WINNIPEG — An amputee wearing glass legs filled with beer. An amnesiac nymphomaniac aroused by snow. A pygmy funeral drummer.Not the characters you would see in an average film.But then, Guy Maddin is not your average director.
"Guy gives us a to-do list, and usually amnesia and amputees are both in there," frequent collaborator George Toles said with a laugh. Toles co-wrote the offbeat Winnipeg director's latest film, The Saddest Music in the World, which wrapped up production in Maddin's hometown late last week.
Despite its oddities, Maddin and the film's producers hope that its more linear narrative and musical-melodrama style will appeal to a wider audience than he has reached in the past with such films as the critically acclaimed Archangel, or the cult hit, Tales from the Gimli Hospital.
While many of his other films are eccentric and deliberately disjointed, Saddest Music tells the (fairly straightforward) story of a contest held by a bar matron in Winnipeg during the Great Depression to find the most mournful music on Earth.
Guy Maddin on the set in Winnipeg: 'If it is impenetrable, it will be my directorial incompetence, not my intention.' (Ruth Bonneville/The Globe and Mail)
Based on an original screenplay by The Remains of the Day author Kazuo Ishiguro, the film depicts an eclectic set of contestants -- from Scottish bagpipers to Mexican mariachis -- who descend on Winnipeg for their chance at $25,000. The musicians discover a town right out of a nightmarish fairy tale, described by the beer baroness as the "saddest city" in the world.
Contestants must compete in melodramatic duels, straining to out-do each other with dramatic displays of desperation and despair. The winner of each round gets the chance to slide into a giant pool of foamy beer at the brewery where the contest is held. (Incidentally, Maddin was the first to try out the slide, according to crew members. It's just the kind of down-to-earth director he is.)
Winnipeg becomes the backdrop for a feud between two brothers dealing with the death of their mother in very different ways.
It doesn't hurt that the film has a star-studded cast that includes Isabella Rossellini as bar owner Lady Port-Huntley. As well, Kids in the Hall's Mark McKinney plays one of the brothers, Chester. Winnipeg theatre actor Ross McMillan plays the other. And Pulp Fiction's Maria de Medeiros portrays the sleepwalking nymphomaniac caught between them.
During filming in the cavernous, meat-locker-cold Dominion Bridge factory building recently, Maddin spent some of the time directing from a perch on a ladder looking out over the fantastical Winnipeg street set, its ramshackle houses looking slightly cockeyed and cheeky, buried in glittering snow.
In the same way, he is a man on the brink of success, balancing on a precipice. On one side is the critical acclaim he has already won in the international film-festival circuit, and on the other is the possibility of a real breakout, even box-office hit with this, his largest and most expensive project with Rhombus Media and Quebec's TVA, budgeted at $3.5-million. They hope to have it ready for release this fall, and put it on the festival circuit.
Maddin's producers feel that the film has the best chance yet of appealing to a broader audience -- both here and internationally. "Our aim was to hopefully let Guy make a film that would transcend the traditional, very small audiences that he's had in the past -- he's probably in some ways the most acknowledged filmmaker in this country," said Niv Fichman, a co-producer from Toronto's Rhombus. "He's so poised -- there's so many people out there both in Canada and throughout the world waiting for that one film they'll support to the nth degree," Fichman added.
Maddin, however, is characteristically uncertain, though he continues to pick up one award after another, the most recent for his film adaptation of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet's Dracula.
"It's sort of the hope it will have some [success]. It's sort of set up that way. I know some of the things that have stopped people from watching before was the narrative was too disjointed," the 46-year-old said recently at Winnipeg's Prairie Production Centre, making infrequent eye contact and shifting in his seat.
"So this time I was determined, with my screenwriting partner George [Toles], to write a story that doesn't have any artsy red herrings or really impenetrable parts. If it is impenetrable, it will be my directorial incompetence, not my intention."
But what about the presence of a hugely popular star such as Rossellini?
"It will have a couple of recognizable artists in it, but that doesn't guarantee anything," he said. "Sometimes, a recognizable star with the wrong karma is a turnoff."
So far, Rossellini has been anything but a turnoff to Winnipeggers, who have been buzzing with the news of the Blue Velvet star in their midst.
She seems equally adoring of Maddin.
"I was completely taken back by the strength of the images -- the poetry, the comical sadness, the nostalgia," she said, describing watching Maddin's films for the first time. She had never heard of him before receiving his script and copies of a six-minute short, The Heart of the World, and Careless.
She said the films fascinated her because they had an archival quality she admired and they reminded her of the works of her father, director Roberto Rossellini. He instilled in her the love of the art of making films and of neorealism. Maddin's films -- many in black and white -- appealed to her because they seemed to refer to people's collective memories of the past, like movie reels of the war or grainy photographs of grandparents, she said.
She admired his willingness to experiment with styles of films from eras long since gone. "I think I like to work with directors who are very into novelty -- very avant-garde film techniques," she said. She said while Maddin is not Blue Velvet director David Lynch, there are similarities between the two.
"David, he [has] struggled all his life to make money, to make films and I think that will be the destiny of Guy as well, but at least at the end of [Maddin's] life he will be recognized [as] he's now recognized -- an important filmmaker."
Rossellini said she would have taken any role that Maddin offered her, she wanted to work with him so badly. But she seems pleased that she is playing the lead female, because the baroness is modelled after silent-film star Lon Chaney, whom she deeply admires.
"She [Port-Huntley] is a domineering, nasty woman, and she doesn't have any legs. In that way she's a freak a little bit like Lon Chaney was," she says.
As such, she spends much of the film standing in front of a torso attached to prosthetic resin legs filled with 0.5 per cent beer (no coloured water for Maddin) and wearing a bad blond wig over her closely shorn dark hair. Rossellini said she loved the idea of the legs filled with beer.
Other characters in the film are equally off-the-wall. De Medeiros, who was only on set for six days, plays Narcissa, an amnesiac nymphomaniac who has buried all the memories of her husband (McMillan), and is instead sleeping with his brother (McKinney). The only thing that seems to get her going is the cold.
For his part, McKinney says he loves his character, a down-on-his luck Broadway producer who claims never to have been sad a day in his life. The actor, sporting a jaunty mustache, said he flailed around trying to figure out how to play the world's greatest optimist during the Depression, and was originally going to do a heavy accent, "but it was so wrong."
He said he realized the funny moments spring from "real, ratcheted-down drama, not because I'm doing a funny voice."
While the film is about sadness, by making it partly a musical, the sadness becomes melodramatic and therefore, well, kind of funny. At one point a group of hockey players bursts into song, and their sad rhythm catches everyone in the town, from streetcar riders to hobos.
Film collaborator Toles said he and Maddin didn't want to write another Canadian script about passive sadness.
"You have to give the audience something very strongly opposite to the sadness," he said. Hence Chester's character, hence the musical elements. "You have to give the audience an opportunity to get out of the sadness. It's a comedy about sadness, without selling sadness short."
It's also a story about Winnipeg in winter, complete with the requisite references to cold and depression. But thanks to production designer Matthew Davies, the city looks like something out of a fable. Davies pored through dustbowl images to get the idea of ramshackle yet compelling grey buildings, a little off-kilter, with only their rooftops and tips of telephone poles peeking out, the rest buried in snow. And he used real snow as a prop, though it is scattered with sparkles to give it the slightly artificial, contrived look Maddin wanted.
Toles said he wanted to write a story that would use all of the typical Winnipeg-in-winter jokes, and turn them on their head. "Why not make it positive, make it poetry?"
As for the film's style, Maddin said moviegoers are getting used to a more jagged editing style, lack of continuity and an ever-changing texture of film stocks. "Without my changing anything, this is a completely accessible film."
While Maddin may appeal to a more mainstream audience with this film, a Prairie boy always sticks to his roots. His other recently completed project, Cowards Bend the Knee, is a film loosely based on Maddin's life growing up with a mother who ran an Icelandic hairdressing salon (the film is featured at Toronto's Power Plant gallery until May 25.) To watch the story -- a voyeuristic look at a salon featuring hairdressers who service their clients in more than one way -- participants look through 10 different peepholes for each segment of the film.
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