A One on One with Guy Maddin

Fringe ArtsSarah Lozinski — Published October 19, 2015

Maddin, a Canadian director whose credits include Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988), Brand Upon the Brain! (2006) and My Winnipeg (2007), has become a distinctive cornerstone in Canadian film over his some 30-year career, solidifying aesthetics like high saturation and textured frames. The Link caught up with Maddin to chat about his style, his inspirations and more.

What do you feel your style brings to The Forbidden Room?

Maddin: My very first film, Tales from the Gimli Hospital, was shot in black and white and has a lot of period things in it. I made a point of—in the very first scene—putting a giant slurpee cup on the set, just to say, “Come on, let’s not hold me to really strict standards of reproduction [of the era] either.”

[The intense saturation] reminds me of chemicals—I can almost smell a pungent high school chemistry lab coming off—those aren’t just colors, they’re oxides. Evan’s first experiments were really fine imitations of two-strip Technicolor, where most skin tones, regardless of race, would be an apricot hue and then there would be an aquamarine colour compliment. Some varying saturations of that and flickers were pulsing on to keep the frame alive. We wanted each story to have a different palette—we naively thought it would help people keep track of what stratum they were on [in the story].

Where did the story come from?

Maddin: The plot is 17 stories, nested within each other, Russian doll style. There are six in the first act and you work your way in from one story until it dissolves to a story within that story and then a dream within that story that tells a story, etc. It works its way back out, and in the second act there are nine, in the third act, nine. None of the stories really have proper climaxes, they kind of have anti-climaxes, and then all of the climaxes happen at once in an un-splurging of all the narrative. The story came from a bunch of lost film plots we encountered for a website we’re making called Séances.

Does Séances have a relationship with the film?

Maddin: Yeah, they’re like siblings or companion pieces. It’s a French word that means [a viewing]. In France it means [a viewing] for watching movies, but in North America it means [a viewing] to watch a paranormal activity. We decided [both definitions] are the same. In both cases, you gather in a darkened room. You watch something that isn’t really there, either a movie or a fake spirit. In both cases, the person behind it is a fraud—a fake spiritist or a movie director. The lights go back on [at the end] and everyone decides whether they were charmed or not.

The Forbidden Room is shot in public spaces. What made you decide to do that?

Maddin: Yes, in the foyer of the Centre Pompidou and the Phi Center here. I had a couple films made before that featured live elements in their presentation and I really liked the feeling of being a showman, not just a filmmaker. I narrated My Winnipeg live, like the host of a travel log, and I could affect the way the audience felt about the movie. I could sense the energy sagging, and I could affect it with my narration. When shooting The Forbidden Room, I became more like a contestant in a reality show and quickly forgot about the public watching. What was interesting was the extraneous noise that comes from a foyer the size of the Pompidou’s. There are a thousand people talking, oblivious of the fact that a movie is being shot. The fact is, that when you take a thousand voices chattering amongst themselves, it sounds like the sea that you hear when you hold up a seashell to your ear, so in the end it was just fine.

Maddin and Johnson’s website, Séances, which features a collection of lost film—similar to that found in The Forbidden Room —will launch in April 2016. The website will host a variety of montages, which will be transformed into a short film every time the viewer visits the website. No film will be viewed twice.

The Forbidden Room stars Canadian actor Roy Dupuis, and has won awards for Best Director at Bildrausch Filmfest Basel as well as a Special Jury Award at Las Palmas Film Festival. It was an official selection of Sundance 2015 as well as the 2015 Berlin Film Festival. The film opens in Montreal on Oct. 23, at Cinéma du Parc.