Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin has numerous shorts and features to his name, including the Emmy Award-winning ballet film Dracula — Pages From A Virgin’s Diary (2002), The Saddest Music in the World (2003); My Winnipeg (2007); and The Heart of the World (2000). His latest film, The Forbidden Room (a collaboration between Maddin and co-director Evan Johnson), ruminates on the medium of film and the art of storytelling and is one of his most daring works to date. Our Artistic Director of Film, Jason Wood, caught up with Maddin to find out more.
Jason Wood: The Forbidden Room began life as an installation. Can you describe how it then made its way to a feature length film project?
Guy Maddin: It’s been a long and strange evolution for this creature. I’m proud of the way it’s adapted to its ever-changing environments with advanced improvisational skill, crawling up out of the ocean when it needed to, sprouting rudimentary feet during a brief struggle with standing upright, eventually getting airborne. By shooting all the footage in public, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Centre PHI in Montreal, I was able to tell myself it began life as an installation, and it was, but it really felt like a movie shoot that just happened to take place inside an installation. I was delighted to find the actors didn’t mind performing in public, where their processes were open to scrutiny from strangers. We were truly at our fish-out-of-water phase then. I liked shooting in public because I felt doing so would force more showmanship from the actors from the very start. I wanted to engage the curious onlookers, anyone coming in off the street could watch for as long as they wanted. Film shoots are so boring, they require so much patience, but I knew these shoots would be different. I knew the actors would be in special trances for their workdays, and that they’d be channelling especially odd spirits to produce especially uninhibited performances. All this was to be in the service of our Séances Internet interactive [a website where anyone visiting can hold a ‘séance’ with lost cinema]. But along the way we realised the project was too costly for conventional funding, that we would need to make a feature film out of material originally intended for the internet. I was delighted to face up to the challenge. I find restrictions liberating, and this challenge was a dilly! But by the time co-director Evan Johnson and I Frankensteined the gloopy, ectoplasmic, dismembered chunks of narratives recovered from the great blasting void of kino limbo, we knew exactly what to do with it. Possibly because these slabs of story arrived to us through the same medium, namely, our project, they resembled each other in tone — a spirit always speaks in the voice of the medium — so they fit together in a feature most happily. I doubt any film has ever been made in this fashion, nor ever will be — it’s too stupid, too mad, to work this way! — but the result is something precious to me, and to others I hope.
JW: And will it remain as a film only? Or return to a gallery?
GM: We hope to return the whole thing to its installation roots, let it flop back into the sea. Once Séances Internet interactive is launched in April 2016 I hope to use the internet to travel around various galleries, museums and cinematheques to hold live seances for large audiences. To put my medium’s crystal ball on top of some Internet gear shift and operate, Wizard of Oz behind the curtain style, an evening’s entertainment for the curious. No one will be able to predict what might happen on a given night because not even I will know. Whole evenings will rise from the darkness of lost matter, shine on the screen for a few moments, then be lost again, forever! Then in a couple years all our footage will be destroyed, all the DCPs thrown in the ocean, or burned at a staff picnic bonfire, just as the old films met their ends in the giddiest early years of this odd art/industry hybrid.
JW: This notion of forgotten or ‘possible’ film strikes me a very much central to your work. There is also of course much current discussion around celluloid and the preservation of 35mm. Could you talk about your love for historical and archive cinema, the history of cinema and how you often have sought to integrate this into your work?
GM: I think by working on this project so long I’ve cured myself of my obsession with the dark and haunting powers of lost cinema, of all things lost, in fact — of lost memories, emotions, childhood homes and haunts, old ways of life buried under the new. Let it all go, I say, I need a good long nap.
JW: How did the collaboration with Evan Johnson unfold?
GM: Quite naturally. He was once my student at some university I can no longer remember, the best student I ever had. I liked keeping him around, he was good for my spirits. I asked him to be my research assistant on this project. Soon, he was working harder than I was, thinking conceptually while I worked the surfaces. He was coming up with all the best ideas; I realised I’d have to elevate him to co-creator and co-director or risk having no credit on the project myself.
JW: You have most recently worked in black and white. Why did you choose this moment to return to colour and what was the aesthetic you wanted to achieve?
GM: It was just time, enough black and white already! I had eschewed full palettes in the past because I had too much respect for the power of colour, for the genius required to master its potentially powerful vocabulary, its semiotics! I spent years studying the meaning of colour, not colour theory as Kandinsky promoted it — that seemed half-crackpot to me, and certainly beyond my understanding, but just the instinctive feeling of colour. Then, after years of close viewing — I became a rainbow-chaser, getting into a pick-up trucks right after storms to barrel after those terrifying things to their sources. I knew there was no pot of gold, nor any leprechauns, but I also knew there would be many answers for me where the rainbow met the ground. Finally, after frustrations innumerable inherent in this practice, I decided just to respect colour a little less, then a lot less, before finally deciding to treat it like some profligate idiot in bad need of a good slapping around. We went for it, forcing hues and tones together in unholy palettes, pimping out colours to ones out of their class, degrading some, elevating others, messing with them until they could never possibly be the same. I felt like the king of some horrible empire during those days. It resulted in a film unlike any other ever seen, I guess, but sometimes I wonder about the ethics we used and abused to get there.
JW: You have started to work more and more with established cast members: Jason Patric, Udo Kier, Isabella Rossellini, and Charlotte Rampling etc. Is it thrilling to have such people willing to work with you and are the actors always up for the adventurous spirit in which you work?
GM: They shock me, these wonderful people, with their generosity and adventurousness! Of course the not-s-adventurous turned me down, or were never asked. Come to think of it, the only actor who turned down a request to work with me in Pairs was Frederick Wiseman! Just not adventurous enough, I guess! But now he’s a neighbour of mine here at Harvard. I’ve seen him take out the rubbish during my morning walks. I’m going to shoot him doing just that and upload him to our site! That’ll learn him to refuse me!
In Montreal only Xavier Dolan turned us down, citing something about having to shoot a Cannes-bound film as an excuse. I really like him so I was disappointed, but we got such great faces in Montreal I have zero — absolute zero on the Kelvin scale! — disappointment in my cast.
JW: It was astonishing to see the film on an IMAX screen at the London Film Festival. Are you keen that the film be seen on the big screen and by as wide an audience as possible?
GM: This is the one film in my career that looks way way better on the big screen. All my others look much better small, smaller — smallest even! But The Forbidden Room really needs a theatrical experience, or at least a good Blu-ray big-screen TV experience with the volume cranked. As for the IMAX, I felt like throwing up within minutes of the film’s start. I ran out of that theatre like it was on fire, and London didn’t stop spinning round and round til morning.
The Forbidden Room screens from Fri 11 Dec. Find out more and buy tickets, here.