Guy Maddin
Guy Maddin is a Canadian screenwriter, director, author, cinematographer, film editor, and installation artist. He is known for his fascination with lost Silent-era films and for incorporating their aesthetics into his own work. Maddin was appointed to the Order of Canada, the country's highest civilian honour, in 2012.
Maddin began serving as a visiting lecturer at Harvard University's Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies in 2015.
Life and career
Early life (1956–84)
Guy Maddin was born on February 28, 1956, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, to Herdis Maddin and Charles "Chas" Maddin. Maddin has three older siblings: Ross, Cameron, and Janet. Maddin attended Winnipeg public schools: the Greenway School, General Wolfe, and the Daniel McIntyre Collegiate Institute. In February 1963, his brother Cameron killed himself on the grave of his girlfriend, who had died in a car crash.Maddin studied economics at the University of Winnipeg, graduating in 1977. That same year, Maddin's father died suddenly after a stroke, and Maddin married Martha Jane Waugh. Their daughter, Jilian, was born in 1978, and Maddin and Waugh divorced in 1979.
After graduating, Maddin held a variety of odd jobs, including bank manager, house painter, and photo archivist. Maddin began to take film classes at the University of Manitoba. There, Maddin met film professor Stephen Snyder, who held regular film screenings of titles from the school's film library at his home. Maddin attended, as did some early collaborators, including his friend John Boles Harvie, the future star of Maddin's first film, and filmmaker John Paizs. Maddin appeared as an actor in two of Paizs' short films, as a student in Oak, Ivy, and Other Dead Elms and as a transvestite, homicidal nurse in The International Style. Maddin drew early inspiration from the films of John Paizs, as well as experimental shorts by Stephen Snyder. Other early influences included L'Age d'Or by Luis Buñuel and Eraserhead by David Lynch. Maddin has stated that these films, along with the work of Paizs and Snyder, "were movies that were primitive in many respects. They were low budget, they used nonactors or nonstars, they used atmospheres and ideas, and were unbelievably honest, frank, and, therefore, exciting to me. They made moviemaking seem possible to me." Maddin also met film professor George Toles, who became Maddin's cowriter on many of his future films. Maddin's core group of friends from this period, who played various roles in the production of his early film projects, were known as "the Drones" and included Harvie, Ian Handford, and Kyle McCulloch.
Maddin joined the Winnipeg Film Group around this time, and also became friends with producer Greg Klymkiw, with whom he began making a cable access television show, Survival. Survival was a satirical talk show centred around, as its opening credits noted, how "we must survive the inevitable social/economic collapse and/or nuclear holocaust". The show became a cult hit in Winnipeg and excerpts were re-released on the compilation DVD Winnipeg Babysitter. Maddin plays a masked character on the show named "Concerned Citizen Stan".
''The Dead Father'' and ''Tales from the Gimli Hospital'' (1985–88)
Maddin's first short film was The Dead Father, a 25-minute black-and-white film about a young man whose father dies but continues to visit his family and disapprove of his son's life. Its budget is estimated at CA$5,000. Maddin began shooting The Dead Father in 1982 and finished the film in 1985. Spurred by the work of Snyder and Paizs, and together with Harvie and Handford, Maddin decided to begin making films and founded a film company called "Extra Large Productions".Maddin cast John Harvie in the lead role as the son, and University of Manitoba medical professor Dr. Dan P. Snidal as the dead father. The Dead Father was shot in black-and-white on sixteen-millimetre film. The style of the film owes much to the work of the Surrealists, with Maddin citing Luis Buñuel and Man Ray as its main influences. Critics cite, as an example of Maddin's dream-like tone, the climactic scene of the film, where the son attempts to resolve his relationship with his dead father by uncovering his corpse and attempting to devour his father using a large spoon—since the dead father awakens, the son cannot finish eating him and must instead pack his body away into a trunk in the family's attic. Although Maddin did not feel that the film's Winnipeg premiere had gone well, John Paizs convinced him to submit the film to the Toronto Film Festival and the festival accepted the film. At the festival Maddin met Atom Egoyan, Jeremy Podeswa, Norman Jewison, and began to form connections with Canadian filmmakers across the national scene.
Maddin next began work on his feature film debut, Tales from the Gimli Hospital, also shot in black-and-white on sixteen-millimetre film. Kyle McCulloch starred in the film as Einar, a lonely fisherman who contracts smallpox and begins to compete with another patient, Gunnar for the attention of the young nurses. Maddin had himself endured a recent period of male rivalry and noticed that he found himself "quite often forgetting the object of jealousy" and instead becoming "possessive of my rival". The film was originally titled Gimli Saga after the amateur history book produced locally by various Icelandic members of the community of Gimli.
Maddin's aunt Lil had recently retired from hairdressing, and allowed Maddin to use her beauty salon as a makeshift film studio, and often cites that figure as the film's budget, although he has also estimated the actual budget to have been between CA$14,000 and CA$30,000.
Although Tales from the Gimli Hospital upset some of the residents of Gimli, who believed that the film made light of the historical smallpox epidemic that ravaged the community, and was rejected by the Toronto Film Festival, it nevertheless became a cult success and established Maddin's reputation in independent film circles. The film garnered the attention of Ben Barenholtz, who had successfully distributed other cult films such as the John Waters film Pink Flamingos and David Lynch's debut feature Eraserhead. Tales from the Gimli Hospital consequently succeeded on the festival circuit and screened for a full year as a midnight movie at a theatre in New York's Greenwich Village. Maddin received a Genie award nomination for Best Original Screenplay.
''Archangel'', ''Careful'', and ''Twilight of the Ice Nymphs'' (1989–97)
Maddin's second feature, Archangel, fictionalizes in a general sense historical conflict related to the Bolshevik Revolution occurring in the Arkhangelsk region of Russia, a basic concept presented to Maddin by John Harvie. Boles, a Canadian soldier suffering from amnesia, arrives in the town of Archangel as World War I is ending. Boles confuses the warrior-woman Veronkha with his lost love Iris and pursues her throughout the fighting. Fellow "drone" Kyle McCulloch stars as Boles. The film marks Maddin's first formal collaboration with fellow screenwriter George Toles.Maddin shot Archangel in black-and-white, on 16 mm film, on a budget of CA$430,000. Maddin modeled the film on the style of a part-talkie, an early cinema genre. Film critic J. Hoberman praised the film, and noted that such stylistic approaches were typical of Maddin's growing body of work: "Maddin's most distinctive trait is an uncanny ability to exhume and redeploy forgotten cinematic conventions." Archangel premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, and in 1991 was awarded Best Experimental Film by the National Society of Film Critics.
Maddin's third feature, Careful, was styled after another early cinema genre, the German mountain picture — a surprising choice, given that, "Winnipeg's highest peak is, in fact, an artificial hill that had been created by laying sod over a garbage dump." Maddin was ordered by the producers to shoot in colour, and so Careful became Maddin's first colour film, shot on 16 mm film with a budget of CA$1.1 million. the colour style of the film emulated the two colour Technicolor movies of the early 1930s. Kyle McCulloch again starred, alongside other Maddin regulars such as Brent Neale and Ross McMillan. At one point, Martin Scorsese had agreed to act in the film, as Count Knotkers, but bowed out to complete Cape Fear. Maddin pursued casting hockey star Bobby Hull, but ended up casting Paul Cox.
Careful, also cowritten by George Toles, is set in the mountain town of Tolzbad, where the townspeople are forced to repress their behaviour pathologically, since the slightest expression of emotion can trigger a devastating avalanche. Brothers Grigorss and Johann seem secure of bright futures as butlers, but Johann becomes incestuously obsessed with their widowed mother. Grigorss, who is in love with Klara, begins to work for Count Knotkers, who also harbours love for Grigorss' mother. Klara convinces Grigorss to duel the Count, resulting in the death of his mother, Klara's father, Klara, and finally Grigorss himself. Careful premiered at the New York Film Festival and, although it was not a commercial success elsewhere, "single-handedly saved a struggling art-house cinema in Missoula, Montana" where "sell-out crowds had filled the house twice every night for two weeks".
For his next feature film, written by Toles, Maddin attempted to make an operetta called The Dikemaster's Daughter "set in a nineteenth-century Holland populated almost entirely by opera singers and dike-building navvies" about "a short-lived romance between the titular daughter and a fey opera singer". The singer is killed and the daughter is forced to marry a dike-builder who is also killed. A local alchemist then constructs an automaton copy of the latter, which the daughter succeeds in having implanted with two hearts and a lever that switches control of the mechanical body between the two hearts. The movie was to feature Christopher Lee and Leni Riefenstahl, but Telefilm Canada "declared the project a 'lateral move'" for Maddin and the movie could not secure enough funding, so was aborted.
Maddin consequently flirted with the idea of moving to Los Angeles to become a director-for-hire. He met with Claudia Lewis, who worked for Fox Searchlight, but Maddin found himself dispirited with the projects he was offered: "I remember one was a love story set in a TB sanatorium. The only thing odd or bizarre about it was the very off-putting sight of people horking up blood and phlegm into little paper cups, and these paper cups would accumulate in volume until there were moonlit paper cups of phlegm floating on a lake, and it was supposed to be very beautiful, but it was nauseating. I'm making it sound better than it was, actually." Maddin also directed the TV film The Hands of Ida and married Elise Moore in 1995, and directed the short film Odilon Redon, or The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity. In 1995, Maddin also became the youngest recipient ever of the Telluride Film Festival's Lifetime Achievement Award.
Maddin's fourth feature, also scripted by Toles and inspired by the novel Pan by Knut Hamsun, ended up being Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, his second in colour and his first shot in 35 mm, on a budget of CA$1.5 million. Set in the fictional land of Mandragora, where the sun does not set, a newly released convict returns to his family's ostrich farm and is embroiled in a host of romantic complications involving a heavy-breasted statue of Venus. Twilight of the Ice Nymphs featured Shelley Duvall and Frank Gorshin; The film's star, Nigel Whitmey, had his name removed from the film's credits after Maddin chose to remove Whitmey's voice from the film and replace it with Ross McMillan's.
As seen in Noam Gonick's documentary Waiting for Twilight, Maddin was dissatisfied with the film-making process due to such creative interference from his producers, saying "just close the mausoleum lid on me" since he was possibly done making films. Maddin then entered a relatively "fallow period" although he continued to make short films, music videos, and advertisements.