure. Last year I borrowed the plot of Euripides’ Electra for Cowards Bend the Knee and blended in elements from The Hands of Orlac and my own family. I just tried to use structures that are time-tested—and then messed with them so much that no one would give them a warrantee of more than a month. (laughs) You take this 2500-year-old structure that served Euripides so durably and then break it down.

Cineaste: Why did you initially conceive Cowards Bend the Knee as a peep show installation?
Maddin: It was a commission. I kept things autobiographical; as a pre-adolescent, I spent a lot of time drilling holes in walls and staring at people. Little Brother is watching; my version of 1984. I just thought that, to even the score, it was only fair to let the world look in a peephole and see me. It was a chance to be as honest as possible, and as cruel as possible to myself. That was cathartic for me. The only chance I had to make an installation interesting to another person was to be as lurid and self-flagellating, and self-pitying, as possible—all of those nauseating qualities.

Cineaste: It seems clear that you’re as entranced with literature as with movies. You speak of your fondness for Nabokov in From the Atelier Tovar. Perhaps it wasn’t conscious, but there appear to a few echoes of Nabokov’s Glory in Archangel—e.g. the references to the antii-Bolshevik fervor at the end of World War I. In addition, were you aware of Donald Barthelme’s novella The Dead Father when you made your film of the same name?
Maddin: Glory may be the one Nabokov novel I haven’t read. I have a copy of it that I purchased at a garage sale in the upstairs bedroom of my beach cottage. I intended to read it, but as I get older I spend less and less time at the lake—so I haven’t had that summer of glory. My inspiration for Archangel came from one of my many muses, a real hard-core anachronist who loves early aviation and war stories. He told me about this place where there was a lot of fighting well after the end of the Great War, simply because people seemed to have forgotten that the war had ended. The only kind of soldiers that could be drummed up for these battles were amnesiacs, people with missing limbs, and soldiers crawling to the infirmary in various states of delirium. I also thought that Archangel was such a charming, mystical name— a name also taken by a heavy metal band.
As far as other literary preoccupations go, I really love the Polish writer Bruno Schulz, Osip Mandelstam, the Soviet poet sent to his death by Stalin, and, strangely enough, I really like John Cheever and Raymond Carver. I came quite late to reading. But Nabokov was really my first love; literally the first serious writer I read. There’s something concrete in his language. So I didn’t have to look for symbols, and I read interviews with him where he eschewed symbols and Freudian subtext—in fact almost all subtext. I loved how he unfurled these miraculous, unbelievably lengthy sentences. He got very top-heavy with specificity and you thought that there was no way he could end the sentence. He would somehow find just the right word at the end of a sentence to make it conclude with a powerful punch line. After a while, there’s a cumulative dream effect that results from that super-specificity; he managed to be extremely concrete and vague at the same time. I then liked exploring the vaguer shores of literature exemplified by Robert Walser, Gerard de Nerval, and Robert Musil.
I was aware of Barthhelme’s The Dead Father. It was the very first book that I ever bought. Strangely enough, I bought it at a 7-Eleven. When I was considering titles for my first film, I couldn’t think of any other title but The Dead Father. Someone told me that you couldn’t copyright a title. But Barthelme’s novel was a thrill for me. I was too intimidated by traditional literature; some bad teachers in high school spoiled it for me.

Cineaste: Why did you recently decide to make a movie in Spanish?
Maddin: Yeah. I just made a movie in Spanish and I don’t speak a word of that language. We were in Winnipeg, which doesn’t have many Spanish-speaking people. But many people on this film spoke Spanish and so did many of the crewmembers. So, I said, “Why don’t we shoot this movie in both Spanish and English?” And I got tired after the first two shots of doing it in both languages. That’s the way they used to do it in the old Hollywood days—they’d shoot an English version and than a Spanish and French version. And not only in Hollywood. Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr, for example, was shot in Danish, German, French, and a bit of English. I gave up on that and said, “Let’s just do the whole thing in Spanish.” And the performances seem really good. I have no idea what they’re saying (laughs). But, luckily, my editor’s sister speaks Spanish and she’s making sure that no one’s getting anything mischievous in and is giving us an idea of what the best takes are. We’ll see. But I’m not going to even have English subtitles. I’m just going to release it in Spanish. It can pretty much exist as a silent movie anyway. So it will be in Spanish for Spanish-speaking people—and silent for English speakers. I’d love to go to France. In a way, I’ve got that little bit of mischief out of my system with the Spanish project Although I haven’t used Winnipeg up, I feel like I should live for one year in France, one year in New York, one year in London. And, of course, Italy.

Cineaste: You probably got a taste of that working with Isabella Rossellini.
Maddin: With Isabella I feel that I’m getting shortchanged because she has so many Scandinavian traits.

Cineaste: So her Italian aspects are at war with her Scandinavian traits.
Maddin: Yes, her reactions to her things are these huge Mediterranean gesticulations. But she’s not kissy kissy. She’s just as happy with a firm handshake. I like that about her. It’s very Winnipeg, she fits right in there.

Cineaste: If I understand correctly, you started writing film criticism as a corrective to unsatisfying reviews you read in magazines and newspapers.
Maddin: It’s hard writing on film, especially when you’re given so many bad films to write on that are bad in the same way. No, I have too much respect for good writing to feel that I could come in and offer something new. I did it for the usual reason I do something—I was broke. (laughs) First, I phoned up Gavin Smith, the editor of Film Comment. He had programmed a couple of my short movies and he gave me Dennis Lim’s phone number at The Village Voice. Gavin was able to give me a $100 every three months. That didn’t fix anything in a hurry, but Dennis Lim was very helpful. As a matter of fact, I feel that I should be easing off on my movie writing. I’m not an academic, although I feel that I have the occasional flippant piece in me and that’s about it. I just couldn’t do it on a weekly basis. I only have so many tricks up my sleeve and I’ve run out of them already.

Cineaste: And the Voice has recently been publishing your Saddest Music diaries.
Maddin: I recently wrote a little piece for The Village Voice just hoping to exploit the conflict of interest—to take advantage of my being both a filmmaker and a film reviewer at the same time —to get some publicity for my movie.
Cineaste: Since your diaries are so candid, do you now have mixed feelings about publishing them?
Maddin: My feelings aren’t even mixed; it’s almost complete regret. Like many things I’ve done, it was a snap decision and probably a foolish one. Someone just said to me, “Do you want to publish these diaries?” So I handed them to him and he published them. That was a mistake.

Cineaste: Well, it’s not a mistake for us. They’re quite enjoyable. It’s not easy being honest, I suppose.
Maddin: It’s not easy being honest and doing the damage control that comes later.

Cineaste: Do you see any parallels between being a cinephile and a hockey fan? I find it interesting, for example, that you once compared Divine (the John Waters actor) to “one of those limited role-players on a Stanley Cup winning team that you need on the fourth line.” Would you say that these two interests coalesce somewhat in Cowards Bend the Knee?
Maddin: There aren’t many cases of great artists being hockey fans, although the novelist Mordecai Richler was a huge Montreal Canadiens fan. Baseball and football seem to benefit the most from writers; there’s almost a whole genre of baseball writing. For me, what makes sports special and what makes film special are two different things. Re-viewing a film is great, but re-watching a videotape of a hockey game isn’t. The game doesn’t get better with each viewing! It’s so in the moment. But a great movie and a great game will both give me goose bumps.
I want to correct myself about Divine , however. Having watched Polyester again since that book was published, I have to say that Divine carries the entire team on her back in that movie. Divine gets to be Jean Beliveau and Mario Lemieux wrapped into one. I won’t give her any more left-handed compliments.
There are so many great baseball movies, or at least there are many that are near great and beloved. But there’s only one great hockey movie—Slap Shot. It really nails Seventies hockey quite nicely. I noticed a lot of still photos of Thirties and Forties hockey games taken with a flash bulb, so that most of the game, except for some details, just receded into the deepest, darkest John Alton-like shadows—complete blackness. When preparing Cowards Bend the Knee, I thought it would be fun to film a hockey noir where the players could literally skate off into complete, inky obscurity and then return in a puff of blackness. Everyone could operate under the same kind of murk and mire and eternal suspicion under which all people must be viewed, as in an old episode of The Untouchables or an old noir filmed by John Alton.

Cineaste: Perhaps you could do an Umbrellas of Cherbourg type musical set in an ice rink.
Maddin: It sounds like a lot of work and I might end up marginalizing myself even further. (laughs)The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is sort of a miracle, because it’s such a beautiful film and it’s wonderful that the movie has found its audience.

Cineaste: Although The Heart of the World seems to pay explicit tribute (as well as parody) Soviet cinema, does it also pay equal homage to Abel Gance’s editing?
Maddin: It’s interesting that you mention Gance’s editing style. I was totally inspired by just how far Gance was willing to go. Not only in Napoleon, but also more bravely in his previous films—La Roue and J’accuse where the shots are only one frame. I was determined to do that in The Heart of the World. Right at the moment when the heart of the world breaks, so do the hearts of the two sibling lovers, I kept increasing the cutting speed until it was one frame for each brother. It creates the effect of merging the two brothers into one broken entity and it’s an effect borrowed completely from Gance. It’s something meant for silent film, because when you watch it, even without a sound track, the speed of cutting almost fills your ears with the sound of machine guns. You can derive from Gance an editing vocabulary, virtually a handbook, that’s almost completely different from anything that’s commonly used. It’s not like anything you see in rock videos or other kinds of montage. Unlike Gance, however, I’m not interested in creating films in a medium like “Polyvision ” that can’t be viewed anywhere. But he was a cocaine-fueled megalomaniac —and I love him for that.

Cineaste: You’re fond of certain formats such as Super 8. But would you ever want to shoot on DV à la Lars von Trier?
Maddin: Yeah, I would. I’ve been watching von Trier’s Medea a lot lately, a film of his from the Eighties. He did a beautiful job with it and I don’t have any mixed feelings about that medium. It’s great. I haven’t found the right project for DV, but I’m thinking about it a lot. If I’m lucky enough to be making films twenty years from now, I probably will have to make my own film stock. So I better start planning to shoot on DV.

Cineaste: For some viewers, your films might be reminiscent of the self-contained worlds of Joseph Cornell boxes. Can you comment on the influence of Cornell on your work, if you think there is any?
Maddin: It’s nice of you to say that; I love the idea of Cornell boxes, although I’ve never seen one in person. I love where he cuts in his film Rose Hobart; he cuts in the oddest places. Starting with The Heart of the World, I tried to get cuts that went on a frame too long. It was hard to do in a movie that had to be so tight, though. By the time I did a fine cut, all those Cornell cuts were missing. I really got a feeling for them, that fake randomness he had when the shots stayed on a smidgen too long. There’s a genius in how he got the blue tint in Rose Hobart by projecting it in through the bottom of an empty jar of Noxzema (or whatever he did). It’s very exciting; it’s the movie that launched a million found footage movies. I love watching found footage movies, I can watch them forever. I love Arthur Lipsett, Matthias Muller, and Martin Arnold.
I don’t know what kind of influence Cornell has had on my work. I’m such a dilettante that maybe my knowledge will never get past the fact that he hung out with his mother quite a bit and had good proper obsessions with pretty girls. He also had a quaking, ersatz consummation with a poor man’s Yoko Ono. That’s good enough for me.

Cineaste: In your diaries, you speculate on re-assembling Undercover Brother in the manner of Rose Hobart and give a place of pride to the Denise Richards sequences.
Maddin: I was flipping a coin back and forth. I didn’t know whether to talk about Denise Richards as the Rose Hobart of our day or Alyssa Milano. My heart told me Alyssa Milano, because I did have an obsession with her at one time and I’ve never been obsessed with Denise Richards. That’s why I think I went with Denise Richards, in a rare moment of concealment rather than candor. Like one of those Proust tricks, where he substituted female names for male names in his autobiographical novel, I just put a harmless Denise Richards in there instead of Alyssa Milano—the most important actress of the last fifty years. (laughs) To be serious, I guess that’s the most important Cornell influence—to become pathological about someone’s image. And what’s more fun—as long as you stay at least 100 yards away from the actual person.

Cineaste: We’ve only seen only one example of your acting on screen— a scene with a bag over your head included in Noam Gonick’s documentary on your work, Waiting for Twilight. Are you ever tempted to act more? Most of the films have some sort of “Guy Maddin” character, don’t they?
Maddin: No, I’m not tempted to act more, I’m a terrible actor. Not only that, I can’t stand looking at myself. So if I acted in one of my own movies, it would mean that I couldn’t look at them. I’m happy to make movies with slimmer, younger, hairier versions of myself. They kind of act like I do—Kyle McCullough in some of the earlier films, Darcy Fehr in Cowards Bend the Knee. They’re basically just imitating me.

Cineaste: Although you weren’t a particular fan of Dracula before filming Pages From a Virgin’s Diary, did the use of dance give you some necessary distance from the material? Are there any resemblances between how Transylvania functions in Dracula and how you view Winnipeg?
Maddin: That’s an interesting question. Dance probably gave me some necessary distance because I would never have been talked into it if it was just another adaptation. It’s been done so many times. The fact that it was dance made it a huge challenge to me. When I began, I was pretty much resigned to the fact that it would be unwatchable. But I thought that I’d at least earn a paycheck and learn a lot of about filming big, swooping arcs of motion that the dancers give you and is really hard to capture. It’s usually hard to give it any personality, since the camera has to be so far back. It was a coincidence that I was able to find some interesting elements in the Bram Stoker original and inject those into this very tired tale.
I don’t really treat Transylvania much in the movie; it’s just featured in a castle included in a micro-montage. It’s supposedly a place where Dracula came back and hoarded British money and money from other countries. I guess it was tied to some sort of anti-Semitic paranoia that had either Stoker, or his redneck vampire hunters, believe such a thing. I do feel a bit like Dracula in Winnipeg. I’m safe , but can travel abroad and suck up all sorts of ideas from other filmmakers—both dead and undead. Then I can come back here and hoard these tropes and cinematic devices. Gance’s editing style is one example. And I sit here in almost eternal darkness all winter long and try to make these dead things live.

Cineaste: It was unusual to see a dance film where the director was in such close proximity to the dancers
Maddin: Yeah, and the dancers love it. Dancers never get close-ups and they love that. If dancers had their way, there would probably be a big “Jumbotron” like you have in football stadiums. It would be just above the stage where opera surtitles usually are. Dancers do a lot of work with their faces. They’re silent movie actors and they deserve their close-ups just like everyone else.

Cineaste: Since you sometimes write of imaginary movies, what would be your dream cast?
Maddin: I actually don’t like movies that have too many stars. So I’d have to have a core cast of about four people. I like those Ernst Lubitsch movies with three or four strong characters. And I’d also have to have a lot of strong character actors. Choosing from that pool, I’d take Franklin Pangborn, Eric Blore, and Edward Everett Horton. They could be my queer Greek chorus. I could throw Gary Cooper and Eddie Bracken into the mix, but that would be a horrible hodgepodge. I couldn’t have Marlene Dietrich in there, because Eddie Bracken and Marlene Dietrich in the same frame would cause the audience to break into hives or puke. How about Betty Hutton, Greta Garbo, Eddie Bracken, and Gary Cooper? I haven’t chosen too many contemporary actors, have I? Better throw Sean Penn in there too. (laughs) I’d like to see a scene between Sean Penn and Franklin Pangborn; that’s for sure. Just to continue: Sean Penn and Gary Cooper would have to have a fist fight—each using the fist-fighting styles of their respective eras.