Guy Maddin has called his latest movie, Brand Upon The Brain!, which was produced for the Seattle-based film collective The Film Company, his first foreign film. But the silent, festering phantasmagoria about memories, zombies, brain nectar and flying butter is firmly rooted in the place all of Maddin's films come from: the recesses of his skewed, singular psyche.
BUTB! screened just once at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, as a special event featuring live foley artists, narration and an orchestra. FilmCAN sat down with Maddin -- who, in person, is as pleasant and engaging a conversationalist as you'll find, self-deprecating but suave and stunningly honest -- to find out the story on near-spontaneous filmmaking, what you do with a silent film once the one-nigh-only gimmick is done, and what the visionary director has coming up next.
Check out a behind the scenes look at the making of BUTB! in the FilmCAN video podcast (#02).
filmCANLet's start with Brand Upon the Brain! You got a call from The Film Company saying, we want you to make a film?
Guy MaddinYeah. Greg Lachow (the founder of TFC) kind of lives by these ideologies he's constructed for himself, and he has these kind of ideas. Working as a filmmaker for a number of years, he faced a number of frustrations like all filmmakers do, and he's kind of trying to reinvent the system as something that's better for artists. So he approaches artists -- he doesn't want them to approach him -- and he attracts people that are making interesting noises. In some cases they're people who haven't even made films yet, but might be interested in trying to make a film. Then he insists that, even if they are filmmakers with a big drawerful of scripts, they come up with something brand new for him. That's one his conditions. He usually likes to give them kind of short notice, too, to increase the necessity of a lot of collaboration among the members of his film co-op.
filmCANWhat number of film is Brand Upon The Brain! in the Film Company canon?
Guy MaddinIt's number two. The first one was done by a guy named William Weiss, who I think was given one month from his invitation to screen a movie. So he shot it without even having a script down -- he just had some Post-It notes or something. He made a picture which I haven't seen yet, but which the people who I've spoken to who have seen it find really charming. It's called Telephone Pole Numbering System. I think it premiered a month after he was approached, and then he had recourse to re-editing -- just as I do after this screening the other night [invu was conducted about a week after the TIFF screening of BUTB! -- ed.]. I have a week to make tweaks if I want. There's a lot of impetuosity in The Film Company and it's great, because it keeps things fresh, but it's silly with the amount of money you do end up spending on a movie to be impetuous from start to finish.
filmCANHow long was the time between you got the invitation and the completion of the film?
Guy MaddinIt was actually more like 20 months, because after shooting it and getting it into the can, I think there was a little bit of cash flow trouble, and it stayed in the lab for a few months. It was interesting: during the nine-day shoot, at the end of each day I would change out of my sweaty, dirty shooting clothes -- because I was running around in sand and grime all day -- and I would put on a sport jacket and go to a cocktail party attended by Seattle's wealthiest patrons of the arts, and Greg and I would (drunkenly, because my stomach would be empty except for one highball) tell them why they should invest in the movie. It was interesting trying to do things the American way. In Canada, it's hard work and it's a struggle to get films made, but it's sometimes a purely bureaucratic struggle. (In the U.S.) you've got to trick rich people into giving you money. And when they say, 'So why should I invest in your film?', you just lift the highball glass up to your face and try to suck the last few drops of gin off your ice cubes and try to think of an answer. As a Canadian, I've never really thought in those terms before.
So there was a long delay before the film got out of the lab, and by that time I was already committed to some other projects: I made a short with Isabella Rossellini (My Dad is 100 Years Old) and I shot a documentary about Winnipeg for The Documentary Channel. It was only this summer that my editor and I had the free time to work on BUTB!. So, I wrote the script in a week (with George Toles), I shot it in nine days, and then I sat for 18 months.
filmCANSo when you got the call and you had to come up with something new, how did you arrive at Brand Upon The Brain!? It's a pretty dense film, plot-wise.
Guy MaddinI know. I was a little worried after I shot it that, with a script so packed with twists and turns and things, that I didn't really have the time to boil it down and strain off the extraneous stuff. But I knew on such short notice that it would have to be a silent movie, because I knew there wouldn't be time to write dialogue. And I knew I'd have to borrow a lot from my own family mythologies, because they come ready-made. The only trick I was faced with was finding a structure that would hold all these stories and then somehow add up to something. That's where George Toles really saved the day. He came up with the structure. Then it was just a matter of me sliding these big chunks into place -- sort of like masonry -- until I had a nice towering, lighthouse-shaped pillar of family history. And then I put in lots of personal details as kind of mortar, until it felt sturdy.
filmCANSo you've now staged this the one time. Are you going to do any kind of theatrical release? Are you going to put the score and the narration into the film?
Guy MaddinWell, it would be really nice to stage it live a few more times, because it's such a treat. So we'll try to hit some big cities or festivals. It's costly, so there's only so many places that could do it, unless you started going around, hat in hand, approaching opera houses and things with the idea of doing it two years down the road. But I want to move on, so I think whatever this festival season can offer in the way of screenings will be good. Then it will be time to do a sound mix with a score, and the same foley artists and the same sound effects, and maybe a handful of different narrators. In New York, at the New York Film Festival next month [it screened on October 15 -- ed.], it'll have Isabella Rossellini as the narrator.
filmCANThe live event was so unique. Do you feel like you'll lose anything in having to sacrifice elements like the performance of the foley artists (who were visible throughout the screening) for a conventional release?
Guy MaddinI have to make sure the movie can stand on its own, too. I guess there are advantages to the theatre -- it won't cost very much to mount it when it's on 35mm. On home DVD you can crank it up all you want. There could be a special foley track where, if you want, you could watch the foley artists on a split screen doing all their stuff while the movie's happening. You could switch narrators around. So maybe there'll be something that each version can offer.
filmCANWhat's the next thing you're working on?
Guy MaddinI've got to finish up this documentary on Winnipeg I shot for The Documentary Channel. I'm just starting to cut it now. With documentary, a lot more is done in editing than with other films, so I've really got to start creating it now.
filmCANWhat does a Guy Maddin documentary look like?
Guy MaddinWell, I own a bunch of digital video cameras, so I shot a bunch of digital video. I have a bunch of archival footage of Winnipeg's very strange history. Then I openly and quite transparently recreated some things. Then I encountered this Russian-style silhouette animation of some parts of Winnipeg's history, and then some old guidance counseling films from the Winnipeg school board. By a strange coincidence, it all reflects things that matter most about the Winnipeg I know, and things that matter most to me.
I was encouraged by Michael Burns, the president of The Documentary Channel, to make a highly personal documentary. Winnipeg is a city I spent the first half century of my life in, and I was encouraged to filter everything through my memories of the city and my impressions of it -- to not just present it as the frozen hell-hole everyone thinks it is, but to actually try to waft some of the enchanting impressions that (Burns) felt everyone seems to get when they visit it. I know Isabella Rossellini is perpetually enchanted by the place and keeps coming back. Michael Burns has only been there a couple of times, but he was so smitten and strangely intoxicated by it that he suggested I do the documentary. I phoned him and asked him if I could do a documentary for him, but I said, I only have one problem -- I have no subject. I just want to try one. He immediately said, do Winnipeg.
filmCANIt fits.
Guy MaddinYeah, and I think if I move away from Winnipeg, it'll be a nice exclamation mark on my tenure there.
filmCANSo you can see yourself moving away from Winnipeg at some point?
Guy MaddinI'm looking around for an apartment in Toronto. I'd also like to spend at least one year in New York. But I'm also hoping to teach part-time at the University of Manitoba.
filmCANYour oeuvre is one of the most personal and recognizable in film right now. If someone came to you in New York and said, I'm going to make you millions and millions of dollars to make a movie, could you make something impersonal?
Guy MaddinImpersonal? No. But I think it's possible to just put your personality on something and still make it commercial and accessible.
filmCANSo would you do an action film?
Guy MaddinI want to do a horror film. I want to do a genre picture for my next film. Maybe a crime picture or something. But something that still has some grounding in human thought -- something plausibly human. As implausible as all my crap is, I like to ground it all in my own personal way of thinking. Which isn't, essentially, any different from yours or anybody else's. I have desires and lazinesses and self-loathings and heartbreaks and disappointments. I just try to find visual equivalents for them. I'm no weirdo or anything like that.
I think I'm getting better each time out at reaching a few more people. I think this movie, despite being a silent movie, is probably the most accessible movie I've made. As soon as you go silent, it somehow becomes just a little bit more universal and a little bit more fairytale-ish. I'm really pleased with how it came out. I credit my willingness to be honest about my life. If I tried to make this up, it would've had so many loose ends.
filmCANDon't you think there are people who might call Brand Upon The Brain! a genre film? Or The Dead Father? Or Tales From Gimli Hospital?
Guy MaddinI was trying to make a genre film (with BUTB!). It was my first attempt at making a horror film, but it had too many other genres in there, too: teen detective, childhood reminiscence. So it's kind of a diluted horror film. Lewton-ish, I guess, the way Val Lewton always seemed more interested in allegory first and horror second. So it's kind of only half horror film, maybe a third. I think next time I'd like to go all out for a horror film, perhaps.
filmCANWhat are your thoughts on the Telefilm initiative to produce more commercial fare?
Guy Maddin Personally I've been really lucky, especially in the last few years when the voce grip started tightening up on everything. I just happened to be making micro-budgeted pictures, so it didn't affect me directly. But of course, it's really important for Canada to support its culture. I'm right there next to Sarah Polley wishing out loud and demanding out loud that the government not cut finding to culture. It's really hard to compare with other more urgent seeming demands on tax dollars, but it's also, when you remember about how a culture's history is written by its artists, very important.
Radiant City, the term originally coined by Le Corbusier for a unique combination of buildings simultaneously segregated and connected by motorways, has a nice, hopeful ring to it. It conjures a vibrant, pulsing core that dissipates waves of healthy energy throughout its streets, businesses, residences, and, ultimately and ideally, people.
The material manifestation of this utopian dream began during the immediate post-war period in North America, where new homes became popular as both an essential building block of the modern American dream as well as a useful way to create jobs. North America had new money to spend, and Hollywood helped the yet-to-be-coined military industrial complex fuel dreams of how to spend it on new cars and homes, and to foster mistrust for crowds and a desire for insular independence.
The resultant sprawl, developed on the margins of urban cores (where vertical living was and continues to be the preferred mode of habitation) was often designed according to tenets in line with – if not intrinsic to – Le Corbusier’s fanciful notion of a pod lifestyle. Somewhere along the way, the template was corrupted, and fear also began to play a prominent role in American life. As a consequence, the notion of positive flux has been halted in many areas of daily existence, including the development of the American dream home.
Radiant City the film shows how this dream became a nightmarishly realized psychosis of income-designated living zones and cheap production practices, and how these bastardized visions for an expanding city have a stranglehold on much more than future housing growth. Using arresting visuals and a sly sense of humour, Gary Burns and Jim Brown look at how current building practices are creating a wasteland of misallocated resources on a world scale never known. Eschewing many traditional documentary tenets – title cards to indicate place, archival footage to smugly comment on dreams of a previous generation, and a narrator to tie it all together – Brown and Burns have made a film that stands as a testament to the potential for the doc form from a cinematic perspective. Featuring incredible photography by DOP Patrick McLaughlin (Six Figures, waydowntown, The Suburbanators), a unique score by Joey Santiago (formerly of The Pixies), and a multiple character and narrative storyline that effectively uses experts to discuss and engage rather than dictate, Radiant City tells its tale by showing the real, human effects of poor (sub)urban planning.
Burns and Brown are no strangers to the sprawl of suburban living – both grew up in generic communities like the ones in the film. And Burns’ best work in his fictional features (Kitchen Party, The Suburbanators, waydowntown, A Problem With Fear) speaks of his unique suburban perspective; he has often stated that he makes films about the suburban condition because that’s simply what he knows. Brown, a journalist currently hosting a CBC morning radio show out of Calgary, was eager to step into the documentary genre and also to work with Burns from a fictional perspective that played with the documentary form. FilmCAN phoned up Jim Brown in Calgary to get his thoughts on the process of moving from journalism into documentary filmmaking, anagrams for “Suburb: The Musical,” and a little hope for the future of the ‘burbs.’
Watch video from Radiant City alongside audio from FilmCAN’s interview with Jim Brown in the FilmCAN video podcast (#03).
filmCANI’m curious about the development of the narrative of the film, particularly between the stages of idea to script to funding and shooting/post. Approximately how long did the process take and what was going through each one like for you?
Jim BrownThis is the first time I’ve been involved in something like this and I guess it was unusually quick, but I had nothing to compare it with. We came up with the idea – we started talking about it at a New Year’s Eve party - sat down over the next few months and hammered out a concept, and the NFB was immediately interested. So we kept going with development and pitched it to CBC as a broadcaster, and they were interested right away too. I guess from original concept to finish was just a couple years, which I understand is pretty quick for a feature film.
filmCANAt what stage of development did you take the concept to the NFB and CBC?
Jim BrownWe approached them with a treatment, about 10-15 pages. We started off with the whole idea of doing something on the suburbs, but originally were going to concentrate on Calgary alone. Then we decided to widen it out and make it more North American in scope. Once we decided we wanted to play with the documentary form a little bit and incorporate some other different elements, that’s when we took it to the funders. We had a pretty clear idea how we wanted to approach it and that didn’t really change going through the process. Both the NFB and CBC were really intrigued by the concept and allowed us to stay with it.
filmCANYou mentioned that the original idea was smaller and maybe more ornate, and that it changed through the production process. How did this change help the film, and what was the catalyst?
Jim BrownI guess that all happened during editing. I think most documentaries work the same way – you really do find it in the editing process. We found a lot of the details we planned to include, a lot of visual gags, different motifs…we just started stripping them away and we just found the smaller we made the film the stronger it became. We were going to take a couple diversions with some experts and we eliminated that along with some of the visual gags. One of the gags was the signboard for the play that the father sees when he’s driving by, and the words are scrambled around a bit. We had all these different anagrams for “Suburb: The Musical” and so we shot 8 different versions of the signboard! I remember one of the titles was “Usable Curb Mucus.” We had all these kinds of things. We did keep some of these little clues – pretty much every exterior in the film includes the same golden retriever being walked by the same couple. In fact the couple and golden retriever are in the play too. These little clues we hoped people might find to see that we were messing with the form.
filmCANOne of the most refreshing elements of the film is seeing purely contemporary footage. In your press notes you mentioned a particular disdain for ‘ironic archival footage.'
Jim BrownI’m just so sick of that. It’s become such a cliché – you find some old newsreel of a mom and dad in the 50’s going grocery shopping and loading up their 57’ Chevy and going into their suburban home with dad’s voiceover, and it’s supposed to be humorous because of the irony…it’s such an over used cliché, it’s in every doc now. I thought it would be great to show you can make a doc without that.
We did make a couple of decisions early on that made our work more difficult. We decided we would not use a narrator, which makes it a much more difficult thing to structure because narration covers up a lot of flaws; narration makes it easy to bridge from one idea to another idea, and to link different elements. And we also decided we wouldn’t have an on-camera host or journalist. We wanted to make it a littler different, play with the form a little bit.
filmCANDid your approach to the family change during shooting and editorial?
Jim BrownOur original concept was to use a real family and throw a character into it – maybe the dad. And our original idea was the tour guide to the suburbs would be the daughter. But as soon as we met Daniel Jeffery and his sister and stepmother, we knew they’d be the core of the group. And he actually shot that paintball video. He was telling us about it and so we told him to bring it in and as soon as we saw it we knew it would be in the film too
filmCANI’m interested in the real estate broker – she’s a strange caricature as a person. How has she, the family that is acting, and then the cultural commentators, responded to the film?
Jim BrownI had done a radio special on this community Lake Chapparral in Calgary, and I had used Peggy (Scott), who’s a real estate agent, for that, so I knew what she was like. I called her up and asked her if she wanted to be in this film we were making; I explained to her exactly what it was, and she was cool with it. And when she saw it she loved it. In fact she came up after the screening and asked when she could get a DVD.
filmCANI love the scene when Peggy’s in the parking lot of the power centre and she stumbles for a half second and then recovers with “What more could you want?”
Jim BrownBut that’s it – she loves it there! She’s really super keen about her community.
filmCANI also thought the scene with the mother Anne (Jane MacFarlane) downtown, when she states/asks “This is where you would have me live” was really poignant. What do you think it is about the urban density ideas espoused by people like Jane Jacobs that has prevented them from catching on with the public?
Jim BrownI think there’s a few factors at work. For one thing, people are scared to death – about practically everything. And because of that they’ve retreated into this private world. Families that live two blocks from school still drive their kids because they’re worried that some child molester will be hiding behind every tree. People are terrified, they’ve turned inward, and created internal lies; they spend their time in front of televisions, in their cars, and not out amongst neighbours and friends. And that fear spills over to where they live: They want to live in an area with people just like them. They don’t want to live in an area where there’s ‘street people’ and there’s poor people and they want everyone to be in their income bracket.
I also think the images we’re bombarded with all the time drives it. Every film, TV commercial, program – from Sopranos to Desperate Housewives – they’ve got people living in these unreal suburban pods. They setup this dream… you watch a film and in it the characters might be a secretary or teacher and they live in a house in the suburbs of Chicago that would probably cost 6million to buy. And people see that and say, “That’s how I’m supposed to live.” And so they buy a plastic copy of that on a half sized lot. It’s a constant bombardment of media telling us this is the North American dream of how we’re supposed to live and raise children; couple that with fear and you get these weird, inward, pretend communities.
filmCANDo you feel like that’s also coming about via the condominium phase?
Jim BrownI’m sure a big part of the appeal of new condos is similar. And yeah, that’s very popular in Calgary too. But at least with condos you’re usually in a neighbourhood that’s more urban. There are some suburban ones, but the most popular are downtown, and you can live a life as a pedestrian or as a transit user. In these new suburban communities you just can’t – you don’t have that option.
filmCANAvoiding the use of a title that said “Calgary,” for example, or identified any cities directly really gives the visuals a universal appeal.
Jim BrownEven though we shot it in a variety of cities in North America, we never identified it specifically. So when our dad commutes to work he actually commutes through Calgary, Toronto, and parts of Miami - just to show how basically all these places are the same. The only names we used in the film are the names of communities, which are really generic and could be anywhere, like Scenic Acres or Evergreen.
filmCANDo you think it’s feasible in the future to see upgrades or additions that somehow help densify and connect these communities?
Jim BrownI think it may be possible with some of it, but not all of it. The other question is what the life span of a lot of these subdivisions will be because some are built so badly. And in some cases it may just have to be scraped. I think some will densify and evolve, but you look at Calgary as an example – if we actually densified the entire footprint of this city it would serve an area six times the size of Manhattan. And I just don’t think it’ll ever get that big. So we’ll have to make a decision about what gets scraped and what gets reclaimed.
filmCANTo me the most hopeful notion was the acknowledgement that this is, after all, only first generation building in North America, and, as poor as it is, it can only get better.
Jim BrownThat’s what Jane Jacobs argued in her latest book (“Dark Age Ahead”) – that you should look at the suburban situation now in the same way we looked at the rural land around cities 30-40 years ago, where farmers would subdivide their farms and turn them into suburbs. Now we should look at subdividing the actual subdivisions. So if you’ve got a 50ft lot with a single family home on it, you turn it into a small apartment unit or a commercial development, or you build another home on the frontage. You sell off parcels of your suburban lot, make some money, and densify. It’s going to be tough to do, because these places are not laid out to handle the traffic a densified neighbourhood gets; they’re mainly designed with these curvi-linear cul-de-sac street arrangements rather than a grid street arrangement. And so most of these new subdivisions – the ones built in the last 10-15 years – only have one way in or out. Whereas the subdivisions of the 50’s and 60’s are linked into the grid of the greater city, so you’ve got every street on the East-West and North-South grid as a way in or out. There’ll have to be some redesigned streets and increased access roads…I don’t think it can all be done. I think James Kuntsler is right when he says we’ll look back at this phase as the greatest misallocation of funds in the history of the world.
filmCANI recently read Moshe Safdie’s “The City After The Automobile” and was inspired by many of the interesting urban ideas he proposes - ideas that, again, don’t seem to be adopted quickly, if at all. What’s your timeline on when the shit will hit the fan, in Calgary or elsewhere?
Jim BrownKuntsler and many others write about that as well. As we approach energy scarcity, as the price of gas starts to climb, and the availability of fuel declines, it’s going to be tough to maintain these satellite communities. We’re a little more protected here, we have our own supply… but we’re already seeing municipal governments start to impose restrictions on things like downtown parking, to force people onto transit. Because people, if given a choice, will drive. When they start to also change the way they build freeways or add lanes to highways, and say “No, we’re not going to allow you to get downtown in an hour, it’ll take two and a half hours,” then I think people will look very hard at this. Now it’s too easy to commute – even if you’re as far North as Whitby, it’s almost too easy to get to downtown Toronto.
filmCANYou’ve done a few festivals with the film so far - what’s the status of Radiant City at the moment?
Jim BrownWe were in TIFF, Calgary, VIFF (special jury prize), have been named as one of the TIFF Top Ten, and were asked to show at the MOMA in NYC in March, and also Miami in March. Odeon is our distributor and we’ll be releasing it theatrically in Canada sometime in February or March 2007.
Rick Dillon, the swaggering protagonist of Peter Pearson's Paperback Hero, might seem uncannily familiar to contemporary movie audiences – and not just because he's played by Keir Dullae, known to film buffs as Dr. Dave Bowman from Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Rather, Dillon, a small town hockey hero who wears a Stetson, calls himself "The Marshall" and prefers to settle scores like a Wild West outlaw, shares an outlook with a certain U.S. leader who's also known to prefer his justice served frontier-style.
"Originally, we really developed the script as a kind of wry look at Canadians behaving like Americans," says Pearson, "but in a Canadian context."
The film's themes – the shaping of male identity, the gap between urban and rural lifestyles, the allure of Hollywood fantasy – still resonate in today's culture, making Paperback Hero an ideal selection for this year's Canadian Open Vault. It's been 33 years since Pearson made the film, but he retains many fond memories of his first feature production, which he directed with all the nerve and resourcefulness of a rebellious young artist making his first major statement.
"I wanted the hockey scenes to be from the payer's point of view," he says of the key sequences filmed on a community ice rink. "I would diagram out the play I wanted the players to do, and my cameraman (Don Wilder) was a good skater, so I would just stand behind him and push him." When he wasn't lacing up the skates, Pearson was taking off everything else; for a nude scene involving Dullae and Elizabeth Ashley, shot in a steamy locker room shower, the director went au naturel, "to show solidarity."
The stunts speak to Pearson's tenacious personality. A longtime champion of Canadian cinema, Pearson has played many key roles in the country's film community, serving as president of the Director's Guild of Canada from 1972-75 and heading up Telefilm between 1985 and 1987. Throughout, he has been passionate, aggressive and often controversial – qualities he retains to this day.
"You look at blogs and these kind of low end digital movies, and what that technology is doing is undercutting – huzzah! – the CBC, Telefilm and all these institutions that have basically been spokes in people's wheels," he says, when asked what excites him these days. "Digital technology needs no approval. I'm 68 now, and I constantly think, 'Oh man, I wish I could be 22 now and start all over again!'"
One thing he says he wouldn't change is his 1977 For the Record episode, "The Tar Sands", which has the dubious disctinction of being one of the few Canadian films ever suppressed by the government, after Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed sued the filmmaker for libel. A dramatization of dealings between the premier and the oil industry, The Tar Sands argued that Alberta was getting fleeced by its corporate partners.
Now, with talk of an oil crisis in the air and the tar sands being proposed as a possible solution (bringing us back to that certain U.S. leader), Pearson says he's gunning to bring the issue to the fore once again, via his as-yet unpublished memoir, Entertaining Insurrection – a volume he describes in typically colourful style.
"It's a real shit-disturber book," he says.
Pearson's distaste for government meddling goes beyond censorship. He's equally vocal about the current funding structure for Canadian films, and points to emerging digital technologies as a way of subverting the bureaucracies he sees as incompetent arbiters of Canadian culture.
"The future of our popular culture has got to be reliant on something other than the federal government," he says. "They obviously can't figure out what to do."
Besides, he says, a big windfall isn't necessarily a guarantee of a quality film. As recent big-budget Telefilm stinkers have suggested, sometime, less is more.
"Paperback Hero was made for less than $400,000," Pearson says. "At every stage of my career, I've said, 'We should not wring our hands because we don't have $100 million.' You always get the best work using less money."
*A shortened version of this article was previously published in the Toronto International Film Festival's Festival Daily (2006).
