Guy Maddin: The Interpreter of Dreams
When the Criterion Collection announced its DVD release for Guy Maddin’s silent evocation of childhood memories and sexual hysteria, Brand Upon The Brain!, I took the opportunity to speak with a filmmaker who for decades now has been one of the most visually arresting talents on the international scene. Situated in his childhood home of Winnipeg, Maddin’s popular and critical acclaim derives from his seemingly effortless invocations of a movie era long gone. His inventive appropriation of silent cinema techniques and melodrama married to modern concerns about sexuality, desire, and the darker recesses of the mind make his work challenging at first yes, but never dull and once you get into his world, many other movies out there seem incredibly basic in comparison.
Any worries about ego though were quickly dissipated by Maddin’s pleasant, affable manner, casting our conversation as less than a formal interview and more of an easy chat between two movie fans talking shop. Our conversation touched on such topics as the film itself, our mutual admiration and respect for Surrealist master Luis Bunuel, and his personal/creative affinity with punk rock.
IFQ: Brand Upon The Brain! comes to DVD now after its initial theatrical run/live show that featured live foley, orchestra, narrator, etc. I’m wondering what your thoughts on what the experience of presenting the film in that forum was like creatively and what was the impetus behind presenting it that way?
Guy Maddin: It was something I’d always wanted to do, but there’s so many things I’d wanted to do in my reveries that involve time traveling to what seem like more glorious times, which probably weren’t, so I always wanted to direct a silent movie while having music accompany the actors while actually filming. There’s a number of items on my checklist that I always thought would be fun, direct a movie wearing spats from a megaphone. Just little goofy, romantic things while swigging from a hip flask and suffering from syphilis, all those wonderful things of the era while leaving out all the not-so-wonderful things of the era like unbelievable racism and sexism etc. While making Brand Upon The Brain!, a silent film, I realized that early on some of the performances were going to need the help of sound effects just because it wasn’t quite clear what some people were doing or were responding to without some sound effects help.
I started openly daydreaming at lunch time with the actors and crewmembers about someday performing this with live music and then live sound effects artists as well. It sort of then just built up out of these out loud reveries, and when the movie was being put together it occurred to me that the plot was so complicated that intertitle cards would be overburdened with expository work, so the idea of exhuming the tradition of the interlocutor might come in handy. And then at that point, I figured “geez, I better find a kitchen sink to throw at the audience” so I cooked up this song which thrilled me even more, because if you’re familiar with silent film history of course a lot of them made in 1928 and 1929 were shelved because talkies had come along. But then they were taken off the shelves to have a song or two grafted on a year later and that’s exactly what I did. A year after shooting the movie I put in a couple of songs and had some scenes shot to fit them (laughs).
Those were called ‘goat glands’ because of an odd trend in the 20’s, men suffering from erectile dysfunction would have goat or monkey glands surgically implanted in their lower abdomens by charlatans in a desperate attempt to cure their condition. Silent movies that added some talking or musical scenes became known as ‘goat glands’ because they were attempting to rejuvenate themselves much like impotent men did then. So it came about in those stages but first I had to find someone to pay the about thirty-thousand dollars it cost to mount the show every time. The Toronto Film Festival is a pretty wealthy festival so I approached them about it early on in the edit, showed them a cut, and told them what I wanted to do. I think film festivals really like special events because there are so many festivals now that they really like their movies to be showcased in an interesting way so they went for it. Numerous other exhibitors went for it too, and I found adding live elements to movies really makes a difference. So while it seems like something new it’s exactly what was being done by showmen back in the teens, 20’s, and so forth. It was an extension of vaudeville but there was like a seventy year gap in between.
IFQ: Both on the Criterion release and during the live theatrical run itself, a variety of different narrators were featured including Crispin Glover, Isabella Rossellini, Eli Wallach, etc. In your opinion, what effect if any did the variety of different voices provide creatively to the film since the role of narrator provides essentially the film’s dialogue and thus could affect the overall tone potentially through their performance?
GM: Some would subtract, some would add, it was really interesting. It’s a rare opportunity with this film to actually compare. I watched every performance and luckily I got to direct some of the people before they went on, almost always asking them to embrace the melodrama and go for it. Because even though the narrators aren’t apart of the soundtrack for much running time, they really do set the tone. They’re big tuning forks up there that are twanged right at the beginning and they’re the voice of the film, the audience’s way in. So vocal quality and a willingness to let go really made a big difference. Crispin Glover is unbelievably dramatic but in a way that’s an inverted melodrama somehow; his voice goes up when you expect it to go down and vice versa and he pulls the rug out from beneath you. It’s really interesting.
Isabella Rossellini probably gives it the purest and most traditional, hysteric, melodramatic reading and that’s really exciting because her voice is like an extra musical instrument in the pit. [Poet] John Ashbery has a strange, intentionally flat, affectless reading when he reads his own poetry. But he had just finished watching an Ed Wood movie before narrating on Mother’s Day last year and decided to channel Criswell before his narration. His performance then was a hybrid of Criswell and Ashbery, I kind of like it. I guess he just went for the low-budget desperation in his voice to temper his usual affectlessness, so I was pretty pleased. What a strange experiment because every time out the audience reacted differently and I did too. The movie seemed different each time out so how often do you get a chance to have such a controlled experiment? I feel like I’m up there with (Lev) Kuleshov or something like that (laughs) for great cinematic experimentation.
IFQ: Watching one of the Criterion documentaries, you discuss the influence that early surrealism, such as L’Age D’or, had on you especially its emphasis on sexuality and expressing desire. In looking at your work especially Brand Upon The Brain! it too seems to share at times a similar preoccupation, intentional or not, in using cinema to dig deep into the brain and uncover those hidden desires. Could you comment on the role sexuality and/or desire has in your work from the beginning till now?
GM: Yeah, it’s really the only subject for surrealism. What I liked about surrealism is that it did just cut to the chase, it just said this is our motivating impulse and here are some of the strange places that this impulse takes us to. So no matter how strange things get in great surrealism it’s always grounded in something very human, something we can all understand if we just understand what they’re up to. That’s then very emboldening for me as a filmmaker without a lot of money and technical polish, or even interest in acquiring technical polish. I know where I want to go and I don’t need to spend much money to get there (laughs). I want to get at telling stories that we can all get into somehow if we just learn to recognize that these really primitive impulses are sometimes best represented very primitively and cheaply on screen and that the stories really are about all of us.
IFQ: That reminds me of when you spoke of Bunuel, again with films like L’Age D’or, I remembered That Obscure Object of Desire which is explicitly about desire and that powerful need.
GM: God, that movie’s a masterpiece and it’s his last film too you know? He was in his late seventies and still lusty as ever and smarter than ever.
IFQ: Exactly, and unlike a lot of people today, he’s not very showy technique-wise but just incredibly precise which worked brilliantly.
GM: I heard stories where he would actually take (cinematographer) Gabriel Figueroa’s beautiful compositions, down when they were shooting in Mexico, and just hit the camera with his hands and knock it off-center a little bit (laughs). He just didn’t want prettiness to upset the ideas too much. It sounds apocryphal but there’s truth in the exaggeration that he’s not too concerned about gorgeousness or anything like that.
IFQ: It’s a lot like early Monty Python, where the idea was to take the strangest subject matter but present it in a perfectly straight, normal manner such that it doesn’t draw attention to itself. Then you’re stuck with that odd juxtaposition of craziness being presented as sanity.
GM: Or like Buster Keaton too, you just put the camera there and you don’t want anything to distract from his genius. But yeah, Bunuel’s a really, really big inspiration. I’d like to say Keaton, I love Keaton, but doing Keaton’s impossible so he wouldn’t be an inspiration to me, he’s just wonderful. There’s something about Bunuel that seems approachable, and misleadingly so because you have to be as smart as him. He doesn’t worry about performances that much or overly fussy mise-en-scene, or anything like that. He just takes the things he has at hand and makes movies, kind of like Roberto Rossellini. I learned that over and over again while talking to Isabella Rossellini about how her father worked and she was attracted to me as a collaborator because she said he and I work so much alike (laughs). I couldn’t believe it because I’d never thought I would be compared to Roberto Rossellini but both Rossellini and Bunuel have much more in common than people realize.
IFQ: When watching your films, I’ve always noticed and been fascinated by the sort of intimate, homemade quality they have; they appear to be stories that are created with the sort of care and independent spirit that bigger films often lack. Almost as if you had gotten some friends together, built some sets, and made the films by yourself for
yourself in a sort of punk fashion. Could you speak to how you’ve been able to craft films in such an intimate manner and do you ever receive offers from producers or studios interested in hiring you to do projects that may be larger in scale and budget but more generic in subject and tone?
GM: Yeah, it’s funny you mention making things at home, after The Saddest Music in The World was wrapped I needed some pick-up shots with Isabella when we were editing. But all the sets had been struck and everything so she was passing through town and I shot some stuff in my kitchen with her. She said she hadn’t shot anything in anyone’s kitchen since she helped her dad with pick-up shots on his movies in his kitchen. Sometimes when I’m just lonely or a little bored or seem to have a weekend free, I’ll throw a movie like other people throw parties, like how Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland used to put on a musical in the barn in their Andy Hardy movies. I’ll say “hey, I got some film stock, a camera, some lights. You guys got costumes, come on over! Let’s make a movie!”
So we make shorts and I love that if someone really wanted to study my films closely they could probably recognize my basement, my backyard, and my beach cottage backyard and beach in so many of my movies. Often, I never go more than sixty feet from where I happen to be reclining when it occurs to me to make a movie to when I actually do start shooting. And when you mentioned the punk movement, I’ve always admired the very short, short cuts basement bands can take to a listener’s heart. Music, of all the art forms, takes the shortest route to the human heart anyway but with basement bands or punk bands, the less technical expertise you have the more emotional, the more raw, the more effective the music. And so I’ve always made a point of never really learning how to play my instruments and tried to keep that basement band of cinema feel to my stuff. You’re the first person who’s ever mentioned it in the twenty years (laughs) I’ve been sending out this signal “I’m making basement band movies”.
IFQ: Yeah it was something that always rattled in the back of my head but didn’t quite know how to express it but then watching the disc and hearing it mentioned in that way I thought “Right! Now it makes sense”. So I finally had a context to express it in, like “it’s total punk rock, instead of having a guitar and amp though, he has a camera and shoots what he wants to shoot”.
GM: Yeah I always wanted to make, they’re not quite as fast or short, Ramones tunes or The Swell Maps or The Buzzcocks or something like that. They’re far clunkier but whatever, I just wanted to get those things across. As a result, I haven’t gotten a ton of offers from studios to make big-budget movies but every now and then I’ll get a script. I think the landscape of independent cinema has shifted so much in the last ten years or so that it’s not inconceivable that even though I’m fifty and seem to be set in my ways, that I could cross over if the script were right and had the right producer. A strong, visionary producer who really stood up for his filmmaker that I could make, with the right script, something that was both fiercely primitive and the work of me but also something that reached way more people. I’m lucky in that I have a style at least, so there’s something there that might trick someone into throwing some more money at me if the conditions were right.
IFQ: To conclude, I read recently that you’re working on a variety of new projects from an online-based collaboration with poet John Ashbery to a ballet of Svengali, to something with novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, who wrote The Saddest Music in the World. I was wondering if you could briefly touch on those various works and in general what else are you interested in pursuing creatively in both the short term and long term as well?
GM: I guess long-term I still see myself making that kind of crossover movie that reaches a lot more people but on my terms completely and with a slightly bigger budget. A budget in the millions as opposed to the thousands (laughs). But in the meantime, it’s a great period of flux and creativity in not just film but the ways in which they’re presented so I’d like to experiment more with some live stuff, some Internet stuff. That’s why I’m working on this movie Labyrinth with Ashbery and I’d also like to make the ultimate music-driven movie, and by that I don’t mean musical but I just mean something that can take that same shortcut to the heart that music can and do it with images somehow. So I’m really building this up very carefully from scratch and that’s what the Ishiguro project is, it’s another music-centric story which he cooked up and which I’m trying to really carefully build so that maybe it could work on audiences on a very easy to understand level but also on an occult level too.
*Photos Courtesy of The Criterion Collection