Guy Maddin Talks The Brand Upon The Brain

TB: So, let’s talk about Brand Upon the Brain.

GM: Sure. You know what, I think this may be the third or fourth time that I’ve had the chance to talk about it and it’s definitely the first time since the Toronto Film Festival, so you’ll be getting new, freshly minted bullshit from me. I’m making it up as I go along. No, it’ll be a pleasure to talk about it.

I didn’t know how I would feel about the movie at various stages. It seemed so rushed in the early stages and then was largely abandoned for about eighteen months and then as the TIFF date approached I was feeling so uncertain about the thing and could barely force myself to look at it. But then an unexpected mounting of pride caught me off guard and I ended up feeling really good about the way it came out.

TB: I wanted to ask you about the presentation. You did the Dracula piece so you’ve done live performance before but this has to be a really different experience for you. As a director you’re so in control of the film but then when you’re actually presenting it is there not a moment of terror where you’re just like, “Okay, what happens if the foley artists mess up? What happens if the singer misses his cues?”

GM: Yeah. I was joking with everybody that there were so many live elements that something was guaranteed to go wrong but I think I was saying that just so nothing would go wrong. A sort of pre-emptive strike. But no, some things went wrong and my first inclination, being a coward, was to run and hide and catch a cab out front of the Elgin Theater. But no, I had to suck it up and go do the right thing and rescue my narrator who’d been left high and dry by the failure of technology and help him – he didn’t really need much help – reassure him that he had the right lines and help get him through when his karaoke teleprompter froze.

And about halfway through that I felt all of a sudden like a showman. The show must go on! I’m just doing whatever I can, whether people notice or not to get the thing across. And it felt kind of exciting. By the end of it Louis Negen, my narrator, and I were really bonding nicely and were saying “Let’s do this again sometime!” you know, this terrifying version of film presentation. We really enjoyed ourselves. But afterwards there was so much relief that I remember hearing myself tell people that “I’m not a theater person and this is too much like live theater for my comfort and I never want to do anything like it again …”

TB: Except now you’re doing it again in New York.

GM: Yeah, we’re going to do it again in New York and there are a few other possible dates. Berlin, for sure. The Berlin Film Festival. Maybe San Francisco and Dublin, maybe Boston. It’s good for people to see it live, it’s kind of fun and I like the fact that it’s a little different every time and maybe the narrator is going to change every time and different things will go wrong every time. I’m all for it.

One thing I noticed about the audience, at least in Toronto, is that they were very kind. It’s a bit like performing in my own living room performing in Toronto but when we had some early difficulties you could really see that people were on our side and wanted it to work or maybe they just felt sorry for the performers or whatever. Maybe it just got them on board, the fact that it was a live event and maybe more things could go wrong. It got people rooting, either for us or against us, but it got people rooting either way and that’s something that Canadian films have trouble with. So I felt good about it.

TB: Now, what’s the inspiration to do something like this? Do you have any idea what the last time would have been that someone did a live presentation of a film like this?

GM: Well, silent films with live music is done quite often. But not with foley artists. And then by adding an interlocutor – or whatever you want to call the narrator – and a singer, I know … maybe never? I don’t know. It’s possible that it’s never been done. Maybe never in front of that many people.

I know the Japanese had a different way of presenting silent film altogether, with a benshi narrator who would get in to characters or supply their own narratives that ran athwart the text unfolding on screen and that sounds really elaborate. The most I wanted my interlocutor to do was sort of season up, spice up, the proceedings a little bit and, truthfully, clarify some spots where I may not have shot things clearly enough. The benshi thing I found out about just a bit too late to figure out how to work with it and incorporate it myself. I thought maybe I could take a movie with some benshi influence and it’d be okay but it would’ve come out wrong. I’d be the gaijin benshi , so I thought I’d best leave it …

TB: The Thais used to do something similar to that.

GM: Oh, yeah?

TB: Yeah, they would tour their films from village to village and show them on big outdoor screens. They’d bring a couple of people with them to do all of the voices live on the spot.

GM: Fantastic. I remember reading in Bunuel’s autobiography about his silent films all involving narrators but those were all specifically providing exposition, just describing what’s on screen. “She’s jealous!” or “She’s looking out the window!” or “She sees the lighter and now she’s going to light a cigarette!” That sort of thing. I guess I wanted something to serve that purpose, to provide a bit of clarity, but also to add a little more to the moment. I guess it takes away from the purity of silent film but what do I care about purity?

TB: So what were the roots of this for you? When did you decide that you wanted to do this sort of thing?

GM: The event? It kind of came in stages. Maybe the first time the idea was planted in my head was in 2000 when I made Heart of the World for the Toronto Film Festival and Piers Handling, the festival director, suggested that maybe some day he could commission a silent film event for me and that would involve a live orchestra. And I actually kind of dismissed it at the time, “Piers, I think I want to make talking pictures from now on”, but I never quite forgot that. I thought it would be rather charming and the idea grew on me quite a bit.

And when, all of a sudden in December of 2004, I got this call out of the blue from this Seattle company, The Film Company, inviting me to make a movie as long as I could be up and ready to go in about a month and have the script written a lot sooner so that the sets could be built, and costumes sewn and cast members cast … The whole thing had such a sense of urgency to it that I knew I wouldn’t be able to write a script that had dialogue in it so I suddenly ended up throwing myself into a silent film project.

And then I kind of forgot about it for almost a year and it only really came back this spring when Noah Cowan – the other director of the Toronto Film Festival – asked me how my film was coming along because he wanted to see where he could put it in the festival. And it’s then that I suddenly came up with the realization that all I had was a silent film and it was probably going to be tucked away on a Tuesday morning. And so I thought I would hold out for a little more, so I told him that I had this film but that to be seen properly it needed to be gussied up a little bit. I was holding out for Roy Thompson Hall screening but I’m really glad it played at the Elgin, that was the perfect place for it. I’d been warned many times about the corporate atmosphere at Roy Thompson, which is totally the wrong audience for this and which made me want to do it more. I wanted to annoy them. But I’m really glad I went to the Elgin, I like the energy there and the gilt roses and the movie palace atmosphere. And the strange, ghostly existence of the Winter Garden, another theater almost as big right above. A very strange venue and it really seemed fun for me.

So, the genesis of the event, yeah. It was at the back of my mind for a long time and really only came together like this because I made these megalomaniacal demands on Noah Cowan and he acceded. And it was fantastic, I really enjoyed it.

TB: What can you tell me about The Film Company? These guys are a not for profit, correct? How on earth do they survive?

GM: I don’t know if they still are a not for profit, but they’re certainly not making any profit. When they started off their mandate was to make six films a year and they were pretty confidant that they started with enough money stockpiled to take them through the first three years and then they’d re-evaluate. I was the second film. The first film was by William Weiss, The Telephone Pole Numbering System. I think he was given a month from the time he accepted the assignment to premiere the film. He was given an opening night and a theater, so he started shooting the next day without a finished script. And then I was the second one and there have been a few since. They’re just very idealistic, quixotic, utopian, all those sorts of things. They invite film makers to join them, they don’t accept outside solicitations. They just kind of tap your shoulder and invite you. I was really glad they invited me, it was the perfect time. I’d just been scolding myself for not planning my life well enough to have a feature planned, then they called and I had a feature in the can in about a month and a half. That was incredible, usually it takes a couple years. They supply an all-Seattle cast and crew, including post production, an in-house composer, set designer, director of photography, casting agent, everything. You just have to show up and make the picture. It has to be a new script, too. They can tell if something has drawer staleness to it, they want something new created just for them. So, I did. I didn’t have anything ready anyway.

I’m also kind of pleased with what I came up with. It was such short notice that I didn’t have time to make anything up, I had to just be very honest. So much so that I can’t really show it to my family. I’d be disinherited, things like that.

TB: It’s kind of funny to hear you say that about a film that involves organ harvesting in a lighthouse.

GM: Yeah, I sort of promised myself I’d never talk about that part of growing up. It’s all there now! But sometimes you can hide things in plain sight.

TB: This was your first time shooting away from home, was it not?

GM: Yeah, it’s my first foreign film. Seattle. I’d been to Seattle a few times before, it was a real seminal visiting place for me as a child. I went to the Seattle World’s Fair when I was six years old and saw the Space Needle when it was brand new so I thought it was kind of nice to go back there and record this chapter of my life on film.

TB: Now, you’re doing Brand again this weekend in New York?

GM: Yeah, Sunday the 15th.

TB: And Isabella Rossellini is narrating this time, correct?

GM: She is, yes.

TB: Have you been doing rehearsals with the group there? Is the rest of the live group changing?

GM: The foley artists are just coming down from Toronto. It wouldn’t make sense to get local people for that. There’s more rehearsal time for foley artists and they actually had to make some equipment for this since they were doing wind effects and foley artists don’t normally do wind. So they had to build a lot of things and really had to practice a lot. The musicians are local, they’re all professionals so they can play it from a written score with minimal rehearsal. A narrator could use a couple days practice so I’m going to go down a couple days early, stay at Isabella’s apartment, drink wine and have naps and read through it a few times. She’s got a great accent. Even if she goes Zsa Zsa Gabor it’s still going to sound fantastic.

TB: So, at what point with a project like this, or any of your stuff really, do you wake up and think, “How am I going to sell this?”

GM: [laughs] Well, it should be obvious that I don’t ask that question nearly enough.

TB: Do you ever wake up and feel like “I should just go and make a romantic comedy”?

GM: Well, I can’t, I know that. But I have finally heeded the advice that people have been giving me for years and that I’ve been resisting probably because it makes sense. My next talking picture, my next larger scale project, is going to be a genre picture. People have had so much trouble promoting my films just because they’re so hard to classify.

TB: I was going to ask you about that. Everybody always fixates on the expressionist influence but there’s always been a lot of genre influence in your work.

GM: Yeah, well it’s usually some sort of hybrid of genres, a mish mash. It’s strange, when I made the ballet horror piece Dracula, way more people went to see it than I ever expected. I mean, it wasn’t even designed to get a theatrical release and it got one. And people came out. And I realized it’s because it’s about Dracula and everybody knew what Dracula was, there have been a million movies made of Dracula so people knew what it was. Even when warned that it was a dance version, they still went. It’s a small genre, but there it was, the dance-horror film. And so I just think I can do myself a favor by making a crime film or a horror film. And I really used to take a perverse pride in being impossible to classify but I think all of my favorite film makers also worked well in genre and it works with what I do. So I don’t know what it will be yet but my next film will be a horror film. Teen comedy is something I use as an example all the time. And my agent sends me scripts for teen comedies all the time.