Thursday, September 10, 2009 1:54 PM
TIFF's life of the party: Guy Maddin
Guy Dixon
TIFF's life of the party doesn't dress the part ("Look at what I'm wearing!" he says of his comfortable, been-through-the-wringer look), nor does he bother going to parties anymore. ("I've sworn off parties. I've been coming to the festival for over 20 years now. I can be crusty.") Yet even just a short, irreverent hello with director Guy Maddin is a welcome release after self-serious interviews with stars and other auteurs. This year, Maddin is showing his latest short, Night Mayor, produced by the National Film Board of Canada. The film in the Short Cuts Canada program is about an immigrant Canadian who discovers a way to turn the aurora borealis into TV images. It's ultimately about dreaming through the media and implies a kind of historical trip through Canadian audio-visual telecommunications, complete with the government shutting down all innovation just as it starts to really catch on.
But Maddin and the NFB? A director known for his hyper-kinetic style and images of glass legs filled with beer, now matched with the NFB's reputation for earnestness? "As a kid, I had been marched along with my classmates into the film room to watch such exciting pictures as Zinc Mining in Flin Flon or Mitten Knitting in Morden," he says. Of course he's joking. He's a great admirer of the film board's past work. And a while ago, he got a call out of the blue with an offer of money, any director's wish. The NFB wanted Maddin to create a new short on the occasion of the board's 70th year in operation. Maddin wasn't really looking to make another short at the time, but money is money, and his relationship with the NFB had grown closer recently when he scoured the film board for archival footage for his pseudo-documentary My Winnipeg.
Still, his next project is being backed with private financing. It's in the writing stage, but has a title: Key Hole, Or The Naked Ghost. "I've been making a lot of test footage of my actor friend Louis Negin as a naked ghost. He's been having a lot of semi-transparent sex in the footage. It's looking good," Maddin says.
To which I joke, "Say no more!"
