Canadian director Guy Maddin makes movies that look nostalgic but feel modern. Often using black and white film and techniques from Silent Cinema like intertitles, live musical accompaniment and expressionistic acting, Maddin's unusual movies have been favorites at numerous international film festivals. Now the exuberantly creative director is punching up the movie going experience to make it even more like the cinema of yesteryear, showing his most recent feature Brand Upon The Brain! (which played at last year's New York Film Festival) with a live orchestra and a live narrator describing and explaining the silent melodrama on the screen. The movie seems to be about a young boy named Guy Maddin who lives with his rebellious sister, controlling mother, absent scientist father and a whole mess of orphans in a creepy lighthouse, but in any Maddin movie you never really know what else may lurk beneath. Special screenings of Brand will be touring around the country, with a run in New York starting on Wednesday May 9 at the historic Village East Cinema on Second Avenue and going through May 15. Some of the special celebrity narrators scheduled here include Eili Wallach, Laurie Anderson, Lou Reed, Crispin Glover, Justin Bond and Isabella Rossellini. Gothamist recently spoke with Maddin about what he's calling "Cinema Spectacle," his unique working relationship with Rossellini and the joys of drunk snacking in New York.
Your silent film aesthetic is so distinctive. Do you feel like your movie making style has been influenced by any other directors in particular?
I guess the biggest emboldener – that’s not a word -- but the director who filled me with the courage to try something like this has been Jean Vigo, who made a great childhood remembrance film in Zero de Conduit. That’s too much understatement. He made the MASTERPIECE Zero de Conduit. I love the recklessness of the continuity, the uninhibited performances and their incredible, pitch-perfect stylization. Everything he did he did primitively, and everything his collaborators like composer Maurice Jaubert did, too, really nailed the feeling we all get when we are indulging ourselves in the poetic pastime of remembering our earliest years. We think in metaphors we inadvertently coined for ourselves while trying to order our youthful thoughts. Vigo got this.
Brand Upon the Brain! obviously has some allusions to autobiographical filmmaking, whether the remembrances of your character Guy are yours or not. What led you to writing a script like that?
I just wanted to make my own contribution to the wonderful genre of the childhood reminiscence. Always did. When I got an offer to make a film from The Film Company, my Seattle-based utopian, quixotic and not-for-profit producers who offer COMPLETE artistic freedom – they don’t even want to read your script! – I thought this was my best chance to attempt such an ambitious project. I didn’t want this delicate subject to be tackled under the usual, distracting conditions that other shoots force you to endure. I had a VERY melodramatic, German Romantic and hysterical (in the Medea sense) childhood. This material is best suited to silent film for there are still many things which silent film does much better than these talkies which we are all too inclined to watch at all times, myself included. Silent film is automatically less literal-minded than synch sound pictures. Its viewers are freed of any temptation to think in naturalism. Everything makes a big lurch toward the fairy tale, the lyric, the universal. Toward the shared experience of childhood wonder and confusion, the magic (sometimes very painful) of it all.
The live Cinema Spectacular at the Village East Cinema will feature a variety of narrators. How did you choose these collaborators?
My producers and I all made up a dream list of our favorite performers. Then we sicced Jamie Hook, my uber-gregarious, vociferous and sometimes even frightening producer, on these people. Some were charmed and accepted, some turned and ran. It’s a system with many casualties, but it worked out eventually, splendidly.
