All The Pretty Horses | Lovers take a romantic stroll amidst their city's frozen equine corpses in Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg
MY WINNIPEG
Directed by Guy Maddin. Narrated by Guy Maddin. Starring Ann Savage, Darcy Fehr. Opens Fri, Aug 15.
*****
Guy Maddin liked to tell interviewers that his autobiographical 2007 film Brand Upon the Brain! was “96 per cent literally true.” The breakdown of his latest epic, a delirious exercise in hometown pride called My Winnipeg is more complicated: “The movie’s about one-third fact, one-third legend—which, if you think about it, is truer than true in many ways—and one-third just honest lamentation. It’s all various species of honesty, but I don’t think there are any real whoppers in it.”
Still, anyone who’s been to Winnipeg may have a hard time recognizing any traces of that often prosaic city within Maddin’s version of it. The Winnipeg of My Winnipeg is a city whose nighttime streets are choked with sleepwalkers, all of them carrying the keys to their old houses and apartments (a city ordinance requires those dwellings’ new residents to let them in, too); a city whose former mayor used to preside over sleazy “man pageants,” male beauty contests whose winners would be rewarded with plum jobs at City Hall; a city where a herd of runaway horses once drowned in the icy river, and remained there, their frozen heads dotting the landscape, for the rest of the winter; and where for years, the most popular TV show was the locally produced LedgeMan!, a daily drama in which the same young man would walk out onto a building ledge, threatening to jump off, only to be talked back inside by his mother.
But My Winnipeg is also the story of Maddin’s home life—especially his relationship with his domineering mother, a figure moviegoers previously encountered in Cowards Bend the Knee and Brand Upon the Brain! (and who’s played here, in a casting coup, by Ann Savage, the star of Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1945 cult noir Detour). One of the film’s funniest running gags consists of Maddin’s attempts to exorcise his own childhood traumas by hiring actors to recreate key events from his past. Only then, Maddin tells us in his hilariously overheated narration, can he be free of Winnipeg’s hold on him. “Maybe I can film my way out of here!” he says. “This time I’m leaving for good—again!”
The always genial Maddin spoke to SEE about My Winnipeg last week. He’s still in Winnipeg.
SEE Magazine: This seems like the kind of movie where the most outrageous claims will turn out actually to be true.
Guy Maddin: Yeah. No one believes that “If Day” [a phony Nazi invasion of Winnipeg staged by the Rotary Club as a stunt to sell war bonds] happened, for instance. And it was completely forgotten immediately afterward. It’s very analogous to Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast, in which as legend would have it, thousands of listeners flew into a panic—got into car accidents, committed suicide—because they feared the Martians had landed. It became part of American myth. But Canadians are so timid about self-mythologizing that they didn’t even bother talking about the If Day invasion.
SEE: The film stands out from your other work in that it has this very tactile, emotional component that breaks through the stylized visuals and the sometimes arch language of the narration. In the section about the demolition of the Winnipeg Arena and the building of the MTS Centre, for instance, your anger is really palpable.
GM: Yeah—now that I’ve shouted it out, I’m not so angry anymore, and my anger has been replaced by my usual resignation. I guess the advantage of ranting about this stuff in the context of a movie is that there’s nobody around to interrupt me. But I was genuinely upset about the arena getting torn down. And I don’t trust people who run for city council anyway—the job pays so poorly, I always figure the people there aren’t in it to help the city, but to help themselves get some sort of subdivision zoned so they can make a million dollars off of it. All these people seem to walk away from these poor-paying jobs a whole lot wealthier than they were when they got them. I don’t like it. I’m wary of every one of their decisions. Every one of them!
SEE: What is your level of celebrity in Winnipeg?
GM: I’d say about a Grade D. I can get my late DVD rental fees forgiven and occasionally a free coffee at a local café, but that’s about it. It’s not bad. It’s a comfortable level of celebrity. A movie director’s picture doesn’t appear in the paper very often. Although we got a great turnout when we showed the film in Winnipeg and I narrated it live.
SEE: Did you learn anything about performing your own writing from watching the screenings of Brand Upon the Brain!, where people like Isabella Rossellini and Eli Wallach would do live narration?
GM: Yeah, I learned that unless you embrace the melodrama unashamedly, you’re going to die onstage. The stuff is meant to be florid and hypnotic—it’s got to be dialed up to 11, whatever the emotion is. I’m not Bob Newhart; I have to be more of a 19th-century melodramatist.
SEE: Do people ever get choked up at this movie? I was kind of surprised to find myself feeling genuinely moved by the sequence near the end where you imagine “Citizen Girl” magically restoring the city to its former glory and undoing the damage of history.
GM: You know, every now and then, someone will admit that their eyes sort of misted over during the film. They won’t say where—they’ll just say “the end”—so maybe they mean there. That was always a goal of mine, to choke people up.
SEE: Well, speaking of tearjerkers, one of the films that My Winnipeg strongly reminded me of is It’s a Wonderful Life—both films really tap into this idea of a hero who tries as hard as he can to leave his hometown but can never quite break free. It’s such a potent theme. I assume that’s something that you’ve struggled with in your own life as well.
GM: [Sighs.] Yeah, yeah... although Jimmy Stewart was trying a lot harder than I did. I always felt I should be trying harder, and as I was making this movie, I realized I should have been trying harder 20 years earlier—which is why I put a younger “Guy Maddin” into the movie. It’s a Wonderful Life is one of my favourite movies. God, it’s potent. And it says so much about home and family and the things that make a home. I could never do something as good as It’s a Wonderful Life, but it was nice to try.
SEE: I have to ask about the casting of Ann Savage as your mother. Where did that inspiration come from?
GM: Well, she’s always been a favourite of mine. Detour is my favourite and the most famous Poverty Row film ever made, and I’m a Poverty Row filmmaker myself. And she’s the most fearsome femme fatale in film noir history. And so when I was looking for someone to play my mother, I needed someone to be a real force of nature—not just a mother, but the mother. Really, only Ann Savage or Bette Davis could play such a thing, and I remember reading that Bette Davis was scared of Ann Savage! So I figured I’d better go for Ann Savage! I remember, I was lamenting to a friend in L.A. that I couldn’t have Ann Savage because I assumed she was dead—and he told me that he’d had her at his wedding and gave me her phone number. It took me two or three months, but I talked her out of retirement.
SEE: Is that fearsome quality something she puts on for the camera, or is she a tough cookie in real life too?
GM: Oh, she’s a tough cookie. She talks like a film noir broad, even at 87. She’s spitting rivets the whole time. She’s really lovable, but she’s a tough broad.
SEE: The DVD of Brand Upon the Brain! has also come out this week as part of the Criterion Collection. That’s got to be a thrill for any director.
GM: It is a real thrill. I think the film stands a good chance of being seen by more people now, just because people trust Criterion. And they did a really great job of packaging it—I have my own copy already, and it looks beautiful. In lieu of a director’s commentary, they decided to make a documentary of interviews with me and my collaborators. I felt a little conflicted because I’m very loyal to my other distributors, like Zeitgeist, but Criterion was very generous—they made a point in the interviews and in Dennis Lim’s essay in the booklet to make sure my other titles got interesting-sounding mentions. Very classy. I got to visit them when I was in L.A. recently. At the end of the tour, they let you visit a room called “The Closet” where all their DVDs are, and you just take a big bag and fill it up with Criterion discs. The Closet was my favourite part.
SEE: Which discs did you snap up?
GM: Oh, too many to count!
