Guy Maddin has repeatedly told interviewers that his new film, Brand Upon the Brain!, is “96 per cent literally true.” He must have had quite a childhood. According to the film—like most of Maddin’s work, a deliriously plotted, blazingly edited silent melodrama designed to look like a lost cinematic artifact from 1929—Maddin grew up in a lighthouse on remote Black Notch Island in the Pacific Northwest, where his parents ran an orphanage. It was a hardscrabble but happy life, until brother-and-sister teen detectives Chance and Wendy Gale arrived on the scene to investigate the strange puncture wounds on the backs of all the orphans’ heads—it turns out that Guy’s mad scientist father has been extracting “orphan nectar” from them as part of an experiment to rejuvenate Guy’s puritanical mother back to infancy. Meanwhile, Guy’s sister, Sis, has fallen in love with Chance Gale, not realizing he’s actually Wendy in disguise. The whole experience is very hard on young Guy’s constitution—time and again, with each new shocking revelation, he faints dead away. “Too much for Guy!” reads the intertitle.
That’s the part I have trouble believing. “Too much for Guy”? Don’t be ridiculous! As a director, Maddin’s imagination has always been drawn to notions that are “too much”—too wild, too strange, too perverse, too loony, too embarrassing, too weird, too overheated, too stylized, too emotionally extravagant. The Winnipeg auteur’s films (eight features, and more than a dozen shorts) are like fever-dreams bubbling up from early cinema’s long-suppressed subconscious—fast-moving tales of love, lust, guilt, jealousy, repression and bizarre outbreaks of surreal violence, all told with a breathless eagerness to entertain. (Probably three-quarters of the intertitles in Brand Upon the Brain! end in exclamation points! And a significant number of those end in two or three!!!)
Maddin’s creativity has always seemed too much for the screen to contain, and with Brand Upon the Brain! it’s finally burst out onto the stage. Special screenings of the film in Toronto, New York and Los Angeles have included music by a live orchestra (featuring a castrato singer), live sound effects by a team of Foley artists, and narration by such notable guest artists as Laurie Anderson, Eli Wallach, Lou Reed and Isabella Rossellini.
Sadly, Metro Cinema audiences won’t get the full Brand! multimedia experience when the film arrives at Zeidler Hall this week. But even in this bare-bones format, it’s a very potent brew—I’m ready to call it the funniest, saddest, most emotionally resonant film in Maddin’s entire oeuvre. (Although the short Sissy-Boy Slap-Party runs a close second!)
I talked with Guy Maddin last week about Brand Upon the Brain!, the chronic unreliability of Lou Reed and the universal evilness of children—and in the process he more than lived up to his reputation as one of the most entertaining interviewees in cinema today.
Q: This will sound like I’m just sucking up, but I think Brand Upon the Brain! is my favourite movie of yours.Guy Maddin: I think it’s mine too.
Q: Why do you say that? Is it that it’s the most personal? Or the one where you best realized your intentions?
GM: Yeah, all of that. I made it so quickly, first of all. I drew so much on my own autobiography that the script just came out in one big lump, and no matter how many characters or complications or odd digressions I threw in, it all added up sideways and upside-down and top to bottom. It still felt psychologically true. And also, I made it with a lot of enthusiasm and fearlessness. Now, that kind of thing doesn’t always work. David Lynch was saying pretty much the same thing about Inland Empire, how he made it without a script, and... well, it’s the kind of thing you have to be careful bragging about. Sometimes the lack of a script kind of shows!
I also always loved literature about childhood recollections. It’s seems almost like the birth of magical realism to me—we’re all poets when we’re reminiscing about our earliest childhoods, because we all have such lyrical, mysteriously incorrect models of the universe when we’re that young. All our reasons for why things happen are incorrect half the time and everything seems possible. I’ve also always loved Jean Vigo’s films—Zéro de Conduite and L’Atalante, which are so full of that sense of childlike myth and wonder, and I guess I felt kind of emboldened by those accomplishments and felt that I could try to point myself in that same direction. I set off in a windsprint to make the movie and I couldn’t be more thrilled that it came out pretty much the way I hoped.
Q: You keep saying how the film is autobiographical, but since the plot is so obviously unrealistic, can you explain what you mean when you say it’s “96 per cent true”?
GM: Well, does it matter if it’s true or not? I find myself sneering, sometimes loudly, during trailers that claim a movie is “based on a true story.” What do I care if it’s true or not? It just has to be entertaining. And let’s fact it: the facts have been nipple-twisted into agonized dishonesty by the time any movie that claims to be based on a true story is finished. So I sort of try to backtrack when I claim this movie is based on fact. But it is! And in fact, it’s probably more honest than most Hollywood “true stories” that manage to get the surface right. I don’t worry about the surface so much as I try to get at an emotional truth. I didn’t grow up in a lighthouse, but it did feel as though my mom was perched atop one with a searchlight and a telescope. And she’ll be up there long after she’s dead, you know?
Q: Tell me about presenting the live version of the film, with this rotating cast of celebrity narrators. Did it change the flavour of the film depending on who was narrating it?GM: Oh, absolutely. It was a really interesting experiment, because the film never changed, and the orchestra and the Foley artists stayed basically the same as well, so it was up to the narrator to assert himself or herself and make a connection with the audience. Some of them were a little bit ashamed of the film’s melodramatic aspects, and if they were, if they backed off, that connection wasn’t made. But if they went for it, the connection was incredible—you could feel the energy in the audience just swelling up. Isabella Rossellini gets better and better every time out. She brings the audience to their feet every night. People like Udo Kier and Crispin Glover and Barbara Steele, the old “scream queen,” really went for it too. Other people were a little more cool—Lou Reed fell asleep at his reading.
Q: Really? You’re kidding me, right?
GM: Seriously—he fell right asleep. He was up in a balcony and couldn’t be awakened. Only this big gong at the end of the movie woke him up. But I knew he was going to be trouble, because he fell asleep six minutes into the rehearsal as well. All that day, I was so tense—I was grinding my teeth together so hard that I shattered a molar and had to spend the next five days in New York with exposed nerves sort of swimming around in my mouth.
Q: Your movies often get described as “demented” and “delirious.” I always wonder—do they feel demented when you’re writing them or making them? Or do you resent those kinds of adjectives?
GM: “Delirious” I like. Because, I find the darnedest and most painful and funniest truths about myself occur to me while I’m dreaming. Truths present themselves to you in the most demented and delirious ways when you’re dreaming! My goal has always been to present cogent, psychologically plausible plots that feel like a dream.
Q: Is it easy to make these movies? I mean, a flippant person might say that at this point there’s now a Guy Maddin formula you can follow—you just do a weird silent movie, through in some non sequitur intertitles and chop it up with these lightning-fast edits, send it out to the theatres...
GM: ...and have no one show up! [Laughs.]
Q: Right, right, but the critics will praise it to the skies. Because you’re a critics’ darling.
GM: Well, obviously it’s not that simple, although I wouldn’t blame people for thinking so. Some movies are easier to make than others, but I’ve read countless interviews with directors who all agree that the ease of making them has nothing to do with how well it turns out. I’m just trying to work on perfecting my own achievements. And I like to think I have something to say—it’s not just wackiness for the sake of wackiness. And even if my movies can be lumped together as being fairly similar to each other, at least they’re not the same as anybody else’s.
Q: Have you ever been approached by a studio to be a director for hire? I mean, I doubt that Hollywood is looking to you to do the next Kate Hudson romantic comedy or anything—GM: No, but I wish they’d let me. I was approached to do the remake of The Omen, actually, but it didn’t work out. I didn’t want to do it, anyway—I thought the original was terrible and figured the new version was going to be just as bad.
Q: Would you have been able to rein in your style, do you think, and make a mainstream film?
GM: Yeah, I could’ve, but it wouldn’t have been very much fun. Maybe if the story was better. I mean, how many more possessed-children movies can there be? But I thought about it for a long time, believe me. The payday would have been good. I was trying to think of an approach, and I actually arrived at one: all children are possessed! All children are the offspring of Satan! I was thinking of setting it in a daycare or something. Oh well, I think Little Nicky did that whole premise better anyway.
Q: Are there any directors out there right now who seem like your peers or kindred spirits?
GM: Well, I don’t know about kindred spirits, but the directors I admire are people like Jared Hess, the guy who made Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre.
Q: The critics really dogpiled on Nacho Libre.
GM: Well, let ’em do it, because I love that movie! I like P.T. Anderson quite a bit. Lars von Trier is very interesting at times.
Q: You write a regular column about odd and obscure old movies, “My Jolly Corner,” for Film Comment and you’re obviously very interested in early cinema. Do you consider yourself a film scholar at all?
GM: No, no. I’m a total dilettante. I’m just an enthusiast. An enthusiastic amateur.
Q: A teen detective?
GM: Exactly.
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