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| Guy Maddin: “I’m just always shuffling around timelines in my head to make sense of time’s great flow.” |
Guy Maddin on hacking my dreams, elevators and escalators, Franz Wright’s Kindertotenwald, Lois Weber, Haruki Murakami, Mathieu Amalric and Arnaud Desplechin’s dreamwork, thinking of numbers, Federico Fellini’s dream journal, A Director’s Notebooks, I Vitelloni and Rimini, Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, and an enchanted place called Riminipeg were all discussed in the second instalment on The Rabbit Hunters, co-directed with Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson, and starring Isabella Rossellini as a “merged version” of Fellini and Giulietta Masina.
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| Guy Maddin with Anne-Katrin Titze on his hometown and Federico Fellini’s: “Fellini is from the city of Rimini in Italy, which is really just the Winnipeg of Italy.” |
From Winnipeg, Guy Maddin joined me on Zoom (on March 25, 2021, the day the masterful, multiple award-winning filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier died at the age of 79 in Paris) for an in-depth conversation on The Rabbit Hunters.
Anne-Katrin Titze: Do you think about numbers a lot?
Guy Maddin: I do! I’ve always thought in terms of timelines and when people were born and when they died, how much they overlapped. How old, say, my dad was when a movie came out. Or how many years it’s been since a movie was made. I’m always shocked to find out a very old movie was made after my dad died.
I’m just always shuffling around timelines in my head to make sense of time’s great flow. I guess, even to talk about The Rabbit Hunters in the same breath - since Fellini kept a dream journal and dreams notoriously shuffle around timelines and make dead people alive again and even in rare cases, living people dead, and early loves accessible again, things like that. I guess it was my access to my dream life that enabled me to make movies in the first place.
And the more I learned about Fellini, that he kept a dream journal like I do, and that he even published his with illustrations by him that are very beautiful, I realized when I was commissioned by the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive to make some centenary tribute to Fellini with my partners [Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson] we realized that probably just shooting a few of his dreams would be the best way to pay tribute to him. The commissioners got nervous because we didn’t have time to clear all the rights to Fellini’s dreams.
AKT: Wow!
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| Franco Fabrizi with Leonora Ruffo in Federico Fellini’s I Vitelloni |
GM: Fellini’s dreams were copyrighted. Fellini is from the city of Rimini in Italy, which is really just the Winnipeg of Italy. And when I watched I Vitelloni, I realized that my useless 20-something years were exactly the same as Fellini’s useless 20-something years. Even though he and I aren’t really alike in any way really as filmmakers.
AKT: You share Riminipeg! Do you keep your dream journal every night or every day?
GM: Whenever I can remember my dreams. I went through a spell this winter [2021], I think pandemic related, where I couldn’t remember my dreams. I think because I was napping about seven times a day. And then I had insomnia but the other day I started dreaming again big time. And I started writing them down, especially the less sense they make. Because later while you’re writing them down, the word choices you make, you’re already starting to project sense onto them. Or later they just make more sense to you.
You know, I’ve put dreams of mine into movies and only figured out ten, 15 years later why I dreamt that stuff. And that they actually have thematic rhymes with the other garbage in my movies. Yeah I put a lot of stock in dreams. I don’t believe that an outside party is influencing me by changing my dreams or delivering messages to me. I just think it’s the slurry of memories in my head that are just churned up by the act of sleeping. And that you get glimpses of yourself from the past or present.
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| Mathieu Amalric with Anne-Katrin Titze on Arnaud Desplechin: “He tells himself the night before to dream how he is going to set up the shoot the next day.” Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze |
AKT: Or from cinema. What’s so fascinating about your films is that they frequently mirror my dreamscapes. How do you know? Elevators for instance, I dream so much of elevators, no idea why. And in this film there is an elevator leading to a cornfield. Dreams connect us all.
GM: Yeah, I’ve been hacking into your dreams for a while now. Thank you. I got plenty of good movie ideas. Elevators, you’re right. And even escalators. I was talking to my mom shortly before she died and she was saying she has a recurring dream at the downtown department store in Winnipeg that just closed. It’s the Macy’s of Winnipeg, you know, real big.
It’s boarded up now, it’s unsightly and depressing. It was boarded up right around the time my mom died, as a matter of fact. But she used to dream that my dad would come down the escalators but couldn’t finish, he couldn’t get off the escalator. He had to kind of stay at the bottom and there was a little fence there and they would have visits. When the visit was up he would go back up the escalator.
And I talked to other people that had numerous dreams of taking escalators to the top of that building, that weird building at the center of the city that has been dying for decades now. Some people have recurring dreams of being on the roof of it. You’re not supposed to be on the roof of a department store, so there’s that extra layer of altitude. Elevators are really … is it Murakami [Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World] who features an elevator that moves sideways?
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| Fellini: A Director's Notebook poster |
AKT: Could be!
GM: Very dreamy. I’ll get back to you on that one.
AKT: Mathieu Amalric whom you worked with on your Séances, I interviewed him together years ago with Arnaud Desplechin and Mathieu was spilling the beans, saying: “You know, Arnaud doesn’t really set up his scenes beforehand. He tells himself the night before to dream how he is going to set up the shoot the next day.” Arnaud just nodded and said “Yeah, hm, yeah, that’s how I do it.” That’s the dreamwork. I never forgot that. You program yourself the night before and then let the dream do the work. Do you do that too?
GM: I’m pretty lazy but I haven’t thought of doing my work while sleeping. But from now on I’m going to give that a shot. That’ll spare up all sorts of time for dog walking and naps and making dinner. Because storyboarding while you’re awake that takes a lot of time. If I could just dream it up, that would be amazing.
AKT: I was trying to do it last night for for my class this morning and then for our interview, but the result wasn’t very good because I had a terrible nightmare last night. Have you seen Michael Haneke’s Funny Games?
GM: Yeah, that sounds scary.
AKT: I was trying to program myself and instead I got all these young guys and it was like January 6th mixed with Haneke characters, cutting off hands and limbs.
GM: I guess the only thing I can say is that you’re really glad to wake up and get on with your day at that point. Yeah, I frequently have nightmares and there’s nothing much to recommend them. But it’s always interesting what you dream of. That just sounds like a flat-out experience of terror. You don’t want to be dreaming Haneke’s mise en scène, that’s for sure.
AKT: No, you don’t.
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| Guy Maddin on Bertrand Tavernier: “He really taught me how to love the Lumières …” Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze |
GM: The Rabbit Hunters was all scheduled to premiere - I can’t remember the exact date - but something like March 19, or March 17 [2020]. I had a big fundraiser in San Francisco and the fundraiser was cancelled. Then its screening the next day at the Pacific Film Archive was held for about three people at it because the world was shutting down.
AKT: Exactly at that time, yes.
GM: Yeah, literally that day. It was the last thing. It played in a double bill with A Director’s Notebooks. Which is a beautiful movie that Fellini made in 1969, kind of a fake documentary. I love it. I wish I had seen it before making my own fake documentaries. But I feel like I could have made it. Not to flatter myself too much, because I’m not Fellini. But it’s just like I say, he’s from Riminipeg. Or like you said.
He’s from Riminipeg and I’m from Winnipeg. But it feels like those two movies could be traded without any net loss between the directors, without any net loss to world cinema somehow. I’d be exceptionally proud of it and happy to give up my movie for it. So it played in a double bill with Director’s Notebook and that was the last thing that played in the Pacific Film Archive since and there were just a handful of people watching.
AKT: Have you ever been to Rimini?
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| Guy Maddin with Anne-Katrin Titze promoting Keyhole Photo: Ed Bahlman |
GM: I haven’t, no. I’ve been to a few cities. I went on a boat cruise of all things, way younger than the average boat cruiser. I think I was 42 or something like that but I felt like I was by thirty years the youngest person on the boat. We stopped in many Italian cities, Portofino and Rome and Florence. Sometimes you stop and take a bus into some place. But I really wish I had gone to this Riminipeg to capture its spirit.
AKT: You haven’t missed much. I haven’t been there since I was there once as a child of maybe five years old for a brief visit. It’s not that thrilling. Are you in Winnipeg now?
GM: Yes I am. My dog is barking, sorry, because the neighbours are walking on the stairs.
AKT: Did you ever read the poetry of Franz Wright?
GM: No!
AKT: He is dead now, but his poetry is very much about the before-life. He connects to before life and it’s really interesting poetry. Kindertotenwald is the title of one of his poetry collections. You are triggering this before and after a bit in your film.
GM: Who knows what I’m doing. I’m glad I put that thought in you. I think of my pre-history a lot but not where I am, not in some sort of limbo or heaven. I just think of what the people I loved were doing then, say, I’m a timeline conductor. I should steer my thoughts that way and see what’s going on. But I refuse to even acknowledge any theories of what’s happening to me after I die, I don’t know how to begin formulating them. I know Kindertoten means dead children. What is the last word?
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| Guy Maddin on Michael Haneke’s Funny Games: “You don’t want to be dreaming Haneke’s mise en scène, that’s for sure.” Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze |
AKT: Wald, which means forest. It isn’t correct German but three words - children, dead, and forest connected in a slightly messy composite, playing also with Gustav Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder.
GM: I will look it up. There’s these Lois Weber movies that are, I guess, anti-abortion. I think Lois Weber was for sterilising poor people, criminals, and people with disabilities. She was a eugenicist but she was really against abortion. She made that feature film, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen it, called Where Are My Children?
AKT: No, I haven’t!
GM: Features a lot of unborn children in it. She makes a lot of double exposures of little cherubs in a sort of a limbo land. By the end of the movie, the heroine or the villainess who has had many abortions is left kind of utterly alone and disconsolate. I think she is sitting in front of a fireplace and then dissolving like ghosts around her are her grown unborn children
AKT: Oh God, that sounds chilling!
GM: All the friends, all the companions she could have had in her later years, but she’s left alone. As people dissolve they briefly shake their heads at their abortionist mother then dissolve away into a limbo again. A good movie.
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| Anne-Katrin Titze on Franz Wright’s Kindertotenwald: "His poetry is very much about the before-life." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze |
AKT: Franz Wright is not going into this direction at all, it’s more about your own consciousness in retrospect, floating about before you were born. Anyway, what are you working on now?
GM: I guess, since it’s been impossible to actually shoot anything in the last year, and that fact has just removed a lot of pressure from me to get something ready to shoot when I didn’t have anything ready - I spent the last year writing. And now I’m ready. I have a feature script and I have a TV series.
Read what Guy Maddin had to say on Marcello Mastroianni and a red scarf, David Niven in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s A Matter Of Life and Death (aka Stairway To Heaven), commissions and Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, Luis Buñuel and a line from Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca, Héctor Babenco’s widow Barbara Paz and her dance to Singin’ in the Rain, Ella Emhoff and knitted pants, and a remembrance of Bertrand Tavernier.
The Rabbit Hunters was commissioned by the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) to honor the centenary of Fellini. The world premiere of the short was screened with Fellini’s documentary fantasia Fellini: A Director’s Notebook on March 11, 2020 at BAMPFA, just before the pandemic took hold of Canada.
