to th Toronto International Film Festival this year with his latest short film - Night Mayor - and we had the chance to sit and talk with him about his latest work earlier this week.

TB: Tell me about the genesis of Night Mayor. Where did the concept come from? How long has this one been brewing for?

 

GM: It's a pretty quickly-conceived little thing. The NFB invited me to pay tribute to their seventieth birthday. I agreed, and I was super honoured and a little bit scared because I didn't want to desecrate their noble tradition and reputation. The idea for the actual show came out pretty quickly. I've learned to just obey my first impulse on stories, even if it seems like a bad idea, just keep massaging it until it fits. Somehow I got this idea of this guy who's harvesting the power of the Northern Lights to capture images to send back out into the Canadian ether to help our dimly spread out population understand itself better. I like to think of it as an echo of the NFB and Canada itself.

 

TB: It seems that in a lot of ways that it's the most explicit iteration of a scene that comes up in your films all the time, mythologizing Canada.

 

GM: Right. In this case, instead of saying the NFB did this stuff, I have this mythic figure at the fictional end of mythical figure line-up, on the Paul Bunion end. We had Nihad Ademi, who really exists, he really is a friend of mine, a Bosnian immigrant who's been through a lot of the things he talks about in the little narration. I just got him to riff on his favourite subjects and the importance of doing it documentary-style. I tried to make the movie like a documentary, even though it's a complete fantasy. For instance, I never directed him, never wrote -

 

TB: So you left it entirely improvised?

 

GM: Yeah, I just told him who he was - "Ademi", I told him "you invented this machine and the Production Designer Ricardo will tell you about it. As a matter of fact, Ricardo is in costume, and he'll whisper in your ear every now and then the things he does, and we're just going to make a documentary of you and your children."

 

TB: Have you worked much improvisationally before?

 

GM: No, actually. A lot of people assume that I do.

 

TB: I would assume the opposite because your visual style is so structured and formal.

 

GM: Yeah, a lot of people have said in the past - even my best friend - are a bit flabbergasted because they see how I work and they go "Guy doesn't even use a script!" But I do. But this time I didn't. I had a few ideas, a few specific shots I wanted to get, but still documentarian. I just went in and winged it. That just postpones all the work to editing. I thought, "Well, the NFB has been making documentaries for seventy years, and it's true what they say, that a true documentarian finds his subject in the editing room." So I thought it was best to postpone all that stuff until later. And the performances can be documentary caliber, there can be a dazedness to them, a discomfort to them. And the writing, that's fine too. Somehow the more you lie about a certain subject, you find yourself lying in a certain way, and excluding other lies, and finally all those lies distill and harden into some kind of truth. So while the thing is completely spun out of fiction, I feel ultimately it is a true little myth about the way the NFB or Canada feels about itself.

 

TB: An interesting thing for me in this one is that he makes this machine, and the idea that you can harvest the power of something like that which is pretty significant, and then he just uses it to show Canadians to themselves.

 

GM: Yeah, well, Canadians are lousy entrepreneurs. That always happens. That's what seems truest of all.

 

TB: (laughs) Well, I also think it's a recurring thing that Canadians have a really hard time formulating who they are. We're really good at saying who we're not.

 

GM: Yeah, exactly. We're not American. We're not British. But that's about as far as we go. It usually takes an immigrant to see us as we are.

 

TB: First of all, how did you collect the images you were going to use? And secondly -

 

GM: From the NFB.

 

TB: Really?

 

GM: I just asked Joe McDonald at the NFB, just send over the old NFB movies. So a courier brought over a giant box of VHS tapes.

 

TB: (laughs) So you didn't have any ideas in your head of like "This is a Canadian thing.."?

 

GM: No, I admit hiring an intern to go through all the footage and look for iconic Canadian things. So there's like a taffy pull and a curling bonspiel and some woman petting a beaver. I just asked for diversity. When it came time to project those onto a thin little piece of aurora ectoplasm, it was kinda like seeing them for the first time. I felt like a wonder-struck Canadian.

 

TB: Are you familiar with Douglas Coupland's Images of Canada books, the project that he did?

GM: No, but I saw a great quilt he made once that was related to the project. It was really good.

 

TB: The visual stuff is cool. You don't see as much of that, as I think would be good for people to do. It's just the books. He's done two of them now that are purely about these are things that are Canadian that you don't see anywhere else, like the stubby beer bottle. Even commercial goods that you just assume -

 

GM: There are obvious ones, like chocolate bars.

 

TB: Yeah, and Kraft Dinner is only Kraft Dinner in Canada. It's not called that anywhere else in the world.

 

GM: Oh really? I didn't know that. So that's why my KD jokes are failing miserably in America.

 

TB: There are some really, really surprising things -

 

GM: I'm going to go buy those.

 

TB: Yeah, they're cool. It's a very, very similar premise to your film. We like to think that we're kind of bland, and we're not this or this or this, but there actually are all these iconic things that exist and are around us all the time and we're just blind to them because we see them too much.

 

GM: Maybe those Coupland books can be adapted into a product placement, drunken movie. (laughs)

 

TB: (laughs) Are there plans for this film beyond this festival?

 

GM: I don't know if I'm the right person to ask. I'm not sure. I know they're hoping it'l get into a couple other festivals, but we'll see. But I have no idea. I asked for and got permission to reuse any of the footage that I felt like using because I was thinking I've been making a few shorts over the past year using the same cast and the same set, and I thought maybe I could keep making shorts, and finally just to add up all the outtakes into a feature. But that seems like the most mad, low-budget film for me yet.

 

TB: I've actually seen some films that have been done that way that have worked out.

 

GM: Yeah, the trouble was I didn't have my script ready yet for the feature, otherwise I probably would have done it already.

 

TB: Now the last time I talked to you, you were saying you wanted to do a horror film feature. Are you still working on that?

 

GM: Yeah, I think it's still a good idea to do a genre. I'm either going to do a crime thriller or a noir. I think I'm leaning towards the noir. The horror films that I like are these more elegant  things, where horror films for modern audiences are just simply just slasher films.

 

TB: I think it's swinging back, actually.

 

GM: I would hope so. Maybe it's time for that cycle of Hammer and Universal horror pictures to be made again. Those are the ones that I love. And some of those silent movies, the Lon Channey movies. If I made a horror movie, it would be like that. I've already had elements of that in my movies. But then my movies have mashed up too many other genres to be considered a genre. I'd be wise to stick to one genre, do myself a favour. I actually enjoy working within limitations, I like the idea of being a gun for hire, but with a really peculiar skill set.

[Thanks to the lady-friend for the transcription.  Aint nobody enjoys doing that.]