Audio transcription
For more interviews and talks, visit the Harvard Film Archive Visiting Artists Collection page.
John Quackenbush 0:00
November 13, 2015, the Harvard Film Archive screened My Winnipeg. This is the audio recording of the introduction and the post screening Q&A. Participating are HFA Director Haden Guest and filmmaker Guy Maddin.
Haden Guest 0:19
Good evening ladies and gentlemen. My name is Haden Guest, I'm Director of the Harvard Film Archive. I just want to start tonight– So those of you who may not have heard that there's been a really terrible and awful attack in Paris that has taken many lives. And I just wanted to say that our thoughts are with the people of Paris right now.
Tonight we are really proud to welcome Guy Maddin, a truly visionary filmmaker whose work we've been screening and celebrating an expanded retrospective that began in September and reaches a grand finale this weekend. We are especially privileged here because Mr. Maddin is a visiting professor in the Visual and Environmental Studies Department, where he is teaching this academic year. Courses both in film production and in film studies. Now, though Guy Maddin is spending the academic year with us here in Cambridge, tonight's film makes very clear that his heart remains in his hometown of Winnipeg, Canada.
My Winnipeg is not only one of Maddin's most beloved films, it also counts among his most personal. It is a rueful and poetic meditation on home and family and on memory itself. And though one can describe My Winnipeg as an essay film, it also wonderfully confounds many of the ways that that genre has been defined. Confounds the essay film with its vertical flights of fantasy in its open embrace of a dream-like structure. Indeed, we enter My Winnipeg as passengers aboard a mysterious night train to, or perhaps from, Maddin’s snowy, sleepy hometown, which he explores through a kind of imagined archaeology, unveiling layers of myth and hazy memories that lie upon those haunted sites that he revisits from his youth and the intertwined histories of his family and city. If My Winnipeg is a documentary, as some have insisted, then we could call it a documentary of the imagination. A mapping of the Winnipeg invented by Maddin—as the secret yet shared place where he hides and reveals his fondest memories, his most ardent desires, his darkest fears. For My Winnipeg takes place in an in-between place, between fantasy and reality, and an in-between time, a conditional tense of what-if. What if Maddin could leave Winnipeg? Would he ever really make that leap? Or would he hover like the poignant figure of the Ledge Man? What if the Nazis had won the war? What if the inexorable forces of destruction and urban renewal had not eviscerated the city in the name of blind progress?
My Winnipeg needs to be recognized as an important showcase for Maddin's great talent as a writer, an aspect of his art and craft which I think remains underappreciated. Indeed, the heart of this film lies in Maddin's ultimately rye and moving voiceover, which glides with an almost musical quality. Maddin's impossible return to the past, his fleeting grasp at the lost world of childhood is both therapeutic and heart-rending; gently comic and deeply melancholic; offered as a waking dream that refutes Thomas Wolfe by insisting not only that you can go home, again, but that perhaps you never can actually leave the place where you were born and raised. It's a great pleasure to welcome Guy Maddin.
[APPLAUSE]
Guy Maddin 4:15
Thank you very much. Thanks, Haden. And it's been an unbelievable honor to have all of these films I made playing here throughout the fall. And this weekend, to see such a nice turnout on a blustery night. It is true that wherever I go, my thoughts—especially on foot, when I walked here tonight—seemed to take me backward. Something about walking that casts my thoughts backward. I don't know why. But it was during walks, most of them with my dog Spanky, who was featured in a brief short before tonight's film, that I thought up a lot of this stuff. And troublingly enough, the rest of it was thought of while I was in Paris, where I have a great deal of friends. I just had thought, like many of you who come to the Harvard Film Archive, maybe that of all the media, that film has grown to become the most effective mythologizing medium of them all. Since the start of the 20th century. At least the most popular. And I remember daydreaming about my city, Winnipeg, and about how no one knew about it. And I thought, “What's the matter with this place anyway?” Well, lots.
[LAUGHTER]
But what it really lacks is a good mythologizing. And then I received a call from the director of a short-lived but wondrous network in Canada, just called The Documentary Channel, and I received a commission to make a documentary on anything of my choice. I was scared to make one on something serious because I feared the amount of work required to research anything. And I feared the amount of rigor. And I hated the terrifying notion that documentaries are created in the editing room. And I'd hoped for some sort of shortcut to a documentary by just cheating and scripting it beforehand. And so, I thought, “Winnipeg. I'll do Winnipeg. And that way I can mythologize it too!” And so that's what happened and I made the film you're about to see. And I do narrate it, so I won't say much more. But as a young child—I don't cover this in the movie—My Aunt Lil, who was a second in-house mother to me—I was raised in a, well, you'll see in the movie, in what I call a “gynocracy.” A lot of women: a beauty salon, a grandmother, an Aunt, a mother, a female Chihuahua.
[LAUGHTER]
And I– Oh no, I’ve thrown myself off already! My Aunt Lil used to take me to travelogues. And I didn't even know if you all even know what they are, but there was a sort of a circuit for filmmakers, most of them American, but some of them British or Australian. They would travel along with their films made about faraway lands. About Morocco, or, you know, the UK. “England, fabulous England!” Or something. Or, “Australia down under!” Or something like that. And that they were always beautiful 16 millimeter films. Always narrated from the side, just like I'm talking, by the filmmaker himself. There was music and sound effects in the travelogue, but no voiceover. And the voiceover is always supplied live. And so I realized halfway through making this that that's what I wanted to make. Alas, tonight, I'm not going to narrate live. I did tour with this movie when it first came out in 2007. And I got a chance to improve upon the voiceover you'll hear here, where, for some perverse reason, while recording it, I decided to make it my goal to hypnotize the sound recordist and put him to sleep. So it's a bit soporific, the narration. But live, I could notice when the audience was sagging in its seats. And I could sort of crank up my performance. And I used to have really high walkout ratios on my movies.
[LAUGHTER]
Sometimes, you know, in the 40 to 80% range. And so if someone got up, I could fix them with a stare, actually, and get them to sit back down again. Or even sort of make a tacit agreement with them that they were just going to the bathroom and would be coming back. That sort of thing. So anyway, I won't be able to do that tonight. But I hope you enjoy it. It's only about 75 minutes long, but there is a little short, an edited in-camera Super-eight movie about a walk I took with my dog. And then another one, which is perhaps the most inconsequential movie ever made, called The Nude Caboose. It was my first experiment of shooting something on a cell phone. In a bar that I used to go to, The Club Morocco. Oh, that's what I wanted to say about the travelogue! I went so often and I was so enchanted by those travelogues. And my Aunt Lil would say, “Guy,” you know, to the eight or nine or ten year old me. You know, in the summer of love, the only kid at school with a brush cut. And you know, “Tonight we're going to Morocco!” Or something. Or you know, meaning just the travelogue! And I would go to school and say to all my friends, “Tonight, I'm going to Morocco!” And I would get beaten up!
[LAUGHTER]
Anyway, tonight you're going to Winnipeg. And I'll be back for a Q&A in an hour and a half, or so. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
John Quackenbush 10:23
And now, the discussion.
[APPLAUSE]
Guy Maddin 10:31
Sorry, Haden went and dragged me out from a bar, somewhere. I was very happy sitting-.
Haden Guest 10:37
He was a part of a Nude Caboose, I believe.
[LAUGHTER]
Guy Maddin 10:41
So we were just getting one going. I'm very sorry. I've calculated everything. All the time.
Haden Guest 10:46
Well, here. Have a drink of water.
Guy Maddin 10:49
I don’t need any more to drink.
Haden Guest 10:51
No. Okay.
Guy Maddin 10:54
I'm going to turn off the curtains, apparently.
Haden Guest 10:56
Okay.
Guy Maddin 10:58
Thank you, Haden.
Haden Guest 11:00
Sure. Not at all. Here. No, that's fine.
Guy Maddin 11:02
The floor. A Winnipegger.
Haden Guest 11:05
Well, Guy, thank you so much for this really marvelous film.
Guy Maddin 11:08
Thanks.
Haden Guest 11:09
And I thought I'd ask just a few questions before opening the floor to questions or comments from the audience. This film, I think, occupies a really singular place in your ouvre, but at the same time, we can see it as part of a longer sort of autobiographical turn in the work. You know, it's been preceded by two earlier films that feature protagonists—unsubtly named Guy Maddin—and act out sort of primal, shall we say, stories of mothers and sons. And in some ways, this film, which is both a Valentine to Winnipeg, is also a kind of exorcism of sorts. And so I was just wondering if you could speak maybe about this autobiographical turn within your filmmaking practice?
Guy Maddin 12:00
Well, no sooner did my career get going—and surprisingly, in the early 90s—and I astonished myself because I worked hard at making movies and I conquered what had been a lifelong problem of laziness. And I finally made some movies. Then I ran out of things to make movies about! And then in the early aughts I thought, in desperation, I'll start reading Euripides, or something, just to see if there's some old play there. You know, I thought, if Euripides is still in print after 2500 years, he's got to have something going for him. And I read Electra. And I had just been through a relationship with, as it turns out, Electra. Except I was kind of her brother, Orestes. And I found it very easy just to write, using this ancient story as a skeleton. And I made this movie called Cowards Bend the Knee, that used this skeleton. That emboldened me. Euripides' sturdy 2500 year old skeleton. But I didn't use my own name as a protagonist or anything. And then, at the last second, I found it very liberating just to take out the name that I had supplied for the protagonist and put my own in. And that enabled me to put some masochistic mustard on it. I could really detail it with things that were extra humiliating to me and I could make that character. And, you know, I have movies full of types rather than characters. And so that enabled me to flesh out the types a little bit with some masochistic detail. And then I did it again in a movie called Brand Upon the Brain! But in that case, you know, what felt so masochistically exquisite, to out myself, was kind of messed up a bit by the fact that I was outing members of my family too, inadvertently, in my zeal to just create more script matter. And I felt really bad about that. Here, I thought, I've been commissioned to make a documentary of the city, but I knew there was no way I was able to research the city's history and make it interesting to anyone. I just decided to conduct all my research in my head and my heart. And Spanky's head. He has a very small brain. I have an X-ray of him.
[LAUGHTER]
And some other friends. And just collect some myths and legends and just to put them in there. The strange thing about making movies, about things with which you're obsessed, is that you cure yourself of your obsession. You take something that really matters to you a lot, that produces narcotic tingles, and you just turn it into units of work! You turn it into a script that needs to be written, shot lists, schedules, casting sessions, shots, you know, days of production, editing, color, timing, a sound mix. And then even talking about the movie, by that time, you're really sick of it. So I'm kind of cured through just aversion therapy, simple aversion therapy, of almost everything I've ever really cared about.
[LAUGHTER]
So I'm done with autobiography, I think. I now use my own experience the way other filmmakers use their own. And that's just as a test, you know? How would I behave in such a situation? Or what have I experienced of others, in certain situations. Or they might even use something called their imaginations, for all I know. But for a while, to get going again, I really needed to mine the motherlode of strange family experience. I’m kind of embarrassed that I used my own name. But, oh well. You know?
Haden Guest 16:23
Well, one thing you’re certainly not cured of is cinephilia. And, you know, your love of cinema, and of its histories is so palpable, so real, so vivid in these films, and in this film especially. And I was wondering if this is something, perhaps, we could speak of. I mean, this is a film that, like so many of your other works, embraces and reinvents ideas from the silent cinema, from von Sternberg, from so many of these deep, fathomless wells that the cinema has created, you draw on new waters. And then, at the center of it all, is the figure of Ann Savage. And only you could take perhaps the least motherly figure in the history of cinema, Ann Savage's Vera, star, of course, of 1945’s Detour, and cast her as your mother. So I was wondering if you could speak then, maybe, about Ann Savage a bit. And about cinephilia, within this film.
Guy Maddin 17:21
Well, Ann is amazing, and I love Detour. I don't know if any of you have seen Detour. She plays easily the most ferocious femme fatale in film noir history in it. And you know, there's a famous scene in it, where she's picked up, hitchhiking, by Tom Neal, and she falls asleep. And he's assessing what she looks like, because, you know, he's giving her the full stereo male gaze. He's decided that she's kind of tough. Yeah, that she looks a lot like the highway he’s driving on or something. He's giving some sort of horrible assessment of her. And then at that point, she just suddenly wakes and turns and says, “Where'd you put the body?!” Something like that. And it's really terrifying. And when I picked her up at the Winnipeg airport, she did fall asleep in the car.
[LAUGHTER]
And I thought, “Oh my God!”
[LAUGHTER]
Well, I'd lost track of Ann Savage. To me, I'd always just noted her as someone whose name suited her screen persona so perfectly. And what I thought was a one-film career. It turns out, she had a long career on Poverty Row. PRC Pictures and many other places. And in early 50s television. And she retired about nine months before I was born. Oh my God, if only I’d have thought to plant the fact that she was my real biological mother on the internet, somehow, before. Because there are some things in the movie that are just factually true. There are other things that are poetically true, and psychologically true. And some things are just lies. And I can't remember which is which anymore. I do remember having the whole script vetted by poets, beforehand, just to make sure it was okay. But Ann Savage is not my mother, alas. My mother is still alive. She just turned 99 on Monday. And Ann Savage passed away shortly after we made this movie. But I was very careful not to allow them in the same room. Well, because they were very similar. My mother has a hint of dementia now, which has polarized– There's been a magnetic polar flip in her and she's very sweet. But she cast a very long shadow across a few continents there for a few terrifying decades. But it felt important to me to just, maybe it was just pure narcissism. Maybe it was the need to mythologize. But I needed my mother, who had been so huge and dark and powerful for many generations of our family, and came from a dark, strange place, which her dementia is now unearthing for me now. It's really fascinating. But it was important to me that I cast someone. She couldn't do it. She was blind and starting to lose her memory. And, as it turns out, Ann was starting to lose her memory, a lot, too. Well, you can see it in the movie too. I'm badgering her, I’m bullying her, to remember her lines. And it was important to me. It was just narcissism, that my mother be played by someone who was frightening. As a matter of fact, I thought Ann Savage had just died years earlier. And I was writing an email to Dennis Bartok, who was programming the American Cinematheque at the Egyptian Theater, in Hollywood. At one point, he just said, “What's new?” And I just said, “I've just written a script. And if only Ann Savage were alive to play my mother,” I said. And he said, “Ann Savage is alive! I just had dinner with her last night! I’ve got her number!”
[LAUGHTER]
I went, “Really?!” You know. So next thing I knew, I was phoning her and waiting for her to call. I felt like, you know, I was as nervous as the teenage boy I once was, waiting for phone calls. But it was a real score for me to get that—right up there with the thrill I got from first casting Isabella Rossellini, you know—to get Ann Savage, the queen of Poverty Row.
Haden Guest 21:50
Well, again, to speak about... this film has so many different textures, I think, both emotional and in terms of the visual image. And again, we could speak about these in sort of cinephilic terms. Yet, at the heart of the film, too, there are these moments where the stadium is destroyed, where the department store is destroyed, where you show these in this sort of raw color video. And the color just comes out with the MT Centre. Just so sort of harsh and glaring. I was wondering if you could speak about the decision to use that quality of video images and color at those moments.
Guy Maddin 22:30
Well, back in those days, I made real distinctions between film and video. Distinctions that could still be made now, but I've just kind of given up on them. But I felt I was still writing film scripts rather than video scripts. And somehow, I just equated memory with film emulsion and video with something more present. But that's a bit arbitrary, considering humans have been having memory for hundreds of thousands of years, long before film emotion was concocted by humans. But I did hedge my bets. I shot the thing mostly in digital video first, and then at the last second, just projected it on my fridge and reshot it on film. Just to sort of get some emulsions. I found out later there are just simple programs that will add film grain to video.
[LAUGHTER]
Haden Guest 23:26
But they won’t add a refrigerator.
Guy Maddin 23:27
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, you know, I was trying to figure out how to program a fridge into the software. So, it just seemed like, since I was throwing the kitchen sink at the viewer, anyway: narration, reenactments, stock footage, animation, stills. You know, the Ken Burns-y thing. And I’m an old baseball fan, so I just thought that full-color video here and there would just be some sort of eephus pitch that’s just sort of lobbed over the plate with an “eep,” designed to startle the batter. Just, you know, just threw it in there. So it seemed to belong with certain things. Like demolitions of things that were happening in the present. But it was all pretty arbitrary. And it was just a matter of, “There hasn't been any color for a while, so we'll add some.” That's all. It was just a matter of changing things up. Like a pitcher with a very sore arm, which is what I am.
Haden Guest 24:34
But it also felt to me like that's a moment where we've been in this kind of trance, this reverie state, almost asleep, in this waking dream, and suddenly it seemed like we're forced to wake up and to actually, to see something else. Now, just to speak about dreams, you know, the structure of this film and the kind of the way you go from episode to episode—if we want to call them episodes. You know, the second or third time I start to see, you know, these connections, for instance, between the horses in the river and then the Golden Boys, which you describe as thoroughbreds. You start to see these. And also, the incantatory quality and the ways in which words and meanings build up and images are… you almost give them… you suggest before what's going to happen. I was wondering if you could speak about this structure of the film. The kind of poetic structure.
Guy Maddin 25:31
Well, thanks. Thanks for taking such a close read on it. I think it just comes from walking the same darn streets, over and over again, for many years.
Haden Guest 25:39
The footsteps, again and again, right?
Guy Maddin 25:40
Yeah, no. You retrace and you're walking on your own fossils all the time. And I don't know if any of you have come from smaller cities. I don't think this would apply to the world capitals, people from world capitals. But some people have told me that even though they've never been near Winnipeg, that the movie reminded them of it, though they've never even been through a winter anything. But there's just something limited about a neighborhood, that it's both maddening and kind of a precious gift to be confined to a small area so that you end up being forced to study it more closely. Not that I give such a close study to it, but I get kind of like a fly in a bottle. Just buzzing around looking for a way to get out. You kind of get pretty familiar with the bottle. And the same sort of themes just start repeating themselves. And I've learned to obey—or, not obey—I’ve learned to take note of the things that come up, more and more. It's a funny thing. Once, when this movie first came out, it toured around a lot and I did a lot of Q and A's. I haven't done one for years now. And I just made it a point to alternate—whenever anyone asked me a question about the movie—to alternate telling the truth and lying to them. The film played in Reykjavik once and someone in the audience asked me a question, in that fantastic Icelandic accent, which makes all Icelanders sound like helium addicts.
[LAUGHTER]
You know, that kind of falsetto? It’s really beautiful. And I realized it was Björk asking me a question. Yeah, about, you know, “Are they horse heads? Did they really happen?” You know, that sort of thing. And I was thinking for a second, “Good God, that's Björk! I better sort of prostrate myself and tell the truth to Björk!” And then, by the time she finished asking this beautiful singsong question, I realized, “No, I must lie more to Björk.”
[LAUGHTER]
“...than to anyone, ever.” But it's an odd thing. You discover, telling the truth is easy. You run out of the truth pretty soon and you get bored of it. So you switch over to lies. And pretty soon your imagination starts running dry. And so you start telling hybrid truths and lies. And after a few years, you realize that the lies you've chosen to tell are just as revealing about you than as if you told the truth all along. It's like you've subconsciously curated these lies, and that they just sort of stand there as a crystal clear representation of you and of your opinions and your intentions and everything. It's almost like just going back to seventh grade math, with absolute value, when there was something that was a negative seven, but if you put those straight parentheses on either side of them it just meant they were seven units, you know. And whether it was a positive seven or a negative seven, the absolute value of it was seven. And so it was just as true that it was seven units, whether they were negative or positive. And I felt like that the absolute value of all the lies and truths, here, just adds up to the same thing. As if I’d just told the truth all the way... I don't know.
[LAUGHTER]
I don't even buy that myself!
[LAUGHTER]
Haden Guest 29:24
You convinced me! Let's take some questions, comments from the audience. And we can start right here in the third row. And you, just wait for a microphone, please. Well, we'd like to.
Guy Maddin 29:37
I think we're recording this.
Haden Guest 29:38
Yeah, we are recording.
Guy Maddin 29:39
Although, I have the option of deleting the entire recording tomorrow morning, apparently.
[LAUGHTER]
Audience 29:43
Alright, I understand. So, there have been a lot of movies playing here, in the last couple of months, about filmmaking. And I noticed that this movie figures into that in a big way. And I was wondering what you've thought about the way in which a lot of filmmakers will film versions of their own act of creation, and why you think so many filmmakers choose to do that.
Guy Maddin 30:13
I know Ben Rivers, who I think is here tonight—unless he walked out—
[LAUGHTER]
Haden Guest 30:19
He’s still there.
Guy Maddin 30:21
–programmed some and has his own fabulous film on the subject. It's a fantastically fecund genre. And same with the lyric essay and writing, of just acknowledging oneself as the author or the director, and acknowledging that as soon as you put something down on paper or put something on the screen, it's fiction, no matter what. And that the real honesty comes from your viewpoint. I don't know, it's just really breaking open as something. But one of the movies that both Ben and I love, Cuadecuc, Vampir, was made in 1970, ‘71. It's not anything that's– And going back even further, Ed Woods’ Glen or Glenda, which is a highly personal cine-essay on Ed Wood, who plays himself, but under a fake name in that movie, as some sort of crossdresser. And then, at the behest of producers, had to throw in some burlesque footage. And then he ran a “In the News” gender reassignment reenactment. These things all interact with each other as a kind of a making-of. It's just impossible not to look at these movies and think of the process of moviemaking. Or just to read these essays and not think of them.
I remember J. Hoberman talking about the films of Oscar Micheaux as films that just wondrously announced themselves, every step of the way, as things that were manufactured by a filmmaker. And you can't help but be drawn into them and aware of the way they were made at the same time. And I go back even further to my own childhood, when my grandmother would tell me bedtime stories, and sit at the foot of my bed. Maybe even sit on my feet. And tell a story that she told many times before, and I was both inside the story but aware of her as a storyteller, and aware of her maybe telling the story not quite so well this time. Or wishing she wasn't sitting so hard on my feet. Or really nailing it this time. And so, being both simultaneously aware of her as a storyteller, but being aware of the story as well. And, I don't know, I like to think of my grandmother as my very own first personal cine-essayist, sort of. But it goes all the way back to Scheherazade, and stuff like that, and further. I don't know, it's just a matter of, I think, filmmakers getting less and less literal minded now, and just knowing what they're doing with the medium, and thinking hard about it. And I won't take credit for any of that. I wasn't aware of the history of making-ofs or self reflexive cinema when I made this movie. I just made it, you know? So I was kind of pleased to find out that it already belongs somewhere in the middle of a very large tradition. I don't know if that answered you at all, or if I pulled a full Henry Kissinger, and just answered someone else's question altogether. Thank you.
Haden Guest 33:54
Other questions. Yeah, here's another one, right here.
Audience 34:04
So it seems to me that someone who sees this film who grew up in Winnipeg might have a very different reaction than someone who's never been to Winnipeg.
Guy Maddin 34:13
You're from Winnipeg?
Audience 34:14
No! No, no, no.
Guy Maddin 34:15
Okay. Thank God. There's one in every audience. I dunno, I swear.
[LAUGHTER]
Audience 34:19
No, I've never been there. I'm from Florida, which I think might be the opposite. Sarasota, Florida. But anyways, yeah, it seems to me like there would be a very different reaction and different things you could kind of access seeing this film being from Winnipeg, or having never been there.
Guy Maddin 34:36
Yeah.
Audience 34:37
And I was wondering how you considered that, as you were making the film and the choices you made making it?
Guy Maddin 34:45
Well, as I said briefly in my intro, I wanted Winnipeg to be mythologized in film emulsion. That's all I wanted. And by mythologized I just meant recorded, you know? Because once you're in film emulsion, you kind of exist in a world full of people that watch motion pictures, video or film or whatever. So it helped me make the city exist. It existed in small fragments. It's in a couple of brief scenes in Michael Powell’s 49th Parallel, a few other. There's a brief episode in The Simpsons where Homer drives up to Winnipeg to get cheap drugs.
[LAUGHTER]
But other than that, it doesn't exist much, you know? But I knew that there would be Winnipeggers, especially very literal-minded ones, that would complain that I hadn't, you know, shown it in the summer, when it was really nice, when it's kind of like Milwaukee, you know? So big deal, you know? Winnipeg is really meaningful and beautiful to me. And ugly is the winter. It's special then. It's so cold that your nostrils feel like they're being turned inside out by needle nose pliers. And crystals just hang in the air and you have to knock them out of the way and they shatter. And, you have to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on your pug now and then, just to keep them going. And I don't know, it's just things. That's when it's special. And I knew Winnipeggers would complain. Winnipeggers don't really like me anyway. Neil Young spent most of his... you know, I think from the age of nine to sixteen—when he ran away from Winnipeg—in Winnipeg. And he got booed off the stage the first few times he came back. It's hard on its own. So I made sure not to show the movie at all for at least a year after making it, for one thing. And then I did manage to book it into a nice old movie palace there, on a very hot summer night. And I put my mother up in a loge, somewhere. And the audience for some reason was sweet to me. Maybe because my mother was there. Maybe they were scared of her.
[LAUGHTER]
And a spotlight went on her. And she stood up and she waved with so much poise. And she got a standing ovation from about two-thousand people. And she was so poised. It was as if she got standing ovations every three days, or something like that, in her life. But she was very sweet. I don't know, it went well, but I had to handle it very carefully, Winnipeg. But like I said, wherever I went, there was always someone who stood up and went, “I'm from Winnipeg, and I have got a bone to pick with you!” Or something like that. But it turns out, they'd always moved away twenty years earlier. And I could always say, “Well, you're the one that moved away, you know. I'm still there.” So the question about whether I leave or go is all beside the point now, because I'm lucky enough, as a filmmaker, that no matter how impoverished I sometimes am, I still get the odd free plane ticket to a film festival or something like that. So I get to travel and be trapped in a grave, at the same time.
[LAUGHTER]
Haden Guest 38:03
Are there other questions? Yeah, right here.
Guy Maddin 38:08
And here's a microphone.
Audience 38:09
Hi. So I really loved the textual titles that you have.
Guy Maddin 38:15
Oh! Ok, thanks!
Audience 38:17
And they made me think about two things. One is that, often, they echo some part of your narration. So it's like this giant hand highlighting with a yellow highlighter, you know, a favorite word on the page. But sometimes they come ahead. So it's like marginalia, added to text. That's really fun. But I also grew up with, you know, several brothers and sisters in a small home, and it was noisy. And there was always someone commenting on other people's conversations. And I just wondered what, you know, sort of where that came? How you did the titles. Did you do the visual part? Yeah. Or why? Or what? For you? Or what were you hearing when you hear these?
Guy Maddin 38:57
Well, memories are kind of a racket, you know, they just sort of come at you. And then it ended up being almost wall-to-wall narration. There's a brief break from my voice. What one critic described as a “woefully inadequate voice.”
[LAUGHTER]
I didn't really want to narrate this. I wanted to somehow channel James Mason to narrate this movie somehow. But I was told by the producer, the director of The Documentary Channel who had commissioned it. He just said, “No one's going to believe this movie.” By the way, the least likely things are true. And the other things that seem most plausible are usually not. But he just said, “There's just so much sketchy material in here, you've got to use your real voice.” But it's just almost wall-to-wall narration and I just felt that you needed to do the equivalent of a yellow highlighter. There just needed to be little visual reinforcements. So I've learned through using intertitles in many silent movies that if you keep the intertitles very short, that you can just flash them on and people can read them after they're gone, even. They kind of hang in the air for a second or burn slowly. The burn heals slowly on the retina and you can sort of read them after they're gone. So they're just there to help along, that's all. And it's part of the kitchen sink philosophy. I probably should have had a 3-D section with a kitchen sink coming out at the audience or something like that.
There's a gentleman, right here. Yes. Oh, just one second for the microphone.
Audience 40:35
The silhouettes of the cutouts, like the horses? They're like Reiniger or something?
Guy Maddin 40:43
Like Lotte Reiniger, silhouette animation. Yeah.
Audience 40:46
Right. Did you do those yourself?
Guy Maddin 40:48
I did not do the animation. I know a guy named Andy Smetanka, who lives in Missoula, the birthplace of David Lynch. I'm very flattered that he tracked me down—and not David Lynch—to ask to work with me. And he's a man of many talents, but he suddenly, at the age of 40, decided to take up silhouette animation. I'm not sure if that was a wise career move but–
[LAUGHTER]
–he did it. And I asked him if he could supply some, because I was desperate for different ways of portraying. you know, a bison stampede. There was some stock footage from Fox newsreel, you know. The same with If Day, the Nazi things. I bought just, I think, three shots from the Fox newsreel company, but it was so expensive that it was cheaper—even at $500 a day for a Nazi uniform—to just stage my own. So I did a mixture of newsreel stuff and reenactments. And it was also cheaper to pay—to exploit—a friend at the beginning of his silhouette-cutting career to cut a bison stampede than to buy stock footage. So it was just a matter of being cheap, basically. Yeah.
Audience 42:09
In Winnipeg, in the summertime, are people as sleepy? Or are they?
Guy Maddin 42:12
More sleepy in the summer? Everyone leaves town and it's kind of–. Everyone just leaves town in Winnipeg, in the summer. Yeah, they just go north.
[LAUGHTER]
They follow the snow. Yeah. They don't know what to do with an unfrozen footing, and things like that. They just head north, so you pretty much have the town to yourself in the summer. Yeah, I don't know. You don't really want to know what Winnipeggers do in the summer. It's okay.
[LAUGHTER]
Haden Guest 42:47
Any other questions?
Guy Maddin 42:52
I will probably dawdle on the way. I have a standard practice, because I know I'm very shy during Q&A periods and I never ask questions, so I go out and I bend over and I pretend to be tying a shoelace. And someone can sidle up to me and ask me a question. And I will pretend I'm talking to my shoe–
[LAUGHTER]
–and answer. So I can do that for you, if you're shy.
Haden Guest 43:13
And, even better, we'll be back tomorrow night with The Forbidden Room, Guy Maddin’s latest film. So please join me in thanking Guy Maddin for a wonderful evening.
[APPLAUSE]
Guy Maddin 43:33
And thanks for staying. I'm so sorry I was late.
© Harvard Film Archive
