‘Some of the stuff is very gently peculiar, so the overall feeling of this movie is a bit like being on lithium or something. You feel like giggling every now and then.’

I repressed the urge to ask director Guy Maddin (Careful, Tales From the Gimli Hospital) how he knew what lithium felt like, because anyone capable of creating such an elaborate fantasy world inside an old iron plant in Winnipeg’s downtown core is capable of imagining anything.

Maddin’s Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, a Marble Island Pictures feature film produced in association with Telefilm Canada and Manitoba Film and Sound Development Corporation, wrapped last week. Credo Entertainment’s Derek Mazur is the executive producer.

Many acts of God have been recreated in the aforementioned building, like floods and storms and stampeding ostriches. (Actually, the ostriches never stampeded. According to Maddin, they were really kind of dumb.) Also recreated inside this monolithic 35,000-square-foot ‘dump’ – an ostrich bestiary, a rain forest, a beach, a couple of ponds with sailboats and gondolas, mountains and hills, sunny skies, and unearthed statues of ancient Greek gods and goddesses. Praise is heaped from all sides on art designer Rejean Labrie for his elaborately brilliant sets.

Adding to the whole scene, consider this: it’s a movie made primarily of exteriors where it’s always daylight, but nothing was shot outside. It got to a point where cast and crew actually hated the real outdoors.

‘Our lunch tent is outside and we all curl up like smoldering vampires when we have to go out,’ says Maddin. ‘Tungsten light, simulated natural light, is so much easier on the eyes than real sunlight. My retinas would scream from the difference and we’d cower back in.’

Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, the sixth collaboration between Maddin and screenwriter George Toles, is about ‘the paranoia of people who are far too in love.’ Attempting to recreate an otherworldly place (as if the fantastic sets weren’t enough), Maddin cast actors from all corners of the globe who speak in a melody of different dialects.

Says Maddin: ‘It’s a place where the sun never sets, the vegetation is very unlikely, and we’ve created an averaged-out accent from six different points on the compass.’

The picture, which is being shot by Mike Marshall, has been able to attract an internationally renowned cast on a budget of around $1.5 million. The ensemble cast includes Shelley Duvall (The Shining, Nashville), Nigel Whitmey (Jefferson in Paris), Pascale Bussieres (Eldorado, When Night Is Falling), Alice Krige (Star Trek: First Contact, Chariots of Fire), R.H. Thomson (Lotus Eaters) and Frank Gorshin, Batman’s original Riddler.

The producer, Ritchard Findlay, says making the picture happen on a shoestring has been more than challenging. ‘It’s not the easiest job in the world, making an art film,’ he says. ‘If we had a Colombian drug lord and a car chase, maybe it would be easier.’

‘Admire Guy’s work’

However, of Alliance Independent Films, the picture’s international distributor, Findlay says they’ve been on board from the very beginning. ‘They really admire Guy’s work, and they wanted to give him another opportunity to prove he could do something amazing.’ In Canada, Alliance Releasing is handling distribution.

Back on set, one of the challenges during the last part of the shoot was putting up with some of the smells. An indoor rainstorm sequence had to be rescheduled from the end of the shoot to the middle due to actor availability, leaving the vegetation on set pretty soggy under the lights for the last couple of weeks. Not to mention the odor 20 seven-foot ostriches under shooting lights can generate.

Other wild things, albeit smaller ones, have staged their own little coup. ‘We lost a couple of snakes a few weeks ago,’ says Maddin. ‘We let them go in one shot, and we didn’t recover them all. Now we’re finding increasingly large snake skins that have been molted here and there. These skins are getting pretty big, I don’t know what they’ve mutated into’

But as the production was set to wrap, Findlay had his own problems to consider. The bills. ‘Two years ago I didn’t know what cash flow was, and now it’s my whole life. It’s wheedling and trying to get a movie made on no money,’ says Findlay. ‘Thank heaven for credit.’

But he’s still on somewhat of a high about it all: ‘I’m Mr. Happy,’ he says. ‘I just go in, smile broadly, and slap people on the backwhere do you get lithium?’