Festival co-chair Greg Carlson asked Guy Maddin to share some thoughts on the eve of Maddin’s special appearance at the Fargo Film Festival.
I imagine there are a number of Fargoans who would love to take your course on cinematic melodrama. What is the appeal of the melodrama?
Everyone thinks they hate melodrama, that it’s too “over the top,” too tasteless, too unrealistic. What they don’t realize is that they love melodrama, that many of their favorite TV shows, movies, books, sacred writings and even real life experiences are melodramatic.
That practically everything is melodramatic except perhaps a security cam tape running in real time, someone any sane person could watch only with the ardent hope a felon would enter the screen to inject some melodrama into the real life experience only a woebegone security guard could endure.
Here’s why I feel so. Melodrama is not real life exaggerated, it’s not the truth exaggerated. It’s real life uninhibited! Grandiosely gestured for better recognition and shortened for more comfortable viewing — but good melodrama is still the truth.
Consider for a second how conventions of decorum force us to repress all our true feelings during our waking hours. We’re not allowed to strike the person we dislike, nor seize the person after whom we lust. We’re not allowed to cry out loud with attracting general opprobrium, nor steal what we covet.
Only in our dreams are we allowed to display our true desires. We hit, fornicate, steal, wail and void ourselves in ways that would land is in the clink and the newspapers. Only children and the mentally unstable are allowed to be completely uninhibited, completely honest, without suffering career-ending humiliations. In other words, we spend our waking hours stifling our true feelings.
Good melodramas release our true feelings, bring them up to the highly recognizable levels that we experience in our dreams or deep in our hearts. To say that melodrama is real life exaggerated suggests a distortion, and a distortion makes something less honest. To say that melodrama is an uninhibiting of the truth that allows it to stand as grandiosely tall as it wishes is to suggest the truth is finally going to be seen as it is. So, melodrama can actually be more honest than what passes for naturalism in contemporary film, and it can do so more wildly, briskly and entertainingly.
When you spend time in the classroom, are you a tough grader?
No, I’m a pathetically easy grader. I fear my A students will be curved downward to B’s and C’s all the time, but it hasn’t happened yet.
From peepshows to live orchestration, several of your films have been exhibited as experiences not found at the standard multiplex. Do you build these exhibition ideas into the earliest conceptual stages?
I love live elements in the screenings, whether it is an orchestra in the pit, a narrator, sound effects performers, singers and, in my next live event, (a projection of my first feature Tales from the Gimli Hospital) live projections into the vertical bars of blank space left on either side of the original square film.
There are so many film festivals in the world now, one almost every day of the year, so I thought adding live elements would take films that might otherwise screen on a Tuesday morning and turn them into events — big happenings! It’s worked. And I’m hooked on the fear that wracks my body before every show, and hooked on just how great the beer tastes after a performance is over!
So far, I’ve been planning the live events as I proceed through preproduction, but sometimes I think of another element at an eleventh hour. I like these things because it turns the relatively self-absorbed process of filmmaking into pure show business! It’s easy for an indie filmmaker to forget he or she is a species of entertainer.
James Quandt suggested that many of your films reminded him of Nicholas Ray in the sense that they are “about what it means to be a man.” Since that interview, the Criterion Collection has released a gorgeous edition of Bigger Than Life. Can you share some thoughts on that movie?
Gee, I love Nick Ray, but he’s a real man. I feel if he could rise from the grave now and read that comparison he’d twist off a swig of bourbon, spike his ass with a jolt of heroin and sock little pussy me on the jaw. My films are what it’s like to be a modern feminized man — cowardly, bottom-y, backdoor-trafficking only.
There is richness in the subjects I choose to shoot, and probably even more in which the male art house habitue can find himself, so in that way Quandt is right. And I love Bigger Than Life — one of my all-time favorites; a film in which James Mason, with the help of some drugs, decides he is bigger than God himself! It’s the domestic melodrama horror precursor to Blue Velvet, but done 30 years earlier, with no post-modernist irony, and in real period suburbs, and shot in real Technicolor! Perfect!
You and George Toles collaborated with Kazuo Ishiguro on The Saddest Music in the World. How did the writing work with three contributors?
Writing with these collaborators, frankly, was a nightmare. But I love Ish, as he is called by his friends, and I’m crazy-honored to know him. He’s a genuine literary genius, a titan. His novel The Unconsoled is one of the top 25 novels of the 20th century, just to be arbitrary for a second. His other novels are just as important. Time will bear out this verdict of mine, if it hasn’t already borne me out in literary circles.
How did you get to know David Filipi? Have you had many spirited arguments on movies?
I simply met Dave when his film department at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus first invited me down for a visit and screening. What a great guy. We share a passion for the Minnesota Twins, especially the twins of our youth — Cesar Tovar, Tony Oliva, Harmon Killebrew, Frank Quilici, etc. — and I love an arts obsessive who also knows his sports. He is going to be more grounded than say, John Galliano. John needs to watch the Mets for a season and he’ll be fine. By the way, I’d love Galliano to design the third uniforms for the Twins this season, he’s got the time.
Dave and I never argue about movies. He teaches me tons about film. So much great stuff comes into the Wex that he turns me onto. I need him to keep up with contemporary film!
You have previously mentioned L’age d’or as a movie that fueled your desire to create cinema. What are some of the other seminal cinematic epiphanies that made your heart beat faster?
L’age d’or is the ultimate orgy of uninhibition in which I can still find myself and my emotional motivations. I can’t find myself anywhere in the messy “unspewings” of Ken Russell, but Bunuel is always grounded in truly universal, and therefore ridiculous, human, and especially male, motivations.
Recently I’ve grown to love, have been driven to male crushes on the directors of, the filmwerke of Austrian and German experimental filmmakers Martin Arnold and Matthias Muller respectively. What these artists can do with repurposed found footage unleashes the occult secrets and deepest mysteries of filmmaking’s thrumming, living power!
And history will prove that these two living titans will have changed the way all film is made from here on in. Their films are somewhat hard to find, but track them down if you can, and drop to your knees in humble supplication! I also love, love, love Sokurov, who has found new ways to experience movies and family emotion. Unbelievable.
At the risk of sharing a secret, what is the best place to get something to eat in Winnipeg?
Rae & Jerry’s Steakhouse, on Portage Avenue up near the football stadium where our Blue Bombers play. A steak, three Bloody Marys and a game against arch rival Saskatchewan Roughriders is my idea of a perfect Winnipeg evening!
Who is your ultimate movieland crush, and who would you have enjoyed directing if you could travel in time?
Denise Richards. If only I could go back one decade and boss her around the set in Undercover Brother. Of course, her performance in that film is already perfect. And I admit my crush is closer to the kind experienced by Joseph Cornell than one torturing a schoolboy with a boner, but I feel I could set that gem in some sort of amber for the ages, mixed somehow with the mildew that settles around the celibate — we, the celibate.
Tell us about your best or most memorable film festival experience. Fargo wants to know where the bar is set.
I suppose the live performance of Brand upon the Brain! at the Deutch Oper Berlin, the largest opera house in that opera-addled burg. I got a long standing ovation from ovation-adverse Germans and countless curtain calls — all this just moments after finding out my daughter was pregnant for the first time.
I was weeping on stage, not sure if the salt water soaking my tux was tears of self-love, tears of cathartic release from nerves or tears of joy over the heart-thrilling baby bulletins. It was all that stuff mixed up in some confused alloy I think! It was overwhelming is all I know for sure.
But I don’t expect Fargo to supply a couple thousand Germans and a family pregnancy. I love a warm responsive audience and a community with a thirsty curiosity concerning the potential of film as an art. Fargo already has that, by ALL accounts — that’s why I’m coming!
Plus, I need to make my pilgrimage to the tomb of Roger Maris, the abiding single season home run champ. I’ll lay down on its slab the shoebox containing my childhood baseball card collection, before heading crosstown in a cab to burn McGuire and Bonds bobble head dolls in a Moorhead witch’s coven I’ve heard tell about.
Many of your admirers are anxious for the release of Keyhole. When can we expect to see it make its way to theaters?
The film should be ready for Cannes consideration, but we just might not get it ready in time, in which case Labor Day seems the likely film festival debut time, at Toronto. Who knows if it’ll ever come to a theatre anywhere? My movies are getting so willfully personal that they defy commercialization, although this one has great performances by real stars, a brisk pace and delirious atmospheres like I’ve never made before, so maybe 7-11 will accept it on a direct-to-DVD-rack basis by end of May this year.
