Ep. 200: Guy Maddin (Filmmaker)

Guy Maddin has directed thirteen feature-length movies, most recently Rumours (2024), starring Cate Blanchett and Alicia Vikander; as well as The Forbidden Room (2015), My Winnipeg (2007), and The Saddest Music in the World (2003). He has also mounted over seventy performances of his films around the world featuring live elements – orchestra, sound effects, singing and narration — most recently, The Green Fog (2016), which was accompanied live by the Kronos Quartet. His screenplay collaborators include Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro and poet John Ashbery. His movies Archangel (1990) & The Heart of the World (2000) both won National Society of Film Critics Awards for Best Experimental Film. For the past 15 years he has partnered with co-directors Evan and Galen Johnson.

"No one makes films like fabulist Guy Maddin. From his home in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, Maddin is isolated from the facile preoccupations and coarse trends which plague the majority of Hollywood films nowadays. It could be argued, though, that he is also estranged from what passes for independent cinema. Truly a stranger in a strange land. But what a strange land indeed! His films are black comedic excursions into the netherworlds of silent film, but he also has an uncanny feel for replicating images and sounds from painting, classical music, and literature. They could easily become a pretentious mess in less-skilled hands, yet Maddin’s melodramatic films are anything but. They’re playful, complex, hilarious, and exquisite; a perfect melange of high art and camp. Cinematic images that can only be described as post-modern phantasms. Perhaps the only other filmmaker today who is so comfortable reworking such melodramatic terrain is - Lars von Trier

His films include

1988 - Tales from the Gimli Hospital

1990 - Archangel

1992 - Careful

1995 - Sissy-Boy Slap-Party

2002 - Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary

2003 - Cowards Bend the Knee

2003 - The Saddest Music in the World

2006 - Brand Upon the Brain!

2007 - My Winnipeg

2017 - The Green Fog

2024 - Rumours

Guy is currently busy colour-correcting the 4K restoration of his film CAREFUL (1992) so please keep an eye out on his Instagram guy.maddin for updates.

https://www.instagram.com/guy.maddin

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Credits

Stephen Bluhm - Sound Engineer and episode editor

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Rich Wexler

Producer/Interviewer

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Episode Editors

Otter Castro

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