At some point during the production of his first film, “The Dead Father,” Guy Maddin made one of his most consequential decisions as a director. It was the early 1980s, in Winnipeg. Maddin was around 26 and had only recently started watching movies seriously, thanks to a friend who had been sneaking him into film classes at the University of Manitoba. When he had the notion to make his own black-and-white short, he reckoned it prudent to pick up a book on filmmaking. The one he chose mentioned three distinct types of lighting, so when shooting began, Maddin dutifully aimed all three of the lights he’d procured at his lead actor’s face. The three lights produced three nose shadows. He unplugged one light, then another. The third left a single nose shadow. It looked like a Hitler mustache, but Maddin just told the actor to move his head until it disappeared.
When the rushes came back, that single light had created a striking effect, something like 1920s German expressionist cinema. “That wasn’t conscious,” Maddin told me. “I just wanted an image, and didn’t want three nose shadows.” He soon realized, though, that he had stumbled into a style, one that “suggested the past.” “The Dead Father” took its title from a Donald Barthelme novel, but it was inspired by recurring dreams Maddin had been having about his own father, who died unexpectedly several years earlier — “and when you’re making a dream about the past, a time when your father was alive and then dead and then alive again,” he said, the style “seemed to be not inimical to the themes of the movie. So I just went with it. And then by the time I made another movie, I thought, Well, I know how to make movies that look this way.”
In the years since, such idiosyncratic excavations have helped Maddin carve out a singular niche in the world of film: Over the course of 13 features and several dozen shorts, he has established himself as cinema’s premier nostalgist and one of the purest embodiments of the cult auteur. His aesthetic may be decidedly avant-garde — most of his films were shot in grainy black-and-white, on rudimentary sets, drawing on a bygone cinematic vocabulary of iris shots and Vaselined lenses, intertitles and dissolves. But there’s also an inviting sense of wackiness to his entire project, especially in the way he draws on the overheated, melodramatic narratives of the more lurid silent and early sound eras. Maddin’s work is often described as “experimental,” but that’s not quite right; some of the shorts, maybe, but the features are too entertaining for such a humorless and process-oriented descriptor. The best known of them, “The Saddest Music in the World,” from 2003, looks like the sole surviving (and not very successfully restored) print of a Depression-era film, but the plot is hilarious: It revolves around an Olympics-style tourney of mournful songs staged as a promotional stunt by a 1930s beer baroness (Isabella Rossellini), whose hollow prosthetic legs carry samples of her product. (“You can almost hear the typhoon bearing down on a defenseless seaside village through this tortured flute solo,” an announcer remarks during the performance of a Siamese musician.) “What was exciting about his films is they didn’t necessarily feel like they were paying tribute to anything that had existed,” the director Ari Aster, a longtime fan, told me. “They felt like unearthed movies that couldn’t have existed.”
Aside from brief stints in Toronto and Cambridge, Mass. — where he was a visiting lecturer at Harvard — the 68-year-old filmmaker behind all this work has never moved away from Winnipeg, where I visited him in August. “It’s Guy Maddin here! Welcome to sorry-ass Winnipeg!” he texted shortly before my arrival. The following morning, I was scheduled to meet with him, along with Evan and Galen Johnson, the fellow directors of his latest film, “Rumours.” Maddin proposed an itinerary that included lunch at “the Sals, a regular haunt of ours” (“We also lunch at Red Lobster now and then,” he noted), and a swing by the highest peak in the city, a park built atop a municipal dump known to locals as Garbage Hill. “To increase your Pulitzer chances, we should take you to places that make good metaphors,” he added in a follow-up text.
I had come to Winnipeg in part because the “experimental” tag might actually apply to “Rumours”: It’s an experiment in normality. The film is a comedy set in the present, at a Group of 7 summit being held in a Bavarian forest by the chancellor of Germany, a Merkel-ish figure played by Cate Blanchett. It was shot digitally, in color, and looks entirely modern. But it remains, somehow, fundamentally a Guy Maddin movie. The theme of the politicians’ summit, Blanchett’s character announces, is regret. The elderly American president is played by Charles Dance, of “Game of Thrones,” with an unexplained British accent. It is, for once, the Canadian prime minister — played by the Québécois superstar Roy Dupuis — who gets to act like a hunky, man-bunned version of Harrison Ford in “Air Force One” as the world leaders stumble upon a giant brain in the woods and find themselves menaced by masturbating zombie bog creatures. “There’s a new influence there,” Aster says, “which I think is Evan and Galen. It feels like sort of an evolution of what Guy was doing on his own, in both aesthetic terms and, I don’t want to say ambition, but there’s a new kind of strangeness.”
For years, Maddin had been talking about trying a more contemporary piece. Then he got a call from Aster, whose arty horror films “Hereditary” and “Midsommar” made him one of the most successful directors of his generation. Aster was forming a production company, Square Peg, “and Guy and Evan and Galen were basically the first filmmakers that came to mind as people who would be exciting to work with,” Aster told me, “if in fact they needed or wanted any help.” They did, it turned out, have a script they’d developed, written by Evan, and extracted from a bloated project they’d been fussing over for years. Maddin loved the screenplay, though he recognized that it would require a change of approach “to be maximally effective and reach more people,” he said — adding, almost defensively: “You know, that’s an actual goal I’ve always had. I always thought I could reach more people on my terms.” With “Rumours,” he said: “I just thought, Well, OK, I’ll play on the modern audience’s terms a little bit. I’ll have fewer utterly alienating effects. I’ll have shots in focus and color and people speaking in a way people can understand, with a plot and stuff like that.”
Blanchett described the result to me as “a wider doorway for an audience unaware of their work to step through. In that way it feels like a departure.” The movie received strong reviews after premiering at the Cannes Film Festival, where Maddin had never had a feature screened before, and this fall it will receive the biggest theatrical release of Maddin’s career. Evan Johnson described a call with Bleecker Street, the U.S. distributor, in which the topic of screen numbers came up. “Someone said, ‘It’ll be something like five,’” he said. “And before he finished, we were like, ‘Five! Oh, that’s pretty good. That’s more than I expected, to be honest!’ And then he said ‘hundred,’ and we were like, ‘What?’”
“Only 499 more theaters than I had before,” Maddin said.
Before my trip to Winnipeg, my main exposure to the place had been through Maddin’s own films — in particular, his 2007 feature “My Winnipeg,” a commission for Canada’s Documentary Channel. For that project, Maddin dutifully exhumed the sort of archival city-life footage you’d find in a proper public-television documentary, but then overlaid it with baroque, deeply unreliable narration and restaged scenes from the history of the city and his own family, some true and some fanciful. Yes, he did grow up in an apartment above a beauty salon run by his mother and aunt, and as a boy would climb into the basement hair chute to peep at the ankles of the largely elderly clientele. No, a flash-freeze of the Red River in 1926 did not trap a group of runaway horses and leave their heads jutting from the ice for months. (“Winter strollers visit the heads frequently, often on romantic rambles,” Maddin claims in his narration, though the image was actually borrowed from the Italian writer Curzio Malaparte’s own heavily fictionalized memoir, “Kaputt.”) Yes, his father, the general manager of a local hockey team, would lend out young Guy to visiting franchises as a “stick boy.” (In a 1997 documentary, Maddin remembered lathering players’ backs in the showers and gazing in awe at the sullen and monobrowed Soviets. “The guys that I loved so much didn’t wear helmets,” he said. “They wore Brylcreem.”) But alas, no, there was never a daily local TV series called “LedgeMan,” in which “the same oversensitive man takes something said the wrong way, climbs out on a window ledge and threatens to jump,” only to be coaxed back to safety by his mother. Nor did Maddin’s own mother portray the mother in the nonexistent series.
“My Winnipeg” opens with an actor playing Maddin as he tries to escape the city. “Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Winnipeg,” the real Maddin intones, over stuttering black-and-white images of a cracked train window and wintry cityscape. “Snowy, sleepwalking Winnipeg. My home for my entire life. My entire life. I must leave it. I must leave it. I must leave it now.”
The real Maddin is, of course, still around, living in a onetime massage parlor (“Massage Therapy” remains plastered on the facade of the building) where he sometimes covers the rent by selling collages he’s made on the internet. On the mild summer day when we met, he was dressed comfortably in shorts and a loose ocher shirt, his soft pinkish features partly obscured by a white beard. The Johnson brothers had the more conventional look of the hip urbanite, both arriving in jeans and black T-shirts — Evan, 41, with a mustache, and Galen, 43, with salt-and-pepper stubble. The two men grew up about an hour northeast of Winnipeg, in Pinawa, a planned community built around a nuclear-power research site, Los Alamos in a Canadian forest; their father, a chemist, later took a job in Zurich, where Evan finished high school. “Evan won’t brag, so I will: He played soccer against Kim Jong-un,” Maddin said. The future supreme leader of North Korea was attending a boarding school near Bern (and may or may not have played on its soccer team).
The four of us piled into Maddin’s white Taos station wagon for a tour of the city, driving past the old family beauty salon (now a Vietnamese tailor) and stopping for a walk along a murky, desolate stretch of the Red River. “We might find a body down here,” Maddin said. On the riverbank he brought up the E-Gang, teenagers who once went around Winnipeg stealing the letter “E” from signs — a deadpan joke, I assumed, until I found a 1980 Canadian wire story confirming it all. (“Prowling by night in recent months, the gang pried the most commonly used letter in the alphabet from signs identifying the University of Winnip?g, Executive Hous?, the R?d Cross headquarters, several apartment blocks and many other buildings.”) Later, as we drove past an apartment building, Maddin said, “That’s where the Snooker Ball Murders happened.”
From the crest of Garbage Hill, Maddin pointed out a 10-story building where he worked as a 19-year-old college dropout, chipping bricks from the facade. Eventually he got spooked by the heights and quit. A couple of years later, a woman he was dating called to tell him that she was pregnant. Twelve hours after that, the following morning, his own father died suddenly of a stroke. Maddin, then 21, married. His wife gave birth to their daughter, Jilian. The marriage lasted less than two years. For years, Maddin would have dreams of his father’s returning to the house to pick up his razor or glass eye. (Chas Maddin lost his eye on his 1st birthday when his mother, while hugging him, accidentally impaled his eyeball on an unpinned brooch.)
Evan Johnson first learned about Maddin’s work while studying film at the University of Manitoba. Maddin, teaching a course on melodramas, would have his students watch Joan Crawford and Douglas Sirk movies alongside delightful oddities like Byron Haskin’s “The Naked Jungle” (1954), in which Charlton Heston plays a cocoa farmer in the Amazon who sends away for a mail-order bride, recoils upon discovering she’s not a virgin (he is) but ends up falling for her after (extremely unexpected spoiler) they bond while preparing to fight off a swarm of deadly army ants. (Maddin described the teeming red-ant horde as a “hymenal flow.”) “I would show up for that class so high,” Evan said.
But he was a good student, and the two men became friendly enough to start what Maddin called an “ignoble” working relationship. Maddin was spending a lot of time in Toronto, where his daughter lives, and needed someone to run errands back in Winnipeg. “I had this baby-boomer idea of what a good pay was,” he said, “but it was actually just below minimum wage or something. ‘I’ll pay you two shiny quarters for putting together my barbecue!’ That was one of the chores.” Evan’s portfolio soon expanded. Maddin, a voracious reader, found the idea of having his own Hollywood-style reading department amusing, and so he began paying Evan to read obscure novels that might make interesting source material. (He assumed that Hollywood would already have covered “all the main books.”) Then he hired him as a research assistant for an ill-fated web project centering on lost films. “Pretty soon he was coming up with conceptual ideas for the whole project that surpassed just adapting lost movies,” Maddin said. “And we just became writing partners.” Galen, who had audited Maddin’s class while working at an architecture firm, soon began designing sets and contributing other visual elements to the project.
Before shooting what would become the 2015 feature “The Forbidden Room,” Maddin promoted Evan to first assistant director. “Which, if you know about filmmaking, it’s a hard job,” Evan said. “It’s not one you look up on Wikipedia the night before shooting starts, like I did, because he told me it wasn’t that important.” As the filming unfolded, though, Maddin recognized Evan was doing much more than a first A.D. and ultimately gave him his first co-directing credit. Galen moved from production designer to third co-director shortly thereafter.
Despite the generation gap, there’s a clear affinity among the trio, a shared sensibility when it comes to humor and artistic touchstones. Still, as much as I hate to traffic in national stereotypes, it feels awfully Canadian for a director of Maddin’s stature to share credit so readily. “It’s a weird move to have a career like his and all of a sudden just take on two brothers halfway through it,” Galen allowed.
“I’m not sure it reflects well on any of us,” Evan added.
“Sals,” the lunch spot Maddin took me to, turned out to be the Salisbury House, a local diner chain known for its burgers (referred to as “Nips” on the menu) and also for once being partly owned by a local classic-rock star, Burton Cummings of the Guess Who. The booths, boxed in by tall panes of glass, resembled retrofuturist office cubicles. By this point I had been trained to assume everything in Winnipeg would have a slightly uncanny quality, so I said something like, “Quirky design choice!” Galen explained that they were just Covid protocols that the restaurant had yet to dismantle.
“Rumours” is very much like my experience of Winnipeg: an exercise in the uncanny. Going into the screening, I wasn’t sure how a Maddin film stripped of Maddin’s early-cinema artifice would work. But “Rumours” locates its own zone of artifice in the bright digital present. Like previous Maddin films, it takes melodrama and hyperbolizes it into comedy — only here the melodrama is rooted not in old films but in soap operas and Lifetime movies. As the self-important G7 leaders gather to draft a vague and meaningless “provisional statement” about an unspecified global crisis, there are mawkish musical cues, smoldering glances and secret assignations. The Canadian prime minister broods over a stupefyingly mundane financial scandal back home, prompting the British prime minister, played by Nikki Amuka-Bird, to murmur, “He feels the burden of leadership.” The mansplaining French president mentions that he’s writing a book about the “psychogeography of graveyards.” The political satire and endlessly quotable dialogue might bring to mind Armando Iannucci (“Veep,” “The Death of Stalin”), but “Rumours” is both sillier and more surreal than that, building to a delirious, apocalyptic climax. “The film is a fever dream, in a way,” Blanchett told me. “Therefore, it could hold all of these tonal shifts. At times it’s lit like a really bad political television interview. At times it’s lit like Douglas Sirk.”
Maddin and the Johnsons took inspiration from the stilted protocol on display in actual G7 summit footage — one moment in particular, when a group of world leaders encountered a puddle of water they had to step around, felt like a Jacques Tati gag. They were also inspired by the novelist Donald Antrim, whose absurd, deeply insular black-comic scenarios Evan thought might be fun to apply to politicians. (“I guess it’s not big box office to say, ‘Perhaps the best Donald Antrim adaptation,’” Maddin said.) In certain key respects, though, “Rumours” grew directly from their last bizarro masterpiece, “The Green Fog,” which recreated the plot of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” entirely using clips from other movies and television shows shot in San Francisco. Something about the images taken from network TV episodes — of pre-prestige shows like “The Streets of San Francisco” and “McMillan & Wife,” originally made for tiny sets — became strangely gripping on larger screens, the glorious faces delivering stilted dialogue, the almost Bressonian attention lavished on close-ups of hands turning knobs. When it came time to make “Rumours,” Evan said, “I thought we were sort of trying to make a live-action ‘Green Fog’ in tone.”
They shot the film in Hungary. “When I got the call,” Blanchett said, “I was so excited: ‘I’m finally going to Winnipeg!’ I was so disappointed when they said, ‘No, Budapest.’” It was the directors’ first time working with a cast of entirely professional actors of such stature. “They memorized their lines,” Galen said, “which, for some reason, I was so surprised by that.” The directors had no delineated roles, but Evan took the lead on directing the actors while Galen focused on technical matters and Maddin took on “the big existential thematic questions,” Blanchett said. She was accustomed to working in theater, she said, so this level of collaboration felt natural enough. “It did concern me at one point that they were all sharing the same apartment,” she added.
Over lunch at Sals and the following morning in his book-lined apartment, his French bulldog Aunt Lil snoring beside him on an antique sofa, Maddin acknowledged occasionally feeling a bit at sea navigating his first truly conventional movie shoot. He had rarely shot on location in the past, preferring the total control of the studio. “I don’t like literal-minded things that much,” he said. “I don’t like worrying about continuity.” Patiently scheduling a limited number of setups per day also ran counter to what Galen called the “artful sloppiness” of the classic Maddin style. “It’s hard to even call what I used to do a setup, because I just wander around with one of the cameras,” Maddin said. “Guy kind of likes the performative aspects of directing,” Galen said. Maddin agreed, acknowledging that the slow pace of a normal movie shoot felt tedious to him, and that he had the most fun directing certain scenes “the way I used to direct my silent movies, where the camera is rolling and I’m actually just shouting to Cate Blanchett what she’s seeing: You’re seeing a bog mummy. You’re not sure what it is. You see it. It’s touching itself! Why is it touching itself? You’re confused! Now you’re horrified! Now you’re disgusted! That sort of thing.” Blanchett described that day’s shoot as “literally an inner monologue Guy was giving voice to for the first time. I learned a lot about his childhood, some of it not to be repeated.”
There was a period in the early aughts when Maddin’s work, while not exactly poised to become mainstream fare, was steadily marking its place in the culture. After “The Saddest Music in the World,” the semi-autobiographical silent film “Brand Upon the Brain!” (2006) played select North American cities, with live sound effects by Foley artists and a rotating cast of live narrators including Rossellini, the poet John Ashbery, Crispin Glover, Geraldine Chaplin, Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed. (At rehearsal, Reed informed Maddin, “I don’t do melodrama,” and could be heard audibly snoring halfway through the screening.) Roger Ebert placed “My Winnipeg” on his list of the 10 best films of the decade.
But “The Forbidden Room,” which came and went without much fanfare, marked the beginning of what Maddin half-jokingly called “our lost decade, wandering from experiment to experiment.” The lost-films project for which he had enlisted Johnson became an interactive website that disappeared in the online soup. “You just don’t encounter it in the zeitgeist, ever,” Maddin said. His encounter with Robert De Niro after a screening of one of the shorts at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival, he said, featured “one of the most distant handshakes I’ve ever gotten from a human.” (Added Evan: “I would say, of all the celebrity meetings I’ve had, it was probably the least impressed anyone’s ever seemed to have been with me.”) A planned television series also stalled out.
“Rumours” felt like a necessary change for Maddin. So far, everyone else seems pleased by it, too. “I think they were surprised that we were able to make a normal movie,” Galen said of the distributors. “And they’re overjoyed about that. A normal movie with Cate Blanchett in it.”
“I like to tell myself I’m not needy,” Maddin told me. “But yeah, it would feel good having audiences like it.” He went on: “I think there’s nothing quite like it. I don’t think it’s as conspicuously strange as my other movies. But I think it will maybe have a depth-charge strangeness to it, because there’s people invited in by the comforting surroundings. And then I think, maybe, when people are going home afterward, they might feel like they’ve just been through something kind of odd.”
Mark Binelli is a contributing writer for the magazine and the author of “Detroit City Is the Place to Be.” He is currently working on a new book about Martin Scorsese.
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