A dying Russian strangling a Bolshevik intruder with his own intestines. A state scientist transforming into cinema itself in the Earth’s core. A baroness with transparent prosthetic legs filled with beer. A giant mummified brain nestled in the middle of a German forest.
These are but a few of the weird, indelible images Winnipeg wizard Guy Maddin has contributed to Canadian cinema. They can be found, respectively, in his films Archangel (1990), The Heart of the World (2000), The Saddest Music in the World (2003), and his latest, Rumours.
The prolific director has made a career of making miracles out of very little, but after 36 years of helming features for aesthetes tuned into silent and early-sound films, Maddin has taken his biggest swing at courting the mainstream with Rumours, co-directed with brothers Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson, his all-round collaborators for the past decade.
The horror-comedy follows G7 leaders who assemble to craft a response to an unnamed global crisis, only to find themselves mysteriously cut off from outside contact in a German wetland. The story is told in straightforward narrative fashion and has a contemporary look – shot digitally in colour – unlike his earlier odes to 1920s cinema on 16mm and Super 8 film.
Does this mark the dawn of a new era for the 68-year-old art house favourite and his younger partners?
“We’ll take it project by project,” says Maddin, speaking with Playback at the office of Canadian distributor Elevation Pictures during the frenzied Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), where Rumours had its North American premiere.
“I’d like to always have an extreme stylistic imprint. That just feels good. I’m a big fan of the filmmakers who wield strong style, whether it was Josef von Sternberg in the old days, or Harmony Korine now,” he says.
Even Rumours‘ conventional style is influenced by one of his classic film heroes, Spanish surrealist master Luis Buñuel.
“I was emboldened by his late films, especially The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie [1972], which has a flatly lit look and no flashy shots or camera moves,” he notes. “The weirdness is in the content.”
He estimates the budget of Rumours – a copro involving Winnipeg’s Buffalo Gal Pictures, Germany’s Maze Pictures and the U.S.’s Square Pegs – was US$5 million, his highest to date. That was enough to land Academy Award-winning stars Cate Blanchett, who plays a German chancellor reminiscent of Angela Merkel, and Alicia Vikander, as the European Commission president and past love of fictional Canadian Prime Minister Maxime Laplace (Roy Dupuis).
Blanchett, asked to characterize Maddin, tells Playback in a statement, “If you were to mix a 1,000-year-old bottle of Japanese whisky with a can of Dr Pepper and set it on fire, that might just be Guy. No filmmaker past, present, and I suspect future, comes close to his uniqueness and cinematic influence.uniqueness and cinematic influence
“Working and conversing with Guy is like being on a marshmallow fever dream rollercoaster that moves across time and space. It’s thrilling, and unforgettable. The transition from conversation to the process of filmmaking is utterly seamless. I admire and adore him in equal measure.”
Throughout his career, Maddin has won over big-name performers, particularly actresses, to his passion projects, including Isabella Rossellini in The Saddest Music in the World and Keyhole (2011), the late Shelley Duvall in Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997) and Charlotte Rampling and Geraldine Chaplin in The Forbidden Room (2015).
On attracting stars of this calibre, Maddin says, “I didn’t think they even knew of my existence. I’m well known in nooks and crannies of the biz, but I’m comfortable with no one knowing who I am. Working with stars is fun. It’s just a matter of getting to know people and how they like to work. It’s something I’m still learning. It feels good to be 68 and still learning.”
Quebec star Dupuis is a repeat collaborator, having previously appeared in The Forbidden Room, a hyper-stylized fantasy inspired by one of Madden’s top obsessions – lost films from cinema’s early days. (It features an even bigger giant brain.) The Toronto Film Critics Association named it best Canadian film of the year in 2016.
“Guy gave me my three best days of shooting on The Forbidden Room, where the mountains were made of paper-mâché and the trees were moving around me while I was walking on the spot,” says Dupuis. “Guy was dancing with the camera and directing us live. He is an artist in the most noble sense of the word; he takes you where you have never been.”
Maddin walked alongside Blanchett and Dupuis on the Cannes Film Festival red carpet in May for the Rumours world premiere, which he describes as next-level.
“That was the happiest night of my life,” he says. “I took my daughter and two granddaughters, who had no idea what I did for a living. They were swept up in the glitz and glamour and all the attention their grandfather got. We got a six-minute standing ovation.”
Looking to build on that momentum, U.S. distributor Bleecker Street put some muscle behind its promotional activities, which included a cover ad in The Hollywood Reporter during TIFF. According to Bleecker Street, the movie opened in 630 North American theatres on Oct. 18 and has taken in US$571,909. While not yet finding a huge audience, it has impressed critics, earning an 80% score on Rotten Tomatoes.
Maddin’s work has always been aimed at a cerebral crowd. But his initial post-secondary education was not in the arts; he attended the University of Winnipeg and got a degree in economics. A friend persuaded him to sneak into his University of Manitoba film classes and a new passion was born.
“That was 1980, which I count as the year I woke up and found pleasure in what I was studying and what I wanted to do,” he recalls.
He made connections in the local film scene and in 1985 made the short The Dead Father, in which passing away doesn’t stop a dad from meddling in his son’s life. It played at TIFF and allowed Maddin to expand his network. He then made his first feature, Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988), a love triangle fairy tale touching on smallpox, necrophilia and puppet shows.
Shot in black and white in a “part-talkie” aesthetic, it earned a cult following, reportedly turned a profit, and garnered Maddin a Genie nomination for screenwriting. He was off to the races, and followed up in this vein with Archangel and Careful (1992), which tells its mountain village sex drama in an old Technicolor hue.
At this point Maddin considered becoming a Hollywood hired gun, visiting Tinseltown on the invitation of executive Claudia Lewis.
“I didn’t know what I wanted to do next,” he recalls. “Claudia arranged for me to meet with some creatives, as well as Madonna’s music video house and a bunch of other companies. But I was a fish out of water. I only knew dead movie stars, not living ones. I just wanted to go home.”
One of his most notable works is The Heart of the World, commissioned by TIFF for its Preludes short film series. A delirious stylistic blend of Fritz Lang, F.W. Murnau and Sergei Eisenstein, the six-minute silent centres on a female scientist (Leslie Bais) loved by two brothers (Caelum Vatnsdal, Shaun Balbar) and an evil capitalist (Greg Klymkiw, who has also produced for Maddin). She learns the Earth is due for heart failure and warns a panicked populace.
The film achieved epic scope thanks to fast cutting and the contributions of the hardworking Winnipeg craftspeople who have been Maddin’s secret weapon. It won a Genie and was named 2000’s best experimental film by the National Society of Film Critics, who had granted the same award to Archangel in 1991.
Jody Shapiro was a producer on the film as well as on The Saddest Music in the World and My Winnipeg (2007), Maddin’s self-described “docu-fantasia” about his relationship to his hometown, which won best Canadian feature at TIFF.
“Guy is a rare collaborator, combining humour, a wild imagination steeped in cinematic history, and a remarkable ability to adapt to any situation, which makes him a joy to support,” says Shapiro. “We’ve had plenty of adventures, and if I’ve learned anything from them, it’s that there’s nothing a little Vaseline on the lens, a few jump cuts and a solid nap couldn’t solve.”
Producer Liz Jarvis of Buffalo Gal Pictures has also gladly returned multiple times for Maddin’s wild cinematic ride. “Since Careful, when Phyllis Laing was the accountant and I was the assistant director, to Rumours, our collaborations with Guy have been a true passion and pleasure,” she says. “Like the protagonist of My Winnipeg, we’re still here – after many fantastic journeys.”
Maddin has received numerous other honours and prizes, including an International Emmy and Gemini Award for Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002), an eye-popping silent collaboration with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. He was appointed to the Order of Manitoba in 2009 and the Order of Canada in 2012.
Experimental film, however, is not the road to riches, and over the years Maddin has made ends meet teaching at institutions including Harvard, the University of Toronto and the Vermont College of Fine Arts.
“I like teaching, but it takes up a lot of psychic space and destroys my momentum as a filmmaker,” he says. “When I’m in another city, it makes collaborating with my Winnipeg-bound partners difficult.”
Now he generates additional income by selling handmade collages on Instagram – typically esoteric stuff, such as a composite of horror actress Ingrid Pitt and a pelican or Prince Harry with wings over a demonic backdrop.
He is past retirement age but has no plans to retire while the creative wheels keep turning. He and the Johnson brothers are currently planning a project steeped in Canadian television history.
“It’s not another old-timey movie,” he says self-mockingly, “but it’s pretty television-obsessed. It could be a movie, but I think a TV-obsessed show should be a TV show.”
Playback‘s Canadian Film and Television Hall of Fame was founded in 2007 to recognize extraordinary achievements in the Canadian entertainment industry. Inductees are selected by a jury of their peers.
Photo by Kristy Sparow/Getty Images
