Still mining his Winnipeg: an interview with Guy Maddin

CineAction, Winter, 2009 by John Semley

Part expressionistic city symphony film, part mischievous autobiographical reminisce, Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg (2007) served as something of a culmination of much of his work this decade. Like the mock memoir Cowards Bend the Knee (2003) and the teen detective Guignol sex-romp Brand Upon the Brain! (2006), My Winnipeg continued Maddin's turn inside, towards a pointed mythologizing of the self. Maddin's portrait of his heavily psychologised relationship to his Manitoba hometown brought him a torrent of critical acclaim--awards at the TIFF appearances on year-end best of lists, etc.--making it his most commercially viable film since 2003's The Saddest Music in the World.

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Further expanding the My Winnipeg brand is a recent companion book released this May by Coach House Books. Including essays by those involved with the film, an annotated screenplay, slews of stills, collages and others images culled by Maddin and, standing as its centrepiece, a lengthy conversation between Maddin and CanLit juggernaut Michael Ondaatje, the My Winnipeg book further expands (and exhausts) the relationship between Maddin and Winnipeg.

I sat down with Guy recently to chat about the book, the enduring popularity of his films, and what's left now for him now that his own nostalgic impulses have reached the point of fatigue.

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JS: How did the My Winnipeg book come about? I know you have a previous relationship with Coach House Books. Did they approach you about it?

GM: It came about in a weird way. When the movie was being released a year ago, one of the promotion ideas--see Canadians have no idea how to sell their films and there's no way Canadians will watch them anyways--but there was talk of making a little limited edition scrapbook of Winnipeg. It was going to be out together by Andy Smetanka who did the titles and all the animation. The distributor was going to pay him $500, some really puny fee to put together basically a handmade work of art. And then they never paid him money and he started, but they never followed up on it. And everybody who was involved with the idea moved onto other companies. It's so typical of film industry crap. It was Andy himself who approached Coach House Books with the idea. He's so keen all the time.

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JS: Well there's his piece in the book where he talks about essentially tracking you down and winding up working with you.

GM: He's a keen one. And I love his enthusiasm. I love surrounding myself with enthusiastic people because my own enthusiasm is so fragile and I'm always on the verge of going back to bed. So Andy arranged in absentia a meeting among Alana Wilcox at Coach House who ended up editing and designing the book, Jody Shapiro, my producer, and me. My experience with the first book Coach House put out [From the Atelier Tovar: Selected Writings of Guy Maddin] was so easy. I basically handed them my diaries and someone edited them. I could have been dead and it wouldn't have been any more difficult. So I blithely agreed, forgetting that unlike my diaries, nothing had been written yet.

JS: So you just had to amend the annotations to the script?

GM: I had to come up with those, yeah. But it was just a matter until three months had passed after the deadline and have my editor lose my temper with me. I remember I was in Rotterdam. Luckily I was in Europe because whenever I fly there, I can't sleep. I get jetlagged. And Alana demanded to see some of the annotations that I claimed to have been writing for many months. So I just started writing some and sending her a few at a time, but then I became so wide awake that I just kept writing and writing and writing.

JS: And from that point, how long did it take to complete?

GM: Three days. [laughs] Three days of really bad prose. Then it was a matter of submitting these very delirious annotations. I was hoping Alana give it a pretty major style edit. I mean I was letting her basically rewrite it.

JS: And was that the case?

GM: [Laughs] No. I mean she corrected the punctuation and cut out some redundant words and some effete words like "actually," and switching "which" with "that" and things like that.

JS: Such is the job.

GM: Yeah, but it was a pretty light edit. So I was terrified. But the book has got lots of great pictures in it, and collages and notes about the making of the film. It's a nice companion piece. I don't know how anyone not having seen the movie could react to it. It might be a bit of a curiosity, for sure.

JS: As far as these annotations, I get the sense that you're trying to be as mischievous as you were with the screenplay itself. Was this the case?

GM: There's so much that I chose to include in the movie that seemed highly implausible-seeming things that were completely true...

JS: Well "If Day" is the great one that I actually bothered checking and it turned out to be true.

GM: Yeah, it was wonderful. And there was also a lot of wish-fulfilment stuff, rants, stories about Winnipeg that really, because of our inability to essentially tell a story properly--namely, to distil its essence and then repeat it differently ... Canadians are so literal-minded when they tell stories, no wonder they die on the vine--I would have loved to include in the movie. But it ended up on the page. A lot of these things just came from my notebook. When I was transcribing the annotations I included these ideas, these long-forgotten bits of narrative. The main thing I was glad to get in was the story of my father's eye loss because, I don't know, in my early twenties I always liked George Bataille story "The Eye," and I was amazed how little overlap there was between Bataille always shoving his eyes up vaginas and what happened to my father. But when you're a filmmaker, or a reader, the eye is very important, so it was kind of fun to fit that narrative in there. I tried to figure out a way to fit it in the movie but ultimately it didn't have enough to do with the film and we had enough reenactments in the movie.