LUCID FORGE

Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin was paid two great compliments at Friday’s Guelph Lecture on Being Canadian. One audience member told him that his movies remind her of dreams in the way their filmed. The first thing he does when he makes a new film, Guy Maddin says, is that he tries to find a dream logic because in our waking lives we’re not allowed to do certain things; he’s trying to make music with movies


Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin was paid two great compliments at Friday’s Guelph Lecture on Being Canadian. One audience member told him that his movies remind her of dreams in the way their filmed. The first thing he does when he makes a new film, Guy Maddin says, is that he tries to find a dream logic because in our waking lives we’re not allowed to do certain things; he’s trying to make music with movies

The second compliment came from the question: “Is Guy Maddin insane?” Replied Maddin, “I’m either the sanest person in the world or sort of blandly, mildly insane in a Canadian sort of way.”

Maddin is the renowned and respected filmmaker behind Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, The Saddest Music in the World and the recently released My Winnipeg. He was also the subject for the sixth annual Guelph Lecture on Being Canadian. The evening also included music by Melissa McClelland and a reading by author Rawi Hage from his new book Cockroaches, but the main event was the discussion with Maddin as emceed by writer and cultural curator Sheila Heti.



The recurring theme of the evening was obsession. Maddin once became obsessed with the German film art form  of the mountain melodrama. “I went about the obsession in kind of an odd way,” he described. “I decided that I couldn’t watch a mountain melodrama, and I’d just have to make one. I just tried to guess what they’d be like.” And did he get anything correct? “There were some points,” he said dryly, “I was pleased.”

Of course, when producing a mountain melodrama in the prairies there are more practical considerations, as opposed to shooting in Germany. “They had real mountains,” he explains, “unlike in Winnipeg where there’s piles of garbage with sod on it. I guess to call them mountains was a bit of a stretch, they were made with chicken wire, two by fours and paper mâché. Some of them were 18 feet tale.”

The first Maddin clip was the short film The Heart of the World from 2000. It was commissioned for the 25th anniversary of the Toronto International Film Festival, but Maddin decided to make it a tribute to film in general rather than the film festival specifically. Maddin said that he’s never thought of the film as an artistic statement, just an expression of love for cinema. “If I did anything smart it’s that I made this movie impossible to follow the first eight times you view it, but on the tenth through twentieth sittings it begins to take shape.”

Also, “It’s the only movie I ever made that turned out exactly as I planned, so I have to stand by it,” he says adding that the short was originally a feature script that he crammed into a five minute narrative.

Maddin was working at the utterly mundane profession of a banker when he was 26. He was a math and economics major in university, but it wasn’t until he was encouraged by friend George Toles that he started to explore his creative side and found that he was becoming fascinated by the mystery of things.

The now exuberant filmmaker says that he used to be painfully shy and always felt all eyes upon him. As a child, he would visit movie sets and found them rather boring since things on a movie set tend to move so slowly. It created in him a paranoia about creating boredom on own sets when he began making his own films. This included going so far as limiting himself to being a one-man crew with a single actor. “Actors aren’t bored as long as the camera’s on them,” he added.



The filmmaker still carries concerns of boredom despite his success. In fact, he says that his favourite part of the filmmaking process takes place before even getting on a set. “I really love the beginning, before anything has gone wrong and anyone with an accounting ledger has said that we can’t do that, or before I’ve misdirected actors, or before I started really screwing up. And that was before I embraced my own screw-ups.”

Maddin added that he loves his limitations. He found that his attempts at commercial success ended in failure, and instead found himself experimenting with Super 8 as opposed to working his way up to 35 mm. He also loves assignments, film projects he’s offered to direct like the aforementioned Heart of the World or the ballet film Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary.

While talking about shooting Dracula, he said that he worried the dancers only wanted to be shot long so that their movements would be filmed in full. But he discovered that the dancers loved having close-ups done of them and he also learned to appreciated how tired dancers became shooting the same movements for long periods. “Dancers really get kind of tired after six hours of dancing,” he explained almost sarcastically. “Dracula is supposed to be all-powerful, but when he can’t even lift a 100-pound ballerina, he’s not longer plausibly all-powerful.”

But ultimately, Maddin loved the project despite initial reservations; it gave him permission to be as “primitive and as sloppy as I like to be,” as he covered the stage with multiple angles working to get as much done in as little time as possible. Much of his work on Dracula was improvised since he didn’t want to “script” the performance, not knowing the language of the dance. But he added that the experience also spoiled him, because he now knows where the best seat in the house is when it comes to a ballet performance.

My Winnipeg was another assignment, this time from the Documentary Channel. The former head of the station wanted to work with Maddin, and being enchanted by the director’s home city, offered Maddin the chance to make a documentary about his home town. However, “I could never make a documentary,” he confessed. “I have far too much respect for the documentarian and I’m too lazy and impulsive.”

The film has reached a surprising number of people because of it’s themes regarding one’s unresolved inner-conflicts with the places they hail from, whether those places are Winnipeg or not.

The segments in the film that took place in Maddin’s childhood home really did, it was not a reconstructed set. Talking about his old house, Maddin says that he didn’t expect it to smell the same and that he forgot how his voice reverberated off the walls. When he got there he first checked to see if his name was still written backwards on his old bedroom door and it did, and then looked for the warped portion of the ceiling that made a shadow shaped like a wolf.

Unlike his film counterpart though, Maddin does occasionally get out of Winnipeg. He keeps an apartment in Toronto now. “I think the trouble is that there are a great number of perks with this filmmaking career that enables me to stay in Winnipeg, but travel as much as I want. It’s kind of like one of those things where you’re in a lousy relationship and you have an affair hoping to break up the relationship, but it actually makes you so much happier.” In the end he confessed, “I think I’ll finally just have to admit that I’ll never move away entirely. Whether I do physically or not, it doesn’t really matter, because we all carry around our home towns inside of us anyway.” Maddin occasionally threw out nuggets like, “Dialogue is overrated” and “Things bore me unless I’m obsessed with them.” But what came across repeatedly was this man, this filmmaker, who seems so skilled at creating these complex visions, is really playing it all by ear, and that’s okay. “I’m still a dilatant to this day, a lot of people make the mistake that I’m some sort of film history expert. I still have huge holes because I’m still just avid about certain areas and there’s no order to my obsession.” And they’re diverse obsessions. He loves old Schwarzenegger action movies and is looking forward to Quantum of Solice. He finds himself under spells with certain things, and is always trying to see if he himself can produce a spell and draw people in the same way, including himself. “I knew when I first picked up a camera I’d never be technically proficient. I knew I’d get primitive. I knew my films would get experimental. But I just didn’t want to be considered a wanker. So I thought that my only course was to be as honest as possible about myself.”