Hey folks, Harry here... Guy Maddin is a genius that almost no film fans knows about yet. After several genius short films, I came to find his work on exhibit at Sitges 2 years back with DRACULA: PAGES FROM A VIRGIN'S DIARY - and was startled by the neo-silent Ballet version of DRACULA. Striking and powerful - and as a judge I argued for quite some time in the deliberation chambers to ensure that it would win the top prize... even gave an impassioned speech about the very fabric of film itself... God, I was full of it that day, but the movie was worth every word. Last year at Toronto we got rave reviews of the film that Beaks is talking about with Guy below. By all means seek it out, I wish it were already here in Austin. Here ya go...
We’re only nearing the end of April, and I’ve already seen three films – ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND, KILL BILL VOL. 2 and THE SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD – that are not only locks for my year end top ten, but damn near sure things for my top five. Hopefully, you’ve already seen the first two I listed (a hearty “Fie” in your direction, if not), and now, if you live in New York or Los Angeles, you’re going to finally get a chance to see the latest work of peculiar genius from Guy Maddin, THE SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD.
The film tells the strange tale of the glass-legged Brewery Baroness Lady Port-Huntly (Isabella Rossellini), who has commissioned a contest to bring the world’s saddest music to Depression-era Winnipeg. Competing for the $25,000 prize are two estranged brothers (Mark McKinney and Ross McMillan) and their decrepit father (David Fox), along with representatives from almost every nation on the planet. It’s a wacky idea that gets typically surreal treatment from Maddin, who is at his most accessible here if only because he’s working from a somewhat conventional narrative. It’s a film of singularly rough beauty, seeming, like Maddin’s best work, as if it just arrived in a time machine from the 1920’s. If you’ve never imbibed the director’s consciousness warping cinema, THE SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD is definitely the drug to start with.
Below is the transcript from my fascinating one-on-one interview with Maddin conducted at the Avalon Hotel several weeks ago. Enjoy!
First, one hockey fan to another, I’ve got to ask who you favor for the Stanley Cup.
A certain part of me wants the Ottawa Senators to win just because it would destroy the NHL’s television ratings in America, and because it would break so many hearts in Canada. But my son-in-law is a huge Toronto Maple Leafs fan, so I feel out of solidarity I have to pull for them.
It’s tough. I grew up near Detroit, so I now root for what’s become the New York Yankees of hockey.
I love the Red Wings. I’ve always loved them: Alex Delvecchio, Ted Lindsay, Gordie Howe. Not that I was alive in their heyday, but just the legend of them. I loved when Igor Larionov played for them, and I’m sad that he’s now benched most of the time as a forty-two year old who’s not getting any respect even though he’s one of the greatest players of all time. He deserves to be in the Hall of Fame.
He does. It’s amazing that these guys, at their advanced age, keep getting out there to play such a brutal sport.
I really wish he hadn’t left Detroit. I wish Scotty Bowman could’ve stayed there.
I think we all do.
Dave Lewis is doing a fine job, but I just wish it could’ve stayed that way for a while longer.
Yeah. It had kind of a magical glow about it.
I guess I’m not married to any one team, but certain teams give me a lot of pleasure and Detroit is one of them, that’s for sure.
I was reading an essay that said you once contracted a rather serious cold that left you with a permanent neurological disorder.
That’s true.
Which gives you the sensation of feeling like you’re touched by ghosts all of the time?
It’s true. It’s suffered by many people at varying degrees. It’s called myoclonus. I have myoclonic seizures, and it does feel like what you just described. They can be controlled by medication, which I’m on for the rest of my life. So, I don’t feel the ghosts all the time now, steering me around. Believe me, though, for a while they just terrified me. First of all, because I was scared of ghosts. Second of all, because I thought it was a disease with initials. (Laughs.) Or a disease named after a baseball player. The doctors thought it was, too. Finally, it turned out to be an easily controlled thing. I wet the bed every now and then, but other than that.
Do you credit that otherworldly feeling with informing the distanced, dreamlike aesthetic of your work?
Of all the ailments to get, that’s certainly an odd coincidence that I would get one that would seem to match-up, or dovetail, with my filmmaking attitudes so perfectly. It is kind of odd. But I got this while making my second feature, ARCHANGEL. I had already started making films, but… I wanted that movie to be full of haunted feeling. It was about a bunch of… dead World War I soldiers without memory, without life any longer, being filmed as dimly remembered characters. And, then, to be sort of haunted myself by something neurological seemed very chilling. I almost felt like I gave myself the disease.
There were some other things, too. In my following picture, my lead actor’s character had a hole driven into his heart by a stake, and then he was diagnosed with having a hole in his heart after the film wrapped. He had to have surgery to have it closed. And one of the amnesiacs in ARCHANGEL actually hit a moose with his car, and ended up with amnesia. He now has no recollection of making two movies with me.
To have that following you around, I don’t know if that’s strangely empowering or absolutely frightening.
I’ve warned Isabella to watch out for her legs, and not to fall asleep near any train tracks.
Given your condition, and these other bizarre calamities, yours would seem a wholly honest formalist aesthetic.
I’m glad you used the word “honest.” I try to be as honest as possible all the time. It may seem odd that a movie with as many apparently bizarre things in it could be described as honest, but I like to put things in for a reason. They have to have a certain psychological source – a neurotic source, or even a paranoid source. Some sort of source or emotion that I’ve experienced, at least. I don’t feel that I’m any different than the average person; I’m just trying to put the human condition up there in all of its multi-varied forms. The result is, I hope, honest.
I don’t think you can help but be honest when you’re throwing so many absurd things at the audience. I mean, it doesn’t feel like absurd for absurd’s sake, as we often see. It does have, and I know you get compared to David Lynch all of the time, but your films do have that kind of genuine oddness.
In his best films, he’s honest, too. ERASERHEAD is an amazing confession of what it feels like to be a father in an unplanned pregnancy, which I was, as well. When I saw it, I saw my autobiography, and it hit me like a wrecking ball. This was a guy who everyone else was touting as an absurdist or surrealist or whatever, and I just saw him as making one of the most honest, most cathartic and *not pretty* pictures of the self. It was really interesting and exciting.
Would you credit that film as one that got you into filmmaking?
That would be one of them. That one and L’AGE D’OR by Bunuel, his second film and second collaboration with Dali. Both he and Dali claimed it was a series of unrelated gags that were funny for now explicable reason. But the fact is: whether they’re unrelated or not, the overall shape of the narrative resembled that of a love story, of an unrequited love story, or a mad love story; something that, if we’re lucky, we’ve all been through, with all its pain and insanity. Actually describing love is the mandate of the surrealist. That one was pretty inspiring to me because… actually, in both cases – with ERASERHEAD and L’AGE D’OR – they were movies that were primitive in many respects. They were low budget, they used non-actors or non-stars, they used atmospheres and ideas, and were unbelievably honest, frank, and, therefore, exciting to me. They made moviemaking seem possible to me. I knew that I was not the kind of person who would ever be a technically proficient filmmaker. Well, I wasn’t interested in it, anyway. What excited me was finding exciting effects in low-tech, and the ideas and story. Believe me, I love great performances in films, and I even enjoy special effects pictures: I loved CHARLIE’S ANGELS: FULL THROTTLE and TERMINATOR 3 as much as anybody. I did. But nothing replaces the excitement of a primitively fashioned, surprising idea to me. And that’s also doable to me, as opposed to those other pictures. So, both of those movies, ERASERHEAD and L’AGE D’OR, probably simultaneously kicked me, one in each buttock, into the director’s chair.
It is an intentional artifice. When you discovered that after your first film, working backwards, were you consciously trying to emulate a certain style as an organic outgrowth from those mistakes?
Sometimes it was. I had two concerns which kind of ran concurrently, and if they dovetailed, fine. If they didn’t, that was fine, too. I wanted to design little stories that were, I hoped, original ways of showing people themselves. But I also wanted to just indulge myself in the surprisingly tasty textures of audio scratches and acting devices and cutting techniques of a forgotten film vocabulary. And for some reason, that film vocabulary seemed just as sexy and new as the women in those 1920’s films. They seem sort of eternally new every time I look at them, and more beautiful each time, almost. I almost feel as if the excitement I feel is necrophilia of some sort. If that’s what necrophilia is, then so be it.
At least no loved ones are getting defiled in the process.
No one’s getting hurt. Like in most cases of necrophilia, there are no victims.
Is it a lot of work to achieve your weathered style? To make it look so primitive?
It’s simpler. Although, every now and then, you have to watch that it’s not straying. There’s sort of a natural buoyancy in your film crew; people that… just know too much. They’ve learned to play their instruments. They’re no longer a basement band, and if you’re not careful, you’ll accidentally allow them to bring the primitivity up to a level of mediocrity, where it’s neither primitive nor sophisticated. I like keeping things raw. It was tricky with THE SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD. I wanted the primitivity to be just so. I wanted it to be an almost subtle form of primitive. I didn’t want to be a punk rock band; I wanted to be a good songwriting basement band. So, we really worked on the script, and made sure it was as sophisticated as possible. We worked on the music score, and everything. But the images I wanted to create the impression that they were sort of fast and loose. So, we shot with many different cameras and many different film stocks. My thinking was that I needed a working analogy to embolden me to say, “This is going to be primitive”. Just by having three different cameras – three different formats of cameras – going, with each one giving a slightly different look, different film stocks and sometimes push processing, which increases grain and sometimes not. It would be like putting yourself into a childlike trance where you’re creating with crayons and fingerpaints and collage and… whatever you feel like using at the moment. So, quite often I would say, “Give me the camera.” They’d say, “Which camera?” I’d say, “Just surprise me.” It kind of had that daycare kind of primitive feeling. I wanted to have at least one aspect of childhood at work in my head at all time, and that early mythmaking time, when children haven’t quite figured out how the world works.
Where they create these vast inner-worlds…
Yeah. And then they form their own spontaneous and erroneous connections. Just sort of fill the film with those little errors that keep harkening back to that kind of childhood invention.
But there must be some kind of tremendous skill to be able to catch those accidents, get them up on the screen, and not look like a rank amateur.
Yeah. I’m getting a little bit better at it. I’ve learned to move the camera a bit more recklessly, and just trust that happy accidents will happen along with the unfortunate ones. Just to trust inevitability enough. And if they don’t happen, then there’s some other reckless plan that will come to the rescue.
Are you, then, left with a mountain of film at the end of the shoot?
On this one we had a pretty high shooting ratio. I think it was ten- or twelve-to-one.
Not quite Michael Bay levels, but—
No. But every now and then I shoot something, and it’s just one-to-one. Not surprisingly, that’s even more primitive. On this one, though, I got the cooperation of my DOP, a really sweet guy, Luc Montpellier. I just said, “I hope you don’t mind other people shooting every now and then. For one thing, I really need to look through the camera myself, and pull the trigger. And I’d like to cover some scenes like a drunken crew would cover the Super Bowl, people just swarming around with Super 8 cameras and 16mm cameras, and just film things from as many angles as possible.” Work quickly. Sometimes, I get really discouraged on a set by how slow and meticulous everything gets. It takes all of the life out of the shoot, and fills me with ulcers. I’m just ulcerated at the end of one of those things. But it becomes a point of pride for me to get as many shots as possible. Plus, you get different eyes and different aesthetics working that way. It’s still lit by the DOP in consultation with me, but with the various shots there’s different framing. It’s endlessly surprising when you’re watching rushes.
You’ve worked with a lot of different cinematographers, and shot quite a bit yourself. Does it take much work getting your DP’s to respond to your style?
It’s kind of weird. I want them to understand what I like right away, but I’m also this weird utopian; I want everyone to feel they’re contributing, and that they can satisfy themselves with their own contributions. But it’s hard finding the right combination. I think Luc was the best because he made it a point to watch all of my movies. And we watched other movies together, and talked about what I liked. So, he sort of understood how far he could go with me, and he made a million suggestions that I would never have thought of, but they were within the boundaries. Plus, he has a great temperament. I’m one of those people who don’t like confrontation that much. Quite often, just to avoid it, I’ll just give into the collaborator, and that’s when the picture becomes less me. That’s why I found the perfect partner here. He’s got the ideal temperament for me; he’s so gracious and non-confrontational. I don’t know how he liked it, because I become a horrible minefield on the set. I go off so easily, but he never set me off once. He really delivered the goods.
You said you watched a lot of different films. You also said earlier that you were inspired by Lon Chaney. Were you watching any of his films?
A lot of his films aren’t particularly shot that well. I watched those almost just for script inspiration. There *is* only one Lon Chaney; you can’t direct people to act like that. He’s irreplaceable. It’d be like trying to say, “Do it like Buster Keaton would.” Some of Chaney’s films are shot rather unimaginatively, but they’re just so inspiring anyway. They seem so timeless and exciting. They’re more like inspiring banners to wave over the production just by watching them before or during. Other movies that I like to watch, just for the look of them, are Max Reinhardt’s A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM, anything ever shot by Vigo or his cinematographer, Boris Kaufman, and then just John Alton film noirs and things like that.
Henri Alekan?
Yeah, yeah! These things just have instant atmosphere. They just seem to define the countries or eras they came from. They don’t belong to the eras; they *are* the eras.
You mention defining a country, it’s said that your films are quintessentially Canadian.
Well, I think Canadians are such lousy self-mythologizers, that I made it a little project of mine to mythologize my own country, maybe get some other people to do the same thing. And maybe, by the end of my generation, there will be a nice little mythos there. Nothing would thrill me more.
That would be a thrill shared by discerning filmgoers everywhere. Shine on, sir!
THE SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD starts today in New York and Los Angeles. It is a must-see.
Faithfully submitted,
