Reviewing Guy Maddin's latest film, The Saddest Music in the World, for the current issue of the Village Voice, J Hoberman succinctly nails what's most unique about one of the most enigmatic living filmmakers: "Like everything in Maddin's ouevre... [it] is a contribution to the imaginary history of our times." Maddin's Music recently screened at SFIFF, prompting a long and leisurely conversation (by telephone) with filmmaker Jonathan Marlow about his work. This week: Part One.
Marlow: When I was in Vancouver in October, I bought the diary From the Atelier Tovar and I was a little curious. We actually talked about this at Sundance briefly - what prompted you to get around to publishing them?
Maddin: A perverse caprice. I happened to have them on me in Toronto one day. I don't live in Toronto but I was staying there for a few months, this past summer to edit, and I go there every now and then.
Marlow: You edited Saddest Music there?
Maddin: Yes, The Saddest Music in the World. So I guess I was having coffee or something with a friend of mine during one of my business trips and I had my diary and a friend of my friend joined us. It turned out to be Jason McBride of Coach House Books and he was talking about diaries for some reason - because I had them on me I guess - and he said, "Would you ever consider having your diaries published?" And I thought, "Maybe someday, when I rewrite them." Because I just thought, "Maybe as a memoir," you know? Ah, but he said, "Would you mind if I took a look at them?" And I said "No, here." I found myself giving my diaries to a total stranger. Maybe not a perverse caprice but a moronic caprice. Then he just sort of charmed me or persuaded me into publishing. He said, "Would you allow me to publish them?" And I said "Eh, whatever."
Marlow: Is it only published in Canada or is there a distributor in the US?
Maddin: I don't know how the distribution works anymore. So many things are available on the Internet anyway. When I was in New York recently, a bunch of people came up to me with copies to autograph, so they're getting a hold of them somehow. I've sold about a thousand copies so far. I don't know if that's good or bad or what.
Marlow: Was the jacket design yours or was it something that they came up with?
Maddin: I like the jacket design on that.
Marlow: It's beautiful, yes.
Maddin: Some guy named Darren Wershler-Henry. He's one of the employees at Coach House Books. He did a good job, I thought.
Marlow: It looks like something that would... Well, obviously there's one part that is from a film of yours, but the actual design seems to evoke...
Maddin: Yeah, they're very thoughtful people there and I'd like to do something else someday and actually take some time to write it. You know, I was so harried when that diary was put together, which is just as well anyway because I would have been tempted to do so many revisions that it would have lost all "diary-ness." I still haven't read it, anyway. I haven't even read my diaries. I intended to read them many years from now and I have this odd thing where I have a book out that I myself haven't even read.
Marlow: There are people out there like myself that know more about your past than you remember.
Maddin: Than I would at least know; I've probably forgotten many things I wrote. I definitely don't know what aspects of me you know because it was edited and the diaries are very long. Those are just a selection. From what I've been able to understand, it sounds like it's mostly... Half of my diaries are little fictional miniatures and I think those are not selected, so it's mostly the diary-ish things that are in there. A lot of the self-loathing and the self-pity.
Marlow: Yes, that's what surprised me.
Maddin: Name-dropping, you know.
Marlow: The amount of self-loathing that permeates the book is somewhat overwhelming.
Maddin: When you're writing a diary, you don't really feel the need to balance anything, so it's not like I hate myself all the time. A diary isn't a perfect reflection of what you're up to. The days in which my life's really humming along and I'm busy and happy, I don't have time to write in my diary. It's those days with lengthy stretches of "down time" that you have all the time in the world to write in a diary. Those days that you don't really feel so good about how your life's unfurling. The shitty days tend to get the lion's share of the print, you know. There's some kind of weird natural selection that goes on, that weeds out the strong days and keeps the weak.
Marlow: That definitely puts things in perspective.
Maddin: Yeah, but having said that, I am a loathsome person.
Marlow: Your films tend to mirror the history of cinema. In fact, in Caelum Vatnsdal's book (Kino Delirium), you say that you're bent on rewriting Hollywood history. As such, the early films seem like this quasi-silent period and then your first color film is almost a mirror of the two-strip Technicolor period. Now, with Saddest Music, you're almost in this period of the early-1930s musical. Except, mixed in with this chronology, you have The Heart of the World, Dracula and Cowards Bend the Knee, which are almost even "earlier" than your earliest films because they are almost pure silent films.
Maddin: I've gotten off the straight-and-narrow path, shooting through the decades of the twentieth century. I'm sort of tackling all sorts of branching lines, loops and blind alleys. I'm traveling a pretty ramified path up through the reconfiguration of film history. It's whatever capriciously seizes hold of my interest for a while. Each project has its own slightly different demands, although I'm sure they all look the same to a casual observer. They all look like old movies. They do have minor distinctions.
Marlow: I think they're pretty significant distinctions. Take The Dead Father, for instance. You mention it was influenced by Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. I don't know if there is any special thing that continues to recreate itself around your relationship with your father, but there's obviously this root that forms around all of your films. There is also some kind of core inspiration and, in this case, it was [Bruno] Schultz's writing. How did you come about putting The Dead Father together?
Maddin: I thought, from the very first, that it was always the subject of the first film I was going to do. In a way, my reasons for making a film and how I made it all sort of intersected at one point and that was with the dead father. I knew I would never be able to make a very sophisticated looking movie, like more young aspiring filmmakers try to make. They try to make an exact replica of their favorite movie or something like that, like those kids that reshot storyboard panel for panel Raiders of the Lost Ark starting at age ten and finishing at age seventeen or whatever. I knew that I just didn't have the technical expertise to make anything that would have any sort of continuity or sort of "Sean Penn style." I would never be an actor's director at that stage of my career anyway, probably never will be.
Having seen Luis Buņuel's early films enough times (Un chien andalou and L'Age d'or), I was very impressed with the effect Buņuel and Dali could get while being film novices... primitives, actually. I knew that was the route I had to take. The kind of accidents you have when you're a clutzy novice filmmaker lend themselves to surrealism. L'Age d'or, their second film, is more narrative than their first, or more recognizably narrative - it's a love story with some surreal trimmings. I knew that I could probably have a narrative that was as continuous as that and as discontinuous as that and maybe, I would hope, as effective as that. It isn't, because L'Age d'or is a great movie, and The Dead Father was sort of an interesting learning experience. I knew that I wanted to make something that wasn't just a piece of wank, so I wanted to make something autobiographical. I also had this burning desire to just put down on celluloid what Bruno Schultz managed to get on paper, these dreams that people have about return visits of dead loved ones that leave you with such a strong feeling afterwards. A really strange recipe of feelings. I just thought that I would try to put these autobiographical reveries down in some kind of artificial structure, some sort of narrative order, in the freewheeling style of Bruno Schultz's writing.
Marlow: Were you familiar at the time with Lynch's The Grandmother? Had you seen that at all?
Maddin: No, I hadn't, but Eraserhead really hit me hard. I was really impressed. It was a big influence. When I discovered that Lynch's first major short film was the same length as The Dead Father and was about his grandmother, it just really seemed like he'd felt the same need. He's exactly ten years older than I am and I know he's felt the same need to go autobiographical all the time. As soon as I saw Eraserhead, I knew he, like I, had experienced unplanned pregnancy and taken all those feelings of delirium and disorientation that comes when all the terrain you're standing on is suddenly pulled up from under you. You find yourself standing in a completely new domestic situation. Especially in the middle of the night when you just can't believe what's really happened to you. On those trips to the bathroom where you go, "I'm in the bathroom in my wife's apartment, the one I share with her, and I have a child," you kind of dream these odd moments and realize where you really are in the world.
Marlow: Surrealism is a natural tendency out of that.
Maddin: Yes, it is. There are many different ways of getting at the truth. There's melodrama, there's surrealism, there's naturalism. When it's done well, surrealism is as good as anything at getting at those irrational moments, those certain fears. It's a unique species of feelings that David Lynch fits in to Eraserhead. It always impressed me and emboldened me to just go after a story in a non-linear way. I felt it was important to be true to the feelings I had and to get them up on the screen. Now, I failed. Nowhere do I see in The Dead Father the feelings that I get from my dreams. But it was an interesting experiment. I found some things worked better than I thought they would. Other things just never worked, even if I went back and re-edited it. About halfway through shooting, I discovered a visual style that I would stay with for quite a while. So it was really valuable.
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