Between 2005 and 2008 I conducted a number of extensive interviews with Winnipeg filmmaker Guy Maddin as part of a book project. These conversations were always intended primarily for use as a research tool, and never specifically conducted with publication in mind. Still, I think that aspects of them may be of some interest to a wider audience. Maddin has furnished a host of accounts and views of his own work, most notably in Kino Delirium, a book-length interview with his friend Caelum Vatnsdal, and in the director’s commentary tracks on the DVD issues of his movies, but also in many, many interviews over the years. One of the tasks I wanted to tackle was to get a comprehensive and detailed narration from him of the birth and growth of his filmmaking techniques and styles.
Maddin’s extraordinarily ground-zero beginnings in production-without practical knowledge of any kind, or any kind of institutional affinity-were quite unusual, and from the start the kind of cinema he produced was simultaneously aesthetically sophisticated and technically primitive. One of the several unique things about him as an artist (or at least as a successful artist) was his attempt to do quite ambitious, elaborate and sophisticated things with essentially no materials and no technical expertise.
The somewhat bleeding chunk of conversation you see here is taken from sessions in July, 2006 that concentrated on Maddin’s evolving use of the camera, stretching from his first film, The Dead Father (a half-hour short from 1985) until the then recently completed shooting of Brand Upon the Brain! in 2006.