Brand Upon The Brain - The Live Show

report from NYC

2007-06-04T11:23:00.000-07:00

Hi Friends,

Here's a mid-madness update on The Film Company. To begin with, our recent week-long run of the live show of Guy Maddin's BRAND UPON THE BRAIN! in NY.

TWO SHOWS A DAY!
We opened on May 9 at the Village East, with Crispin Glover narrating. After vaulting the usual Insurmountable Hurdles we premiered with a solid, if somewhat tentative, performance. After a brief break Crispin nailed the 9:30 show, infusing the film with an eerie and beautiful strangeness, and the sold-out crowd roared in applause when he finished. Off and running.

On Thursday we were graced with two of America's best stage actors, Anne Jackson at 7 and Eli Wallach at 9:30. Ridiculously, these were our least attended shows, but no matter. I was there! The impish Mr. Wallach is a young 91, and the commanding ease and exhilarating theatricality of his performance in particular made for a night to remember.

Friday brought us an emotionally resonant Interlocution by the resplendent Joie Lee, and the return of Crispin Glover, who by now was making this film his own. On Saturday Laurie Anderson gave us a show that was, naturally, precise and specific, but also charming and surprising, as she delivered many of her lines with a gentle and surpassingly lovely lilt. Lou Reed, perhaps my favorite songwriter of the past half-century, then pitched in with a sometimes quiet (sometimes very quiet), sometimes over-the-top, always fascinating performance.

INTERLUDE
A pause in my recital here to acknowledge the performance of the Ensemble Sospeso, under the baton of conductor David Hatten. By Friday they had hit their stride, and were bringing out the nuances and intricacies of Jason Staczek's remarkable score. Their counterpart Stage Left, the Foley team of Caoimhe Doyle, Marilee Yorston, and Stefan Fraticelli, were, nevitably, the rock stars of every performance, even when Lou Reed was in the house. (A nice photo can be found in this week's New Yorker magazine, and at: www.newyorker.com/arts/events.) And Dov Houle, the Manitoba Meadowlark, never ceased to amaze, nor to receive, after every performance, an intriguing proposal of one kind or another.

THREE SHOWS A DAY!
Sunday was a great day at the Village East in the East Village. Justin Bond's collaboration with Guy's film made this a Mother's Day matinee filled lovingly filled with camp and horror. In the evening, John Ashbery delivered a fine performance to a poetry-lusting audience that paid close attention to EVERY word. And Tunde Adebimpe of the band TV on the Radio sent us home singing.

On Monday Peter Hibbert, a really terrific actor, unleashed his, and the film's, inner melodrama, and Peter Scarlet masterfully picked up where he left off. And then, suddenly, it was Tuesday, and ahhh, Isabella Rossellini. Her combination of smarts, humor, and understanding of Guy's work always gives the film an extraordinary breadth. Add to that her charm and strangely unidentifiable accent and you get an indelible performance.

FIFTY SHOWS A DAY!
A performance which you can now partake of at theaters all across North America! The 35mm print, with Interlocution by Ms. Rossellini, continues its run in the NY area and Chicago, opens on June 8 in Toronto, Winnipeg, Vancouver, and New Orleans, On June 15 in Berkeley, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and DC, and on from there. Screening dates and locations are posted at branduponthebrain.com.

WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNED, GRASSHOPPER?
It's a jungle. Anyone who attempts to distribute a film is a fool, and anyone who tries to do it more than once is a hero.

Yours,

Gregg

Gregg Lachow
Co-President
The Film Company

Interview with Guy Maddin in Buenos Aires

2007-04-12T17:32:00.000-07:00

(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!!!!

report from Mexico City International Film Festival

2007-03-07T12:07:00.000-08:00

Hi All,

BRAND UPON THE BRAIN! played the Mexico City International Film
Festival last week. The Google translation of the opening sentence of
the first Spanish-language review certainly gave me pause:

"The American actress Geraldine Chaplin last night narrated in Mexico
the dumb film 'The Island of the Orphans', of the Canadian Guy
Maddin."

Distressingly, and, I thought, unfairly, the critic continues to call
it a dumb film throughout his review. And yet he notes that "700
people exploded in applause at the end of the projection." Then I
read that Ms. Chaplin is "the daughter of the Maxima star of the dumb
cinema, Charlot," and I felt better.

It was a great show. Mexico City sparkled, as did Ms. Chaplin.

So now it's on to Buenos Aires for two performances April 10 in the
fabulous Teatro Coliseo. The next two dates after that are:

May 7 SF (Castro Theater)
May 9 - 15 NY (Village East Cinema)

Best,

Gregg

Gregg Lachow
Co-President
The Film Company

report from Berlin International Film Festival

2007-02-23T12:09:00.000-08:00

Hi Friends,

My report from the Berlin Film Festival is delayed because I couldn't
find a way to improve on Guy's blog:
(http://www.cbc.ca/arts/blog/maddinberlin/2007/02/when_in_berlin.html)

or this great review in the Financial Times:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/8fd61cbe-bf95-11db-9ac2-000b5df10621.html

So I won't try, but will leave you with this Google translation of the
last paragraph of a German newspaper review, in which "Guy Maddin" has
become WAD DIN, (a Chinese porn auteur?):

"Alone the vision already, which propel WAD DIN, its love für's -
motivische like purely physical - material and not least the stubborn
self-willedness, with which WAD DIN moves in front durch's work,
particularly probably permit also in fire Upon the Brain nothing else
as joyful being astonished, in the German opera, where the film will
be specified to 15.02. in (already sold off) a special demonstration
with noise and music orchestras and Isabelle Rosselini as
Filmerzählerin (in the normal cinema its comment part that is clay
pure)."

--Gregg

Gregg Lachow
Co-President
The Film Company

report from NY International Film Festival

2006-10-22T12:21:00.000-07:00

Hi Friends,

Here's a report on the US premiere of BRAND UPON THE BRAIN! at the New York Film Festival. Those of you who read my Toronto report know that putting this show on its feet is a rather hellish experience--one thing after another inevitably goes wrong until it somehow all comes out right in the end--so I'll leave out the tribulations and let a few others report on the triumph. The first report below is from one of the festival's programmers, the second is from a NY-based producer, the third from a wonderful filmmaker. I'll add my two cents at the end.

1. NYFF PROGRAMMER: The performance was fantastic. And I am not just saying that. As I told you I had feared that all the live elements might distract me somehow and make the film less internally felt or something like that. Instead the power of the film went to another level the density of the narrative increased and the magic magnified.Our eyes were glued but our
hearts were broken.
I had written an alternative paragraph on the film for the website description and then held it back and I am glad I did because there was so much more going on in the film than I had caught the first time:

BRAND UPON THE BRAIN!
Sans exclamation mark the title would be positively Jamesian but there were
more shades of Bronte and Sheridan La Fanu and most of all MADDIN.
I couldn't go to sleep that night it was like the first time I ate
bouillabaisse. So rich.
My brain was going like a whirligig.
It brought back a lot of memories I didn't know I had.
and the twin baby sitters in Meadville Pa that grabbed my legs and rocked me
over the edge of the porch four stories up. The erotic confusion. Their
brother with a cauliflower ear that had been chewed upon by a dalmatian when
he was a baby.
the ambiguous feelings about my mother, mothers.
The interiors of windmills that I broke into and played in very much like
the interior of lighthouse.
Beautiful beautiful film.

2. NY-BASED PRODUCER: I've been going to the NYFF for 18 years...last night was the
most sublime, mindblowing event I've ever seen there. Maybe anywhere.
But definitely there. I am so happy I got to see it and wanted to
congratulate you all.

3. FILMMAKER FRIEND: I can't gush enough about how much I was transported/amazed/taken
off guard/delighted by Guy's film, and the entire sensorium of it all!
What a fabulous evening! I hope you get more bookings because
everyone I love most has to experience it!

To which I'll just add...Isabella Rossellini! There can't be too many
people out there who have managed, as she has, to transcend the twin
"blessings" of fame and beauty to become artists in their own
right--what a difficult task!

In between screenings we had a cocktail party with a view, thanks to
the graciousness of Marguerite Soderberg and Richard Massey. Lost in
thought about some technical problems that needed to be fixed before
the 8 pm show, I remember none of it, but am told it was delightful.
Three of the five directors on our next slate were there--Megan Murphy
came from Seattle, Lisandro Alonso from Buenos Aires, and Joie Lee all
the way from Brooklyn. Wait, I do remember meeting the great film
composer Carter Burwell, and Brian DePalma, and an eager young man who
wanted to pitch a film to me right then and there--one minute, two
minutes tops!--even though I had just finished telling him that one of
the things that makes The Film Company unique is we greenlight
artists, not projects. We don't hear pitches or read scripts, and
never will.

To those of you in NY, thank you for making us feel welcome.

Best,

Gregg

Gregg Lachow
Co-President
The Film Company

Gregg's report from Toronto International Film Festival

2006-09-17T12:23:00.000-07:00

Hi All,

Here's my report on the world premiere of BRAND UPON THE BRAIN! at the
31st Toronto International Film Festival.

Megan and I took the red-eye Wednesday night, arrived at our hotel on
Thursday, and were immediately immersed in the business side of
filmmaking. Buyers, sellers, publicists, exhibitors, and press
everywhere. The occasional star shooting by, surrounded by lesser
lights.

We went to the first rehearsal of the orchestra for "Brand upon the
Brain;" eleven members of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, a boy
soprano, and our narrator Louis Negin, under the direction of our own
Jason Staczek. The musicians had never seen even a note of Jason's
intricate, beautiful score, yet from the first downbeat it sounded
well-nigh perfect. My mouth dropped open, Guy smiled, and Jason
breathed a sigh of relief. We were in good hands.

The next day was a difficult one, trying to put the orchestra, singer,
foley artists, and castrato together into a seamless show in 5 hours.
The dress rehearsal was a calamity, with the sound loud and soft in
all the wrong places, and people traipsing in and out of the theater
throughout (at one point, 14 publicists, no exaggeration, from the new
Will Ferrell movie came through en masse to inspect the seating
arrangements). We decided to work through until 6, thus opening the
house a half hour late. Hilariously, we had to make all our changes
while "Borat" played on the big screen, because the projector had
broken down the night before during its premiere screening, and
20th-Century Fox then insisted that the film's producer be allowed to
sit and watch the entire film before the next screening, as if that
would somehow prevent the projector from breaking down again.

As Guy and Maya walked the red carpet into the beautiful Elgin Theater
(with fans shouting at them, as Guy said later, "who are you?"), I
kept repeating the theater mantra "bad dress, good opening, bad dress,
good opening." We began 45 minutes late, but the capacity crowd of
1500, tickled perhaps at the site of the three foley artists in white
lab coats and bowties, surrounded by all kinds of strange
noise-producers, seemed in good spirits. Guy made a nice introduction
of all the live elements, the TIFF trailers played, and suddenly,
there was our film on screen, looking gorgeous!…and started up 30
seconds past the beginning. Jason couldn't cue the orchestra, and
shouted "Can we please begin again? Please?" And so we did. This
time cued up correctly—everyone clapped when they saw The Film Company
logo. Once again the images were gorgeous, the music sounded
glorious…and Louis' microphone was dead. He shouted his lines as loud
as he could while the now much hated union technicians scrambled to
fix the problem. At last they did: Louis could be heard loud and
clear, applause once more, followed by a big laugh at something
onscreen, and it was time to relax and enjoy the movie. And indeed,
after only about 30 minutes of furious nail-biting and pacing, I told
myself to relax dammit and enjoy the movie. I tiptoed to a spot in the
balcony, and was just beginning to relax and enjoy the movie when
Louis said his next line quite late, which is a hard thing to do when
it pops up on your monitor at just the right time to say it. I cursed
him and all actors, relaxed again, and he did it again. This time I
cursed the gods for their rotten sense of humor, ran downstairs, found
Guy and told him that Louis' monitor must have frozen, and that he
should sit in the loge next to Louis and poke him in just the right
place, at just the right moments. Which he did, heroically.

And so the film went off without a hitch, everyone took their
well-deserved bows, and we were an overnight success. Which, in the
festival world, means that overnight everyone forgets you and moves on
to the Next Big Thing. But we were blessed with great reviews
("breathtaking, perverse, delirious, funny and mystifying,"--the
Toronto Star, though Jamie thinks the quote we should print on the
poster is: "High upside potential!"--Screen International) and great
word of mouth, virtually every festival in the world wants the film,
we're "sifting through" some buyers' offers, and most importantly, Guy
was happy. Or as he would write, "Happy!!!"

Next stops with a live score: the 44th NYFF on October 15, and the
Berlin International in February.

--Gregg
Gregg Lachow
Co-President
The Film Company