Philadelphia Weekly

Wise Guy: Maddin makes movies from a bygone era.

Canada's premier retro stylist, filmmaker Guy Maddin, doesn't just make homages to old film styles.

He sometimes seems to be a filmmaker from a bygone era of purple melodramas and bold Soviet imagery. After making a splash on the cult circuit with Tales From the Gimli Hospital (1988) and Careful (1992), Maddin underwent a stylistic change.

Starting with one of his two-dozen shorts--the six-minute "subliminal melodrama" The Heart of the World, which was commissioned for the 2000 Toronto Film Festival--Maddin adopted a manic, dizzying editing style to accompany his intentionally beat-up black-and-white images.

Since then he's unleashed the oddball ballet film Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary; the Isabella Rossellini vehicle The Saddest Music in the World; the sex-and-hockey installation piece Cowards Bend the Knee; and Brand Upon the Brain!, an honest-to-god silent film originally screened with live accompaniment, Foley artists and guest narrators. (The latter arrives on Criterion DVD in August.)

Maddin's latest, My Winnipeg, purports to be a documentary on his hometown and childhood. But as with the docs of Werner Herzog, it's best to approach the truth with some apprehension.

Your films are filled with bizarre stories and asides, some of which turn out to be partly true. How much of My Winnipeg is factually correct?
"I've been kind of sticking to my story that it's 100 percent true. But it's about a third facts, a third factual accounts of local legends and a third sort of wish fulfillment. It's all one species of truth or another. I've gotten some of the facts wrong, but I wasn't all that embarrassed about it. It turns out Winnipeg isn't the coldest city in the world. I always thought it was and it was always reported as such when I was growing up. But I double-checked after making the movie and found out that Ulan Bator in Mongolia has the coldest January and February on record. But it doesn't really matter. It's more important for me that I present a mythic portrait of the place. Canadians are just such lousy self-mythologizers."

Have you in fact left Winnipeg, as you say you're doing at the beginning of the film?
"I kind of have. I have an apartment in Toronto. But I do have a family summer cottage about an hour's drive from Winnipeg."

Your last couple films, chiefly My Winnipeg and Brand Upon the Brain!, have autobiographical slants. Why is that?
"The first time I did that was in Cowards Bend the Knee. I decided to use my own name [for the lead character] because he behaves so cowardly and so horribly that I really thought I'd feel this exquisite masochistic pleasure--sort of outing myself as the monster I once was. And I really got hooked on it. So I did it again in Brand Upon the Brain!, but in that case I outed all the members of my family too. But then I started to feel a little guilty and I felt I had to do it one last time with My Winnipeg."

Do all your films have elements of yourself in them?
"Right from the very first film [1986's The Dead Father], which is 100 percent autobiographical. But I always try to find myself in what I do. Even in Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary, I could find myself in all the jealous males. I decided to make the movie more about male jealousy than females lusting after exotic foreigners. To me it just seemed to be about xenophobia and male jealousy and sexual insecurities. That's where I come in. Those items are my specialty."

Why did you decide to cast Ann Savage, famous as the femme fatale in 1945's Detour, as your mother in My Winnipeg?
"I originally wanted to get my mother because she's quite a good actress and a natural performer. But she's getting a bit old. I thought Ann Savage was the only person in the world who could play my mother, just because of the ferocity that she brought to her role in Detour--the performance that sent Bette Davis hiding behind a plotted palm at its Poverty Row premiere! It turns out I knew someone who knew Ann Savage, so I started a couple months' wooing her by phone to come out of half-century-long retirement. At one point I remember telling her, 'Ann, you're probably a little uncomfortable working on a film after being out of pictures for a while.' And she said, 'There's all this talk about being away from pictures. I'm never away from pictures! I'm in them every night!' She sort of talked like a femme fatale. She's sweet almost all the time but she does have Detour's Vera crouching like a panther inside her at all times, ready to strike."

How do you work with your longtime co-writer George Toles?
"Even though we live a five-minute stroll from each other, we do most of our work over the phone. I write the treatment. He always writes the dialogue. Strangely, he wrote the dialogue for my childhood reminiscences in My Winnipeg. I just like the way he manners human speech. He insists that all of his characters speak in complete sentences and with proper punctuation. It makes naturalism a tough achievement for an actor."

About halfway through your career you started employing a manic editing style, which isn't exactly like silent film-era editing. How'd that develop?
"I always wanted to make my movies faster. My earlier films had a really high walk-out quotient. But it sort of coincided with my decision to go autobiographical. There's a neurological skittishness in the editing--thoughts are fast-forwarding and going backward and there are instant replays. It's just a facsimile of remembrance. I don't know if I'll keep it up or not. But I'll always keep my movies short and brisk."

Has the rise in new media--YouTube, etc.--changed your filmmaking?
"I made some cell phone movies. It's really weird saying 'cut' when you're holding a phone instead of a camera. I'm developing a choose-your-own-adventure interactive movie labyrinth. It's to allow visitors to make their own brisk little fun narratives. Not a video game--I don't want that degree of participation from viewers. I still want them to be slaves to my control."