You come from Winnipeg. What does that city mean for you, for your inspiration and all your work for nearly 15 years ?
Winnipeg means “Muddy waters”, because it is built on two rivers, which are very muddy, you can’t even see your hand when you stick it in it. For me, it’s been my town for my entire life and it’s a very strange and enchanted place right in the middle of the continent. But it’s very isolated, it’s like the middle of a doughnut, there’s nothing there, nothing and everything. All my emotional memories, all my history, everything that defines what I am come from this hole, this nothingness, and it’s kind of a muddy nothingness, like muddy waters. I think, when I was put down for my very first nap as a baby I never quite entirely woke up, my life has always been like a slightly confusing dreamy experience, which I feel tangled up in my pyjamas all the time, I can never quite get untangled, I can never quite do the right thing for more than two days in a row. So it’s been a bit of a struggle for me. Luckily, when I started reading books as an adult I started to discover all the writers with similar experiences -Dostoievski and Kafka-, people that always seemed to struggle to do what they really wanted to do, I learnt that I wasn’t alone in the world and I decided I wanted to be a writer. But I was a good reader enough to know I would never be a great writer but I discovered really exciting primitive filmmakers experimental filmmakers and I gave up the idea of being a writer and I decided to try to be a filmmaker. In the last twenty years I made nine movies since Tales from the Gimli Hospital was completed in 1988. Just in the last couple of years I made Brand Upon the Brain! and My Winnipeg and I made countless shorts, I don’t even know how many, sometimes I make a short just because I get lonely, I invite people to a dinner party and I shoot. All the movies have been based on my experiences, my lousy experiences, or dreamy experiences with love or death, and they are dreamy experiences assembled using a filming vocabulary both ancient and modern, I just always believed that I could not use as a filmmaker just contemporary vocabulary, it would be like using only one colour for a painter. I’m always switching my vocabulary around in my films and I’ve been telling really autobiographical movies, not that I’m thinking I’m so fascinating but I think of it as a way of making people find themselves in me, I think I figured out a way of framing myself as an every person. Every person is really interesting, every person is a genius, and awful, brave, a real mixture of things.

In Brand Upon the Brain! the family and the autobiographical part seems more present than ever.
It’s getting very specific, the more I think about my family, the more I realize what a strange grand-guignol and melodramatic family I’ve had. And so in the last few films I just used entire episodes, changing only a couple of names just to keep my family from suing me and I just put them in. In Brand Upon the Brain!, the main story is my older sister hitting puberty and my mother, who’s very puritanical, trying to prevent her from being a sexual being, most of the movie trying to push my sister’s breast back into her chest and pushing her pubic hair back into her pelvis, trying to reverse the whole adolescence process. And I’m right behind my sister, growing my own pubic hair and watching with great interest and compelled by feelings I don’t understand, compelled by feelings I need to obey, and there is so much hornyness and heart-sickness in this battle between my sister and my mother I choose sides of my sister. Hard things happened to my sister, she fell in love with a young boy when she was about 14, a boy who turned out to be a girl.

Really??
Yes, and I just put it in the movie. My sister went mad at me but we sort of made peace about it. It was very embarrassing for me to mention it now, after all these years, but these were pretty exciting times. I wouldn’t trade my teenage years with anyone because there was such sexual excitement in the air -having a boyfriend and then discover it’s a girlfriend!- and then I got a crush on her boyfriend/girlfriend, I don’t know, it was a weird threesome turning to a foursome.

In this movie you mix a lot of genres, grand-guignol, teen detectives…
Teen detectives are just so sexy, they’re always sneaking around, after the dark, going places they’re not supposed to go, always pressing up against each other so they can feel each others hot breathe on their necks, things like that. Teen detectives are the best. And I always liked grand-guignol, I always liked lighthouses, one of the grand-guignol plays I read years ago was called ‘Orgy in the Lighthouse’ and then I saw it in San Francisco about a year ago, it looked really good, there’s a lot of nudity in this play but the actors said they take their clothes off if the crowd’s big enough, so I was lucky the night I went, there was a pretty good crowd. I’ve always loved childhood reminiscence movies, there are two French movies of this kind in my favourites: Zero de conduite by Jean Vigo and Jeux Interdits. I love those two movies. I’ve always wanted to make a child recollection movie. I think silent films still does some things better than talking pictures because silent films are just one big step away from literal mindedness and a step towards fairy tales and the way you remember and misremember things. It’s most important the way we misremember a childhood because we found myths about our own childhood and the basic way we understand the world is founded upon the way we made mistaken models when we were very young. And every now and then we repeat mistakes we made as children without realizing it because we started thinking of the world in a wrong way and never quite corrected ourselves entirely. I like the feelings childhood recollection cinema give when they’re working. We all watched movies when we were children and so the feeling of watching movies and of being a child are connected, and then you get older, there’s not so much wonderness left in your life but there still is cinema. Even if my movies are very adult themes, and they always are, I always try to get that sense of childhood wonder.

This is your first film made out of Winnipeg, was it something important for you about it?
Yes, it’s my first foreign film. I went to Seattle, I had been there as a 6-year-old for the Seattle World Fair in 1962 but I hadn’t been back ever since. I got offered to make a feature film by this strange utopian not-for-profit film company and the conditions where that I had to use a Seattle cast and a Seattle crew of helpers and I had to shoot it in Seattle. And so I just landed off an airplane, back to a city I hadn’t been to since early childhood and made a childhood recollection film. It was shot on shores near Washington but it looks exactly the same as in my childhood, it’s crazy, the water looked the same, the beach looked the same, it’s really incredible. That was something when I had the actors react certain episodes from my childhood, it was very disturbing for me, because they got it. It was very emotional sometimes, I once even broke down and cried, I had to excuse myself and go to a far corner off the studio. Then I realized I wasn’t actually upset because of my childhood memories, I was crying out of pride, I was so proud of being so clever (laughter).

Is it easier for you to work like that or with a more professional casting like in The Saddest Music in the World with Isabella Rossellini?
I actually really enjoy working with both experienced actors and newcomers. With newcomers you never know what you’re gonna get -so unpredictable- and other times it’s just nice to have someone that looks great on film and who is very professional. I’m happy with either.

You also had experiences with opera, in Berlin for example.
Brain Upon the Brain! played in Berlin a year and a half ago at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, a 1800-seat opera house, sold out, there was a 33-people orchestra playing the score of the movie, Isabella Rossellini was narrating, most intriguing of all perhaps was the sound effects artist performing over 600 sound effects of the movie. They were wearing a black coat uniform and rubber boots, it was very intriguing to watch, the eyes going back and forth to the movie, the performers and Isabella Rossellini, the orchestra, the sound was very good and it just went over really nicely. It’s more relaxing for me to watch it with the pre-recorded sound track but I’ve grown to become a bit of an excitement junkie and the terror makes the beer really taste good after.

Jean-Jacques Rue

Read Guy Maddin’s pick of the week.

Read the Brand Upon the Brain! review.