# “If you want realism, watch security camera tapes.”:An Interview with Guy
Maddin 

## Johannes Springer & Christian Werthschulte

Even after 20 years in the film business, the name “Guy Maddin” rings a bell
only among cinephiles. Strongly rooted in his hometown of Winnipeg, the
51-year old Canadian director's work seems to be too idiosyncratic in its
fusion of silent film-era camera work and surrealistic storytelling for the
audience of German arthouse cinema. Surprisingly enough, a major retrospective
of his work toured German and Swiss cinemas in autumn 2006 and resonated
strongly even among mainstream media. We caught up with Guy Maddin in Bremen,
where he introduced his movie The Saddest Music in the World to a fully
packed cinema.

CW / JS: Mr. Maddin, you have been making movies for fifteen years and your
latest one, Brand upon the Brain!, has just been released to great critical
acclaim. Yet, at this stage of your career, you are also the object of a
retrospective. How does it feel being an active filmmaker while at the same
time being buried in a retrospective?

GM: It feels a bit weird because I always think of my films just as titles of
my filmography, but now I’m actually supporting them in a way. It’s also an
occasion of melancholy, because it reminds me of how much time has passed
since I started. Actually, it’s perfect. It’s both great and terrible – a
perfect mix.

JS / CW: When you started film-making, critics were applauding the ‘New
Canadian Cinema,’ such as the Toronto New Wave or the Winnipeg Film Group and
their postmodernist style. How do you explain the continuing interest in your
work?

GM: I don’t know. I know nothing about the Toronto New Wave. I remember, I
first attended the Toronto Film Festival in 1986 and met young Atom Egoyan.
Shortly afterwards, I met a couple of the other members of whatever that wave
was. Yet, almost all of my movies were played at the Toronto Film Festival,
except for Tales from the Gimli Hospital. When I’m making them, I often think
of the Toronto Film Festival in the back of my mind or right at the very
forefront. As for the Winnipeg movement, I don’t want to be stretching it.
There was a brief little flurry of films that managed to escape Winnipeg and
get into foreign festivals, but they weren’t linked by any aesthetics at all.
Some critics tried to label it as “prairie-postmodernism,” because it came
from the prairies and everything that came after 1975 was postmodern anyhow. I
guess it could be called postmodern but you could easily call me a surrealist,
modernist, romantic, or experimental filmmaker.

JS / CW: This labeling seems quite appropriate given your references to an
anti-realist tradition of European film-making. Where would you place yourself
in the history of cinema? As an heir to the Lumière Brothers or to George
Méliès?

GM: I’m definitely a descendant of Méliès, although I actually prefer watching
the Lumière brothers. But when I try to tell a story, I quit being a filmmaker
and I become a reader of books. My way into great books was always to treat
them like fairytales – no matter what the book was. I always saw all works of
art, books, movies, paintings as artifices. I’ve never really felt like they
were obliged to be realistic in any way. The job of art is to remind you of
life somehow, not to imitate it. And so I evolved into a person that was just
a little better at telling a story through fairytale-ish ways. The visual
equivalent to this always seemed better, when it was a little bit artificial.
Everything had to be artificial. I’ve since loosened up a little bit on these
beliefs, but my most recent movies – both are silent movies – were actually
shot outdoors and on real locations. It was kind of refreshing to have God as
an art director.

JS / CW: Do you agree with the view that the silent film was replaced by
talking motion pictures before it could reach its aesthetic and stylistic
peak?

GM: Yeah, it struck me because it’s both an industry and an art form. Film was
rapidly developing both industrially and artistically, but the industrial
demand forced it to move on while it was still growing artistically and before
it was finished lingering, before it was finished exploiting each stage. It
really did seem to peak visually for a while. Most film historians agree that
film was set back artistically at least one or two years when it switched over
to sound. I just like silent film because it aggressively says to its viewers:
I am artificial. I am art. I am an art form; quit expecting realism from me.
If you want realism, watch security camera tapes.

JS / CW: Although your movies aren’t realistic, they don’t seem
defamiliarized. Unlike Atom Egoyan you don’t intend to uncover the mechanisms
of filmmaking in your storytelling. Once the viewer has passed the initial
stage of bewilderment, your movies make actual sense.

M: That’s why I only reluctantly accept the label of postmodernist filmmaker.
But it’s not anything I’m consciously working with; it’s part of the
filmmaking and storytelling vocabulary that I’ve picked up. It’s the accent I
speak with, it’s the dialect I use to communicate, although it’s a peculiar
one, I guess. I use it without thinking and I’m most comfortable with it. I
try to be playful, and I also try to convey feelings -- hybrid feelings are my
favorite kind. Pleasure and discomfort, for example; and I just try to weld
the two feelings, quite often opposite feelings, together because I think
that’s how life is.

Feelings are rarely simple, the great euphorias are all too brief, and they’re
usually mixed up with other crap that prevents you from enjoying them for very
long. So I always try to stick two things together at once and then render
them somehow in a way that’s pretty. Sometimes I succeed and sometimes I
don’t. I’ve found just better luck making pretty images when I’m building the
sets myself and things like that. I come from a landscape that isn’t all that
interesting to photograph, and it sort of made my mind up for me. There is
almost nothing, there is certainly not enough landscape to fill up eight
feature films in my hometown. I would have run out of landscape in a hurry.
And I don’t like working on locations that much, I kind of like having a
studio with a little desk in it.

JS / CW: Speaking of feelings, you once claimed you wish that your audience
might experience the same kind of collapsing and feeling wrung out as you did
when you watched Douglas Sirk’s What Heaven Allows. Do you think that you
undermine these feelings by adding ironic or humorous ingredients into your
movies? Take the scene in Careful, for example, where Klara and Grigorss
yawn all the way through scheming the murder of Klara and Sigleinde’s father.
It doesn’t work towards the building of tension.

GM: Adding humor probably does undermine the chance of experiencing those
feelings for most viewers. I teach film at the University of Manitoba, and I
have had trouble getting students to experience the same kind of complicated
reactions to films that I have. But they exist in Sirk and von Sternberg.
There are moments, where you can laugh at a film, but surrender to its sadness
at the same time somehow. You literally feel yourself pulled in two different
directions. If you allow the characters to give it, if you just allow yourself
to treat them with a little bit of respect, still allowing yourself to laugh
at them, it can somehow get to you. It’s like a well-told tale in front of a
fire-place. It can get to you, but you don’t actually need to see the images
or anything.

There are many different ways of rendering a story so that it can still be
moving. And one of the ways, I’ve been very pleased to discover, is through
irony. What a gift it is, when some god allows you to be moved while you are
laughing. It’s what I actually attempt to give to my viewers, but I think it
does require some bizarre leap of faith. The last time I taught, the very last
film in the curriculum was Sirk’s Imitation of Life, and almost everybody in
class laughed at the last scene when Susan Connor throws herself on her
mother’s coffin, weeps, and begs her dead mother for forgiveness. I’m sure I
have to figure out what’s so funny about that. I can barely describe it
without crying. So I became very frustrated when people were laughing at it
jeeringly. I still think there is room for delight in the cracks, even in that
scene, but to just dismiss it as a ludicrous episode is infuriating. I wanted
to skin my students alive.

JS / CW: You share this attitude towards Douglas Sirk with Fassbinder who
praised Sirk for his humanistic view and perspective on people’s suffering and
their despair when they become aware of the world’s condition.

GM: I do remember reading Fassbinder’s comments about Sirk. Fassbinder is
elevating him to godly status. This was very early on in my own exposure to
Sirk, when I found him just a delightful Technicolor diversion. I thought Sirk
must have gotten better in the translation somehow, just like Jerry Lewis did
in the French translation. I just came around and learned how to experience
all those completely contradictory feelings simultaneously, and to me it’s the
apotheosis of some primitive mystery. The reason I’m so drawn to trying it is
that I kind of feel that I can’t make a completely serious movie anyway, and
that my movies will always look kind of mannered. And therefore they wouldn’t
be taken seriously, anyway. It’s just my visual rendering style and so I want
it to be – I want to produce real feelings and my only chance of doing this is
through this recipe, which demands simultaneous simulation of almost kitchen
passion.

JS / CW: Is that why you are using a lot of Canadian clichés in your
movies?

GM: Well, I’m very patriotic. And I felt Canada is very lousy in mythologizing
itself. My answer to this question hasn’t changed in twenty years. I just
thought it would be fun making movies, when I just make them the same way they
do in every other country. So that sounds blasphemous and unpatriotic but it
serves patriotic propagandistic purposes. But it hasn’t exactly aroused
Canadians to action or anything because Canadians don’t even watch Canadian
films anyway. Myself included.

JS / CW: Nonetheless, you seem to be rooted regionally; the boredom of the
prairies forced you to explore personal and emotional territory but you also
have a strong peer group supporting your work like George Toles and Steve
Snyder.

GM: It shocks me how regional I am, because I remember making a vow when I
picked up a camera the first time, that I wouldn’t even mention Canada in
anyone of my films ever. And I went out of my way to call the setting in my
very first movie “The dominion of forgetfulness.” But after that, I started
getting interested in being more specific. My next idea for a film involved
the Icelandic settlers in Gimli, which is a very, very specific place. So,
then I thought I should maybe get up to some other mischief. Rather than
ignoring that Canada exists, I could show Canada the way I wanted it to be
seen.

JS / CW: And has this attitude changed while filming in Seattle now?

GM: It was time to get out of Winnipeg for a little while. It felt nice, like
having an affair. It was really wonderful to work with a crew of new people.
There was no baggage at all, we had no history with each other. I loved
working with them.

JS / CW: You said that expressing yourself and your memories in your movies
is very closely tied to your aesthetics. Since you’re dealing with a very
personal episode in Brand upon the Brain!, did you have to adjust strongly to
shooting at another location?

GM: For some reason, since I was very specifically dealing with pretty
accurate recreations of what I’d been through and I was in an environment that
looked so much like Gimli, it was very easy to make the switch. There’s a
beach, there’s a big expanse of water, you couldn’t see the other side of it,
it’s an ocean. Lake Winnipeg also looks like an ocean, it’s 22 miles to get
across. The waves were the same size, the light, it’s the same sun after all.
All you had to be Careful about was to point the camera away from downtown
Seattle and the Space Needle. Otherwise, it looked like Gimli, and in my head
it certainly was.

JS / CW: What can you tell us about the origins of the lighthouse motif in
Brand upon the Brain!?

GM: When I was invited to shoot out there, I pictured Seattle as being
surrounded by lighthouses, and it turned out that the nearest one was 350
miles away and I had to send a second unit of photographers out to grab images
of it. The lighthouse motif itself is taken from a great Grand Guignol play. A
father and son both worked as lighthouse keepers and they both had syphilis,
but the incubation period hadn’t started yet and the supply ship was away for
a month. In the meantime, the syphilis hits and they both go mad in this
lighthouse and the lighthouse started swelling with madness and it certainly
seemed pretty. Father and son were chasing each other downstairs and upstairs
until in true Grand Guignol fashion they murdered each other in a great splurt
of gore. I think this was the first Grand Guignol play I’d ever read, and it
struck me as hilarious that someone would mount plays like this. I always had
it in the back of my head that I wanted to do something mad like set a movie
in a lighthouse, for example. It seems that whenever a lighthouse does appear
in a movie it is an occasion of great madness. I’m thinking of the ending of
Portrait of Jenny, which takes place in a lighthouse and with time-traveling
made possible by this mad love that Joseph Cotton had for a girl that died
before he was born. All these crazy things always happen in lighthouses.

JS / CW: In Careful, the idea of madness also resonates with height. It’s
set in the Alps, and the people suffer from what we Germans would call
Bergfieber. Is this an idea you picked up from German mountain movies of the
1930s?

GM: I hadn’t seen any of the movies when I started filming Careful. I had
certainly noticed that when you’re mad you go up, for example, in crime
movies. When the police chase a criminal, he usually tries to climb to the top
of the building, so he can fall all the way down again. But what really
inspired me for filming Careful was the nineteenth-century Victorian art
critic John Ruskin. I read some little descriptions of his on mountains.
They’re so beautiful. It might even be only two or three pages long. That guy
is insane and one of the most gorgeous writers ever, a pedophile who loved
mountains, he just loved to look at them. I also read another book of his,
which is entitled Crystals: A Lecture to Little Girls. He tells little girls
in lectures about the greatness of mountains and the rock hard ferns. He is
not just describing a mountain in this convoluted sense, he’s describing an
18-inch phallus that’s rock hard with purple semi-opaque caps. And he tells
the little girls that this is what everyone should aspire to be or to reach.
There seems to be so much mischief in the love of mountains and potential
beauty so I thought, “I’ll give it a shot.”

JS / CW: Concerning your references to other directors...

GM: I’ve never seen any of them.

JS / CW: But you must have seen Eisenstein!

GM: Very little, actually. I didn’t see Eisenstein until 1994. I wanted to go
to sleep whenever I saw the name Eisenstein for some reason. And I was wrong.
Once I’d started watching, I loved him. But all the theory attached to his
name was very uninviting to me. I finally was in the mood one day and I
watched Ivan the Terrible, both parts one and two. And it gets crazier as it
goes along, especially in part two, where he started tiptoeing out of the
closet quite a bit and then was running around in a silk bathrobe by the end
of the movie. I loved it, and Prokofiev I loved even more. So then I worked my
way through Aleksandr Nevskiy, and then back into the silent movies. I just
watched them all consecutively and I loved them then.

I can see why you’re sniffing him out, though. He really is the ultimate
storyboarding movie-maker, and I was very determined to be organized in a
storyboard in those days so even without having seen one of his movies I could
see, when I finally did seek them out, why people are saying: Eisenstein. It’s
a ridiculously flattering comparison, because he was unbelievably great and
the photography is so good.

JS / CW: While watching The Heart of the World, we wondered whether there
is a political impact in borrowing the image of the industrial capitalist?

GM: By that time, I had seen all the Eisenstein and that movie is among other
things a parody, I guess.

JS / CW: There’s no political impact in there?

GM: I’ll be very frank as to what I was up to there. The Toronto Film Festival
invited me to make a tribute to it, and that instantly reminded me of the way
Joseph Stalin used to invite film-makers to produce tributes to him. We
discussed what to make and I couldn’t get it out of my head that it had to be
a Soviet Agit-Prop Film about the Toronto Film Festival, and Piers Handling,
its director, liked the idea. He was even volunteering to play Joe Stalin but
I was already plotting to make the film a little more versatile than just a
birthday tribute to the TFF. I wanted it to be something else, too. So, I
thought I’d better write something that’s more like a film creation myth but
in the spirit of propaganda. So it had to be anti-religious, and it would
create a new theology in the place of what Agit-Prop did, where the new
theology was labor and mechanization. This time it had to be Kino. It’s a new
film-creation myth.

JS / CW: We were wondering to what extent the memories of genre and
technique intersect with personal memories. Is it possible at this stage of
your career to really divide the two?

GM: My sometimes screenwriting partner George Toles actually has admitted that
in order to feel emotions properly, he has to translate them into movie
scripts and then watch the little movie in his head and then cry or laugh or
whatever. I’ve only recently become comfortable thinking in terms of genre,
and I don’t think I could articulate in any academic way how genre works for
me, but I remember hearing that sort of paradoxical statement from many
directors who loved to work within genres, because the more restrictions a
genre had, the more liberating it was and while that sounds very neat I
couldn’t quite wrap my mind around how the restrictions were liberating. But
they actually are and I guess when you face too much possibility you can
become a promiscuous creator but when you are given some limitations you are
pointed into a direction, and it puts you on some rails and it does give you a
direction that you can presume with all your strength and then think about how
to best reach the destination. But I think you’re asking me how far genre
affects my own personal memory.

JS / CW: Yes. Our assumption was that whenever one spins a tale, one always
uses small bits and pieces (or clichés) that one sets oneself up against. For
example, you stated that you prefer oblivion and forgetfulness when you are
working on experiences that are long gone.

GM: I started making movies to try to duplicate these dream experiences I had.
I felt I’d be a primitive filmmaker and that I’d best work with some sort of
modern species of surrealism where I try to recreate dream emotions and dream
feelings. And dreams, even though they can revive long forgotten memories, are
also obviously a form of oblivion as well because they take you right out of
your real-life situation. It’s a kind of oblivion, it’s a kind of
forgetfulness because you forget the exact literal details of your life and
instead misremember dreadful ones, and that’s what I’ve been up to right from
the start. The genre I found myself working in and the result almost
immediately was the Amnesia picture, Amnesiac melodrama, most literally in
Archangel, but a little bit in every movie there’s some delirium, some
forgetfulness. In The Dead Father, the main character forgets that his
father is dead. In The Saddest Music in the World, the Maria de Medeiros
character forgets that she has lost her young son. Some things are just too
painful to remember. It’s simply more pleasurable just to forget the
unbearable, to live in the sensuality of the present. Remembrance involves the
painful part of living. Forgetting involves the pleasurable.

JS / CW: Did the idea to use surrealistic methods arise immediately when you
started thinking about doing movies?

GM: Yes, because I was heavily under the influence of Bunuel’s L’age d’or. I
was inspired not so much by the surrealism, but that he as a beginning
film-maker was caught up not so much in continuity and other things. I like
the fact that Bunuel, besides getting a proper exposure, wasn’t concerned with
the beauty of a frame so much or the actual storytelling. But they are still
very smartly put-together, primitive movies that seem like an inexperienced
technician could make them. But you’d have to be very aware of what you’re
trying to say so that you can say it sloppily -- as long as this sloppiness is
kind of an awareness. Technical suaveness is not necessary, and I knew I’d
never be technically proficient even if I had a crew of people who were; I
wouldn’t know how to handle them. I didn’t necessarily try to be surreal, but
I always wanted to have a storytelling style that allowed for that kind of
technical primitiveness. But since my first movie was dealing specifically
with dream memories, naturally surrealism of a sort is in there. I’m a bit
embarrassed at how some of it is off-the-rack surrealism.

JS / CW: Have you by any chance ever seen films by Aki Kaurismäki?

GM: I’ve watched a few, but I haven’t seen his silent films. I’ve seen a few
of his others.

JS / CW: What do you think of the political dimension of the Kaurismäki
movies?

GM: I’ve always tried to stay with the Machiavellian image of the human heart,
but not on a political level. It seems though that Saddest Music has
potential to be interpreted politically because it’s got people representing
countries, and it’s pretty easy to bash America. They deserve it, most of the
time. It’s not that I’m not political, but I’ve just always been more
interested in personal things. Sometimes I chastise myself in private for not
being more political. I’ve trouble being taken seriously, anyway. To be
political and not be taken seriously would be a deadly combination.

JS / CW: Thank you for your time and your observations.

Springer, Johannes und Christian Werthschulte “If You Want Realism, Watch
Security Camera Tapes. An Interview with Guy Maddin.” Screening Canadians.
Eds. Wolfram R. Keller & Gene Walz. Marburg: Universitätsverlag Marburg, 2008.
183-192.

Contact: 
Johannes Springer[mailto:johannes.springer(at)skug.de] 
Christian Werthschulte[mailto:cwerthschulte(at)yahoo.de]