Guy Maddin: Interviews

One of Canada’s premier cinematic exports, Guy Maddin (b. 1956) is an award-winning filmmaker with a rising reputation. Known for his autobiographical tales—hidden deeply within comical, absurd, and surrealistic narratives—Maddin has earned international acclaim, including a lifetime achievement award at the Telluride Film Festival at the age of thirty-nine. Possessing a deep knowledge of silent cinema, modernist artists, and novelists, Maddin’s seemingly amateurish visual style and unusual subjects (patriphagia in The Dead Father, incest in Careful) obscure the surprisingly literate sources for his films. These include novelists Knut Hamsun (Twilight of the Ice Nymphs) and Kazuo Ishiguro (The Saddest Music in the World), the Royal Winnipeg Ballet (Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary), and the films of Erich von Stroheim (Archangel).Guy Maddin: Interviews collects pieces published between 1990 and 2009 and offers the reader a whirlwind tour of Maddin’s offbeat career in his own words, as solicited by a range of journalists, scholars, and fellow filmmakers. Maddin is a charming, erudite, and candid conversationalist who is frank about his own perceived drawbacks, his good fortune, and the often high art culture that motivates his cinematic explorations.