Interview with Guy Maddin in Buenos Aires
(NOTE: "Brand upon the Brain! was performed in Buenos Aires on April 10, with Geraldine Chaplin narrating in Spanish.)
Q: When did you think about presenting this film as a "live show"? While you were making it? Or after? And what about the "reading material" for the narrator? Did you write it after the shooting?
A: It has always been a dream of mine to give a spectacular, crowd-pleasing, live-music presentation of a silent film. I guess I had it in mind secretly while shooting, but I didn't dare mention it to anyone on the set, except maybe as a joke. Poor silent film, it needs all the help it can get. Silent film was once a real pop cultural force, featuring swoon-inducing stars adored by millions round the world, something gobbled up by the masses in virtually all the globe's time zones, something imbibed easily and with pleasure, and yet even most hardcore cinephiles -- myself included – have to be in a special mood to watch silent film today; it seems somehow like it might be work to watch a silent. Illiterates used to watch these things, but now it's work? But I've noticed that if there is a live element to a show the audience gives the night so much good will, the picture is suddenly embraced as if it were its own premiere and the year were 1927! Well, I wanted to throw so much "live element" at this thing I would guarantee myself a ton of audience good will!!! It's worked beyond my wildest dreams. For the first time in my career I feel like a showman, a P.T. Barnum, not JUST a filmmaker! I love the feeling. I feel the movie is my most uncompromising and yet it's been going over with audiences better than anything else I've ever made!!!! I'm getting hooked on this feeling.
I was emboldened to use a narrator because I read in Luis Bunuel's autobiography of his experience in childhood with silent film explicators --people who stood on the stage and explained the most basic things transpiring in a film to an audience not used to watching film. Exhibitors in those early days weren't confident that viewers would be able to follow a picture through an edit, that they might be disoriented by constant changes in camera point of view, so these explicators talked them through it. It sounded so charming. Then I read of the Japanese Benshi, narrators who took on characters' voices during the projection of a silent film. Good Benshi performers became stars in their own right, and often invented narratives that ran at cross-purposes to the story being told on screen. Again, I was charmed. I wanted a narrator.
The lines weren't written until the actual editing had begun. That's when you can tell where it will do the most good. I tried not to use the narrator much, just a little, and almost never for the relaying of fact, more for seasoning, flavoring of the picture. Like a part of the musical score.
Q: In what ways do you think this type of presentation make the viewing experience different? Aren't you afraid that the spectator might lose the concentration in the film from watching the sound effect guys or the narrator?
A: Well, it's live, which means that things can screw up, and they almost always do. This creates a certain amount of tension in the house. But I find that even if things do goof up, like a microphone going dead for a while, or some feedback deafening everyone like it did for a few seconds in Mexico City -- that was the first live performance of Geraldine Chaplin's career by the way and she started out with a mute mic! -- that all these disasters just put the audience on your side. They feel sorry for you, which is good because I'm getting tired of feeling sorry for myself. They are soon pulling for you, for the picture. You can feel this in live shows.
I'm not afraid the live performers -- the orchestra, conductor, sound effects artist, narrator and castrato -- will distract form the movie experience. I look at them as boredom insurance. This movie throws a lot at the viewer, but I like the overload. Audiences are multi-taskers nowadays -- at home they watch TV while talking on the phone and instant messaging or texting friends -- and this might be the first film in a long time that challenges them to multi-task in the same way to which they've grown accustomed. But I would be very disappointed if they felt they could text friends during this!!!! I'm really counting on a spell to descend upon the audience and make them forget what year this is!
I must say, though, that it has also always been a dream of mine to pull the sound effects team, the Foley artists, out of the dark of their studio and onto a public stage. Watching these people create the sounds they do, and out of the most charming and unlikely items, is one the purest delights a film-lover or just anyone can experience!!! THEY ARE HILARIOUS! It's easy at times to forget they are there even, because the sounds fit so perfectly the images. Then you remember, and you glance down at them and they are up to the queerest mischief!!! So wonderful!!
Q: You've said that this film is a kind of autobiography. Can you expand on that?
A: The film is 96% literally true. It's a little Grand Guignol melodrama about abusive and self-absorbed parents sucking the life out of their children just as the kids are growing too strong for their elders with puzzling surges of adolescent sexuality. I set the story in a lighthouse. That's the only part I made up. I realized while writing this why I've always loved the Grand Guignol -- the gory, hysterical and horniest of melodramas – and that's because my childhood could be accurately described as a gory, hysterical and horny childhood. Something always beyond belief to my friends when I tell them of it. Now I get to show it to you.
Q: If you have to pick which one of the influences you have as a filmmaker were the most important for "Brand Upon the Brain", who would you choose?
A: I would have to say the great Finnish composer Sibelius. My editor John Gurdebeke used Sibelius as the temp music when we were cutting. He knew how Scandinavian cool would best reflect the outer temperature of me as my inner passions burn as hot as anything in the Mediterranean, as hot and strange as anything in Bunuel, another favorite of mine. I like this mixture of cool or hot -- something one finds in Isabella Rossellini with her Swedish and Italian parentage. Well, there is something honest and epic in Sibelius, and for an autobiographical confession like this, one needs to be completely honest, even willing to make oneself look even more atrocious, heightened symphonically and melodramatically. Everyone is a poet when remembering his or her childhood -- everything gets lyricized when viewed through the filters of childhood recollection! I'm not a good enough poet, however, to make enduring poetry on my own, and I needed this great composer, and Bunuel, too, to give me the courage to attempt this. I wanted the movie to have the logic of childhood myths, and to be as psychologically true.
Once the movie was cut, our composer Jason Staczek, who is a GREAT composer -- I'm convinced you will hear from him for many years to come -- took the rhythms of the film and made an unbelievable new score, the one you will hear at the performance. He is a genius, and he is the inside out version of Sibelius, or the farthest thing from him, and yet going about things in a completely different way, he arrives at the same honest and musically logical places. He even goes further, because he had the advantage over Sibelius of seeing the film and writing specifically for it. Awesome, awesome, awesome!!!
Q: What are the different challenges you face as a filmmaker when you make a silent film instead of a "talkie"? And what do you think are the differences between this film and the rest of your work?
A: The silent film is pure joy to make! What a shame there is so little call for them any more. I hope it is obvious to the viewers how exhilarating it was to shoot this. There is so much energy of an enchanting sort on the set of a silent you just don't get on talkie sets. First of all, the director gets to direct while the cameras are actually rolling. Ben Kasulke, my cinematographer, and I got to run around the set with cameras whirring away all day long, just sucking up images, shouting out commands and pleas to our actors, running right at the actors, falling back from them, dropping the camera on the floor while it's going and picking it up again, throwing it, shaking it, vibrating ourselves and the lens -- anything to put the kinesis, the pure energy of MOVING pictures into this thing!!! None of this would be possible with actors standing around saying their lines. We were back at the legendary moment in 1928 when film was just learning to express itself with its full potential before the bolted-down microphones froze everyone into yawn-inducing tableaux, static exposition dribbling out of the mouths of statuary into the indiscriminate ears of a suckered public.
Compared to the rest of my filmwork, this really stands apart for me. I really feel I stand the best chance with this picture of reaching something previously untouched in the viewer, not just with the gimmick of the live event, but with the recreation of universal childhood feelings, yearnings, lusts.
Q: It is well known that you have a sort of "Guy Maddin Film Festival" in which you pick and choose some films from your private collection. Which ones would you be choosing next and why?
A: I just tonight saw a film on DVD called SHOCK, with Vincent Price, a wonderful noir from 1946 about a woman who sees her own psychiatrist murder a woman, then get treated by the same doctor for the shock she suffers as a result. I also love a noir called THE LOCKET, which is a story, within a story, within a story within a story, all of these concentric narrative circles built up like pearly layers around a little vaginal locket – a Pandora's Box source of all the troubles in the film -- once owned by the film's femme fatale. It's so good. Those two would headline my personal festival!
Q: Why the castrato? Why do you think it adds to the experience of watching BUTB!?
A: I met this wonderful singer, Dov Houle, in a steam bath back home. He was singing in a thick steam, such a gorgeous unearthly voice!! I thought I was somehow in the women's steam bath by mistake. Then the fog cleared and there was Dov, warbling away. He's known around home as the Manitoba Meadowlark!!! And he has no body hair at all!!!! I can vouch for that!
Q: You've been experimenting with different type of stocks, techniques, styles, length and colors. Do you see the possibility of, one day, make what a regular filmgoer would call "a regular film"?
A: Well, what constitutes a regular film keeps changing, evolving. I'd rather wait and hope that regular films change enough to meet me halfway. That was always my plan. And it's sort of working. I haven't really changed much, but more people are checking me out. Maybe if I just keep waiting, the mainstream will come to me and I can die with mass appeal. At least my death will be a big hit!!!
Q: Are you working in something new?
A: I am just finishing up a new TV documentary about my hometown of Winnipeg, Canada. It was commissioned by a TV network in Canada. It's been really hard to make. I don't ever want to make a documentary. Not only are they way too much work, but your story keeps changing the deeper into editing you go and that's frustrating, tiring. You have to respect the subject so much and I'm not used to the kind of discipline it demands. I'm more used to following a script. Still, I'm having a lot of fun doing it, and the journey into myself (that I made as an unexpected side trip while on my journey into the city in which I've spent my entire life) was really quite emotional, at times depressing. I can't believe I live here, and how much time has gone by while I've done so. Time that I'll never get back no matter how nostalgic my movies get. All that was really draining and yet ennobling. I feel spent, but great. Still, never again!!!
Q: Is Geraldine Chaplin coming back to Buenos Aires? Is she going to narrate it in Spanish or English?
A: Geraldine Chaplin is narrating in BA and she's doing it in Spanish – her own translation, in fact. Wow, I love how supportive she has been. If one needs a narrator for a silent film, what better link to the silent era than a Chaplin?!!!! Her diction is incredible. When speaking English, she has the same mid-Atlantic accent and singular cadences as her father. My skin was creeping up and down in excitement while she read for me in Mexico City. There she read in English -- there had been technical delays with the translation -- but she is so committed to this project that she personally adjusted her lines until she was completely happy with the, I'm so grateful because I don't speak Spanish of any sort. She sounds so beautiful, another musical instrument!!! So much good will! So much love!!! She has so much occult chemistry with the projected images, with the cabalistic musicality of all the live performers, that there is a real invocation of something magic. I really hope the spell works in BA as well as I've seen it work before. As a newly made showman, I feel I must guarantee it!!!!
Q: When did you think about presenting this film as a "live show"? While you were making it? Or after? And what about the "reading material" for the narrator? Did you write it after the shooting?
A: It has always been a dream of mine to give a spectacular, crowd-pleasing, live-music presentation of a silent film. I guess I had it in mind secretly while shooting, but I didn't dare mention it to anyone on the set, except maybe as a joke. Poor silent film, it needs all the help it can get. Silent film was once a real pop cultural force, featuring swoon-inducing stars adored by millions round the world, something gobbled up by the masses in virtually all the globe's time zones, something imbibed easily and with pleasure, and yet even most hardcore cinephiles -- myself included – have to be in a special mood to watch silent film today; it seems somehow like it might be work to watch a silent. Illiterates used to watch these things, but now it's work? But I've noticed that if there is a live element to a show the audience gives the night so much good will, the picture is suddenly embraced as if it were its own premiere and the year were 1927! Well, I wanted to throw so much "live element" at this thing I would guarantee myself a ton of audience good will!!! It's worked beyond my wildest dreams. For the first time in my career I feel like a showman, a P.T. Barnum, not JUST a filmmaker! I love the feeling. I feel the movie is my most uncompromising and yet it's been going over with audiences better than anything else I've ever made!!!! I'm getting hooked on this feeling.
I was emboldened to use a narrator because I read in Luis Bunuel's autobiography of his experience in childhood with silent film explicators --people who stood on the stage and explained the most basic things transpiring in a film to an audience not used to watching film. Exhibitors in those early days weren't confident that viewers would be able to follow a picture through an edit, that they might be disoriented by constant changes in camera point of view, so these explicators talked them through it. It sounded so charming. Then I read of the Japanese Benshi, narrators who took on characters' voices during the projection of a silent film. Good Benshi performers became stars in their own right, and often invented narratives that ran at cross-purposes to the story being told on screen. Again, I was charmed. I wanted a narrator.
The lines weren't written until the actual editing had begun. That's when you can tell where it will do the most good. I tried not to use the narrator much, just a little, and almost never for the relaying of fact, more for seasoning, flavoring of the picture. Like a part of the musical score.
Q: In what ways do you think this type of presentation make the viewing experience different? Aren't you afraid that the spectator might lose the concentration in the film from watching the sound effect guys or the narrator?
A: Well, it's live, which means that things can screw up, and they almost always do. This creates a certain amount of tension in the house. But I find that even if things do goof up, like a microphone going dead for a while, or some feedback deafening everyone like it did for a few seconds in Mexico City -- that was the first live performance of Geraldine Chaplin's career by the way and she started out with a mute mic! -- that all these disasters just put the audience on your side. They feel sorry for you, which is good because I'm getting tired of feeling sorry for myself. They are soon pulling for you, for the picture. You can feel this in live shows.
I'm not afraid the live performers -- the orchestra, conductor, sound effects artist, narrator and castrato -- will distract form the movie experience. I look at them as boredom insurance. This movie throws a lot at the viewer, but I like the overload. Audiences are multi-taskers nowadays -- at home they watch TV while talking on the phone and instant messaging or texting friends -- and this might be the first film in a long time that challenges them to multi-task in the same way to which they've grown accustomed. But I would be very disappointed if they felt they could text friends during this!!!! I'm really counting on a spell to descend upon the audience and make them forget what year this is!
I must say, though, that it has also always been a dream of mine to pull the sound effects team, the Foley artists, out of the dark of their studio and onto a public stage. Watching these people create the sounds they do, and out of the most charming and unlikely items, is one the purest delights a film-lover or just anyone can experience!!! THEY ARE HILARIOUS! It's easy at times to forget they are there even, because the sounds fit so perfectly the images. Then you remember, and you glance down at them and they are up to the queerest mischief!!! So wonderful!!
Q: You've said that this film is a kind of autobiography. Can you expand on that?
A: The film is 96% literally true. It's a little Grand Guignol melodrama about abusive and self-absorbed parents sucking the life out of their children just as the kids are growing too strong for their elders with puzzling surges of adolescent sexuality. I set the story in a lighthouse. That's the only part I made up. I realized while writing this why I've always loved the Grand Guignol -- the gory, hysterical and horniest of melodramas – and that's because my childhood could be accurately described as a gory, hysterical and horny childhood. Something always beyond belief to my friends when I tell them of it. Now I get to show it to you.
Q: If you have to pick which one of the influences you have as a filmmaker were the most important for "Brand Upon the Brain", who would you choose?
A: I would have to say the great Finnish composer Sibelius. My editor John Gurdebeke used Sibelius as the temp music when we were cutting. He knew how Scandinavian cool would best reflect the outer temperature of me as my inner passions burn as hot as anything in the Mediterranean, as hot and strange as anything in Bunuel, another favorite of mine. I like this mixture of cool or hot -- something one finds in Isabella Rossellini with her Swedish and Italian parentage. Well, there is something honest and epic in Sibelius, and for an autobiographical confession like this, one needs to be completely honest, even willing to make oneself look even more atrocious, heightened symphonically and melodramatically. Everyone is a poet when remembering his or her childhood -- everything gets lyricized when viewed through the filters of childhood recollection! I'm not a good enough poet, however, to make enduring poetry on my own, and I needed this great composer, and Bunuel, too, to give me the courage to attempt this. I wanted the movie to have the logic of childhood myths, and to be as psychologically true.
Once the movie was cut, our composer Jason Staczek, who is a GREAT composer -- I'm convinced you will hear from him for many years to come -- took the rhythms of the film and made an unbelievable new score, the one you will hear at the performance. He is a genius, and he is the inside out version of Sibelius, or the farthest thing from him, and yet going about things in a completely different way, he arrives at the same honest and musically logical places. He even goes further, because he had the advantage over Sibelius of seeing the film and writing specifically for it. Awesome, awesome, awesome!!!
Q: What are the different challenges you face as a filmmaker when you make a silent film instead of a "talkie"? And what do you think are the differences between this film and the rest of your work?
A: The silent film is pure joy to make! What a shame there is so little call for them any more. I hope it is obvious to the viewers how exhilarating it was to shoot this. There is so much energy of an enchanting sort on the set of a silent you just don't get on talkie sets. First of all, the director gets to direct while the cameras are actually rolling. Ben Kasulke, my cinematographer, and I got to run around the set with cameras whirring away all day long, just sucking up images, shouting out commands and pleas to our actors, running right at the actors, falling back from them, dropping the camera on the floor while it's going and picking it up again, throwing it, shaking it, vibrating ourselves and the lens -- anything to put the kinesis, the pure energy of MOVING pictures into this thing!!! None of this would be possible with actors standing around saying their lines. We were back at the legendary moment in 1928 when film was just learning to express itself with its full potential before the bolted-down microphones froze everyone into yawn-inducing tableaux, static exposition dribbling out of the mouths of statuary into the indiscriminate ears of a suckered public.
Compared to the rest of my filmwork, this really stands apart for me. I really feel I stand the best chance with this picture of reaching something previously untouched in the viewer, not just with the gimmick of the live event, but with the recreation of universal childhood feelings, yearnings, lusts.
Q: It is well known that you have a sort of "Guy Maddin Film Festival" in which you pick and choose some films from your private collection. Which ones would you be choosing next and why?
A: I just tonight saw a film on DVD called SHOCK, with Vincent Price, a wonderful noir from 1946 about a woman who sees her own psychiatrist murder a woman, then get treated by the same doctor for the shock she suffers as a result. I also love a noir called THE LOCKET, which is a story, within a story, within a story within a story, all of these concentric narrative circles built up like pearly layers around a little vaginal locket – a Pandora's Box source of all the troubles in the film -- once owned by the film's femme fatale. It's so good. Those two would headline my personal festival!
Q: Why the castrato? Why do you think it adds to the experience of watching BUTB!?
A: I met this wonderful singer, Dov Houle, in a steam bath back home. He was singing in a thick steam, such a gorgeous unearthly voice!! I thought I was somehow in the women's steam bath by mistake. Then the fog cleared and there was Dov, warbling away. He's known around home as the Manitoba Meadowlark!!! And he has no body hair at all!!!! I can vouch for that!
Q: You've been experimenting with different type of stocks, techniques, styles, length and colors. Do you see the possibility of, one day, make what a regular filmgoer would call "a regular film"?
A: Well, what constitutes a regular film keeps changing, evolving. I'd rather wait and hope that regular films change enough to meet me halfway. That was always my plan. And it's sort of working. I haven't really changed much, but more people are checking me out. Maybe if I just keep waiting, the mainstream will come to me and I can die with mass appeal. At least my death will be a big hit!!!
Q: Are you working in something new?
A: I am just finishing up a new TV documentary about my hometown of Winnipeg, Canada. It was commissioned by a TV network in Canada. It's been really hard to make. I don't ever want to make a documentary. Not only are they way too much work, but your story keeps changing the deeper into editing you go and that's frustrating, tiring. You have to respect the subject so much and I'm not used to the kind of discipline it demands. I'm more used to following a script. Still, I'm having a lot of fun doing it, and the journey into myself (that I made as an unexpected side trip while on my journey into the city in which I've spent my entire life) was really quite emotional, at times depressing. I can't believe I live here, and how much time has gone by while I've done so. Time that I'll never get back no matter how nostalgic my movies get. All that was really draining and yet ennobling. I feel spent, but great. Still, never again!!!
Q: Is Geraldine Chaplin coming back to Buenos Aires? Is she going to narrate it in Spanish or English?
A: Geraldine Chaplin is narrating in BA and she's doing it in Spanish – her own translation, in fact. Wow, I love how supportive she has been. If one needs a narrator for a silent film, what better link to the silent era than a Chaplin?!!!! Her diction is incredible. When speaking English, she has the same mid-Atlantic accent and singular cadences as her father. My skin was creeping up and down in excitement while she read for me in Mexico City. There she read in English -- there had been technical delays with the translation -- but she is so committed to this project that she personally adjusted her lines until she was completely happy with the, I'm so grateful because I don't speak Spanish of any sort. She sounds so beautiful, another musical instrument!!! So much good will! So much love!!! She has so much occult chemistry with the projected images, with the cabalistic musicality of all the live performers, that there is a real invocation of something magic. I really hope the spell works in BA as well as I've seen it work before. As a newly made showman, I feel I must guarantee it!!!!
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