childhood levers with Winnipeg filmmaker and auteur Guy Maddin
A Guy Maddin film induces a pleasant buzz of dislocation. The mood is palpably modern, but the look is thick with nostalgia. From Archangel (1990) to Cowards Bend the Knee (2003), any one of Maddin’s movies could have sprung from the collective unconscious of the benighted inhabitants of Plato’s famous cave. Raised on nothing but the flickering half-light of early cinema, they have only their twitchy, soft-focus memories to help them comprehend the lurid glare of the present day. Yet Maddin’s world feels both uncanny and familiar, a place where you are glad to meet an ostrich farmer, a ballet-dancing Dracula or an amnesiac nymphomaniac – all the dream-life oddballs so often excluded from contemporary myth.
His most recent film, The Saddest Music in the World, is a comedy of sadness and beer. Isabella Rossellini plays Lady Port-Huntly, a Winnipeg beer baroness who proffers a $25,000 prize to the musician or group who can play the saddest music in the world. While the Depression-era mob sobs away to the world’s saddest tunes, she reasons, their thirst for beer will become insatiable and her profits unlimited. It almost works. But as musicians gather from all over the world, a love triangle and a family feud slowly brew into a melodrama of Maddinesque proportions.
CB: You seem to be stuck in the past. Shouldn’t you pick up a Digicam?
GM: I have so many digital cameras you wouldn’t believe it. It’s funny, but I love them. My only problem is I still write stories that require film, I still direct actors for film, I still see through the emulsions of film. If I can learn to see through pixels, to write for the medium, to find gestures that have nothing of the darkroom about them, then I’ll happily dive headfirst into the digits!
CB: Well, the past isn’t as dull as it used to be, and anyway the idea of the ‘avant-garde’ is kind of vexed these days, in the visual arts and especially the film business – is that why you like to set your films during a period when it really mattered?
GM: Perhaps. I don’t know why I do. I do get quite excited reading about and looking at pictures of the good old avant-garde ’20s and ’30s. That’s just my period. I’m not so closed down to believe nothing exciting happened in any other decade, or that it’s not happening now. I just don’t like nostalgia for stuff that happened during my own lifetime. But the omnipotent prehistories we all inaccurately construct for ourselves: those are intriguing. And of all the prehistories, I’ve stuck myself barnacle-like onto the roaring, surrealistic, intemperate ’20s! Sue me.~
CB: Your most recent film, The Saddest Music in the World, is based on a screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro. How did you first hear about it?
GM: I had just finished making my short film The Heart of the World (2000) and my producer on that picture, Niv Fichman – it feels silly saying I had a producer for a six-minute film – gave me Ish’s screenplay. He told me that Ish had written it some years earlier and since grown weary of waiting for it happen. Well, even though I write screenplays and hope other people will read and enjoy them, I actually can’t stand reading scripts, even when they’re by Pulitzer, Nobel or Booker prize winners, or even if I write them myself. I just don’t like the fonts, the layout or the industry-standard prose. The words just lie there, kind of at room temperature, no fizz. So the script got buried beneath bills, flyers and food scraps on my kitchen table for a few months. Ironically, during that time, I read Ish’s The Unconsoled (1995), his fattest novel, with enormous pleasure – it’s a GREAT book – and I still hadn’t the faintest interest in this ingenious author’s script. I was unemployed and starving, too, and even this didn’t stir my inertia, so great is my distaste for scripts. But I gave it to my screenwriting collaborator George Toles and he reported back to me quite excitedly about all the script’s delights.
CB: Presumably you had to change the screenplay a lot before you could make the film.
GM: The biggest changes we made were setting and characters. We switched the environs of the narrative from London on the eve of Eastern European glasnost to Winnipeg on the eve of the dissolution of Yankee prohibition. The sad music contest sponsored by big business as an excuse to exploit soon-to-be-reopened marketplaces was kept – it functions just as well in Depression-era Canada, and offered me the opportunity to do something I’ve always wanted to do: make a 30s-style musical. Then I introduced a bunch of new characters to illustrate my thesis that Europeans tend to embrace their sadnesses directly through music, while the music of America always represses or buries emotional discomforts beneath an avalanche of pep and optimism. Think of the Tin Pan Alley compositions of the Depression: ‘We’re in the Money’, ‘I Want to be Happy’, ‘Happy Days are Here Again!’ The Slavs wept with their cellos while America foxtrotted the blues away.
CB: And this American mood is embodied by the character of Chester Kent (Mark McKinney) – an unemployed Broadway producer and self-loathing Canadian who claims to be American and tries to win the ‘Saddest Music’ contest with a dazzling, international stage production. He reduces emotions to ‘showbiz’. Is he something you fear becoming?
GM: I only wish I could be Chester Kent! I wish I could make people forget their miseries with lavish spectacles. After spending years reminding my viewers of how miserable life is, I’m really trying to blow some energy up the viewer’s rear end! I know Chester pays a horrible price for overlooking the rottenness of his own soul, but I wouldn’t mind that pleasure.
CB: Surely you got some of that from Saddest Music?
GM: It was pure pleasure! I got to turn myself inside out, got to be as confrontational and ballsy as I’ve never been. And I got to work with musicians -- something I’d always been too scared to do. Also, Chester gave me the chance, since he is always recruiting new émigré members into his band, to show the melting pot of American pop music before all its individual ingredients melted together. In this big cacophonous stew are the great primary musical flavours: African, Yiddish, Hispanic. Chester bribes and cajoles other ethnicities into his mix. There are Scots, Chinese and Japanese. Ukrainian, Portuguese and Chilean. All these wonderful musicians are forced into an unholy orchestra to play American pop, circa 1933. All these influences are present in the pop and rock we listen to today. Chester just gets a chance to play the music before all its components get used to each other, when the individual flavours are still too piquant.
CB: The grand judge of all this musical stew is the legless (literally, not drunk)
beer baroness Lady Port-Huntly, played by Isabella Rossellini. Tell me how you convinced such an extraordinary actress to push herself around in a little cart for a film shot in Arctic conditions.
GM: It was surprisingly simple. I sent her agent a script and a couple of my movies on tape. She phoned me and we chatted. Within minutes this delightful legend and I were chatting about our favourite movies, songs and graphic novels. We both like silent film, and especially Lon Chaney Sr. His great tortured tales of amputation, disfigurement and revenge! His unmatchable agonies of unrequited love, jealous brooding and masochistic longing – all of it etched on that strikingly ugly-but-heartbreaking granite mug of his! What transports of joy Isabella and I shared over the face of Lon Chaney. She booked a flight to Winnipeg a month early so we could watch as much film as possible, not to mention discuss her character, try out make-up together, and wigs, too! She and I rehearsed for a while, then she had to return to her home in New York. But I liked the progress we were making so I deputised my friend Ross McMillan, who plays Roderick in the movie, to direct additional rehearsals on the road. I emptied out my frequent-flier account and sent him and Mark McKinney to New York, where they met and continued rehearsals with Isabella in her apartment. When all three actors returned to shoot in Winnipeg, they were complete characters, camera-ready and antsy to go!
CB: Your characters are forlorn yet funny, and the amputation of Lady Port-Huntly’s
legs is simultaneously grisly and hilarious. Does humour deflect tragedy?
GM: Of course humour deflects tragedy, but more accurately it completes it! Makes it three dimensional, plausible! If you can’t bear one thing, you can always flip it over and look at it that way. I prefer looking at something sad both ways at once. It’s a luxury only the non-sufferer can afford, though. I admit I’d have trouble laughing at my own worst agonies, but minor ones are a snap. But there is something more at work in these morbid wounds endured by some of my characters. I’m trying to work in the great traditions of Victor Hugo, Hans Christian Anderson and the Brothers Grimm. Often, the outward disabilities of their protagonists are expressions of a wounded or twisted soul, the sadness of a victim or the savagery of a perpetrator. These authors created such incredibly moving little works. I’ve started referring to their genre as the ‘allegory of disability’. There is so much poignancy, and so much universality in their work. That’s why those stories will never go away. They’re all true. They evolved as folk tales over countless generations just as animal species evolved, and through natural selection only the strongest stories survived long enough to be put down in print by these master storytellers. This is the area I’m trying to work in. I want to borrow some of this fire. I want to make something that lasts.
CB: You’ve mentioned before that you are a fan of John Ashbery’s poetry. I wonder how his writing, or that of other poets or novelists, has influenced your films?
GM: Most of my filmmaking is infantile and primitive. I’ve been obsessed with recreating the feelings of childhood. I don’t know why. Therefore I love those great castrati, those great mythologisers of the dawn of awareness: Kafka, Bruno Schulz, Rilke. I love Tatyana Tolstoya’s first book very much. And I love Vigo’s films. All these things, including John Ashbery’s poetry, trip the childhood levers for me. These are works made by people who don’t just remember childhood and all its wonders, but are capable of snapping me back into a world I’d yet to make sense of. When I’m with these artists I’m drunk on the mysteries the world once concealed from me.
CB: What about your soft spot for amnesiacs such as Narcissa, played wonderfully by Maria de Medeiros in Saddest Music. Do you fear a traumatic head injury or total loss of identity?
GM: Amnesia melodramas are just allegories of disability, but amnesia is a disability from which we all suffer. We need it. It’s the anaesthesia that gets us through the day, gets us past remembering all the morally slipshod acts we’ve committed. We’d be crushed under the weight of our own guilt if amnesia didn’t ease us from the burden of constant remembering. Not all amnesia is good, though. Sometimes we forget our wedding vows, forget our children, forget our responsibilities. For years now, I’ve been forgetting regularly, in dreams, that my dead loved ones – my father, aunt, grandma and chihuahua – are dead. Long-lost beloveds limp and hobble past me, their faces warmed by dim recognition and vague love. I get to send silent sentiments of love back to these people, this doggy, whose deaths I can no longer remember, and the amnesia is an intoxicating balm. My sorrows are banished for the duration of a dream, and a little longer afterward, till perhaps halfway through the morning, when the last traces of the strange pleasures these visits supply finally evaporate completely.
CB: OK, one more question. If there was a tag-team wrestling match between the Brothers Wachowski, Coen and Farrelly, who would win?
GM: Aren’t those Matrix guys in the biggest weight division? I can say that because I could take any of those brothers just by sitting my big Canadian ass on top of them.
The Saddest Music in the World is on general release in Canada, the USA and the UK from mid May. Visit www.sodapictures.com for more information. For details about UK and Irish venues for the touring Guy Maddin Retrospective visit www.picturehouses.co.uk.
Tartan have just released Maddin’s Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary on DVD. Turn to page 6 to find out more about winning a copy.
Craig burnett is a freelance writer and assistant editor of
the v&a magazine