Guy Maddin (born February 28, 1956) is a Canadian screenwriter, director, author, cinematographer, film editor, and installation artist. He is known for his incorporation of Silent-era film aesthetic into his work. Maddin was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2012.
Maddin served as a visiting lecturer at Harvard University's Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies from 2015 to 2018.
Life and career
Early life (1956–1984) Guy Maddin was born on February 28, 1956, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, to Herdis Maddin (a hairdresser) and Charles "Chas" Maddin (a grain clerk and general manager of the Maroons, a Winnipeg hockey team). Maddin has three older siblings: Ross (b. 1944), Cameron (1946–1963), and Janet (b. 1949). Maddin attended Winnipeg public schools: the Greenway School (elementary school), General Wolfe (junior high school), and the Daniel McIntyre Collegiate Institute (high school). In February 1963, his brother Cameron killed himself on the grave of his girlfriend, who had died in a car crash.
Maddin studied economics at the University of Winnipeg, graduating in 1977. That same year, Maddin's father died suddenly after a stroke, and Maddin married Martha Jane Waugh. Their daughter, Jilian, was born in 1978, and Maddin and Waugh divorced in 1979.
After graduating, Maddin held a variety of odd jobs, including bank manager, house painter, and photo archivist. Maddin began to take film classes at the University of Manitoba. There, Maddin met film professor Stephen Snyder, who held regular film screenings of titles from the school's film library at his home. Maddin attended, as did some early collaborators, including his friend John Boles Harvie, the future star of Maddin's first film, as well as filmmaker John Paizs. Maddin appeared as an actor in two of Paizs' short films,Oak, Ivy, and Other Dead Elms (1982) and The International Style (1983). Maddin drew early inspiration from the films of John Paizs, as well as experimental shorts by Stephen Snyder. Other early influences included L'Age d'Or by Luis Buñuel and Eraserhead by David Lynch; Maddin has cited their low budget, non-famous cast, atmospheres and ideas, and honesty. Maddin also met film professor George Toles, who became Maddin's co-writer on many of his future films. Maddin's core group of friends from this period, who played various roles in the production of his early film projects, were known as "the Drones" and included Harvie, Ian Handford, and Kyle McCulloch.
Maddin joined the Winnipeg Film Group around this time, and also became friends with producer Greg Klymkiw, with whom he began making a cable access television show, Survival (c. 1985–1987). Survival was a satirical talk show centred around "surviv[ing] the inevitable social/economic collapse and/or nuclear holocaust." The show became a cult hit in Winnipeg and excerpts were re-released on the compilation DVD Winnipeg Babysitter. Maddin plays a masked character on the show named "Concerned Citizen Stan".
The Dead Father and Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1985–1988) Maddin's first short film (as director, writer, producer, and cinematographer) was The Dead Father, a 25-minute black-and-white film about a young man whose father dies but continues to visit his family and disapprove of his son's life. Its budget is estimated at CA$5,000 (). Maddin began shooting The Dead Father in 1982 and finished the film in 1985. Spurred by the work of Snyder and Paizs, and together with Harvie and Handford, Maddin founded a film company called Extra Large Productions (they first decided on the name "Jumbo Productions" and went to get a jumbo pizza to celebrate, but changed the name when the pizzeria in Gimli, Manitoba, only served "extra large" pizzas).
Maddin cast John Harvie in the lead role as the son, and University of Manitoba medical professor Dan P. Snidal as the dead father. The Dead Father (1985) was shot in black-and-white on 16 mm film. The style of the film is inspired by Surrealism, with Maddin citing Luis Buñuel and Man Ray as its main influences. John Kozak cites as an example of Maddin's dream-like tone the climactic scene of the film, where the son attempts to resolve his relationship with his dead father by uncovering his corpse (hidden to sleep at night in some nearby brush) and attempting to devour his father using a large spoon—since the dead father awakens, the son cannot finish eating him and must instead pack his body away into a trunk in the family's attic. Although Maddin did not feel that the film's Winnipeg premiere had gone well, John Paizs convinced him to submit the film to the Toronto Film Festival and the festival accepted the film. At the festival Maddin met Atom Egoyan, Jeremy Podeswa, and Norman Jewison, and began to form connections with Canadian filmmakers across the national scene.
Maddin next began work on his feature film debut, Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988), also shot in black-and-white on 16 mm film. Kyle McCulloch starred in the film as Einar, a lonely fisherman who contracts smallpox and begins to compete with another patient, Gunnar (played by Michael Gottli) for the attention of the young nurses. The film was originally titled Gimli Saga, after the amateur history book produced locally by various Icelandic members of the community of Gimli (Maddin himself has Icelandic ancestry).
Maddin's aunt Lil had recently retired from hairdressing, and allowed Maddin to use her beauty salon, which was also Maddin's childhood home, as a makeshift film studio. Lil appears in the film briefly as a "bedside vigil-sitter in one quick shot [taken] just a couple of days before she died" at the age of 85. After Maddin's mother sold the house, Maddin completed the remaining shots of the film at various locations, including his own home, over a period of eighteen months. Maddin received a grant from the Manitoba Arts Council for CA$20,000 (), and often cites that figure as the film's budget, although he has also estimated the actual budget to have been between CA$14,000 and CA$30,000.
Although Tales from the Gimli Hospital upset some of the residents of Gimli, who believed that the film made light of the historical smallpox epidemic that ravaged the community, and was rejected by the Toronto Film Festival, it became a cult success and established Maddin's reputation in independent film circles. The film garnered the attention of Ben Barenholtz, who had successfully distributed other cult films such as John Waters' Pink Flamingos and David Lynch's Eraserhead. Tales from the Gimli Hospital consequently succeeded on the festival circuit and screened for a year as a midnight movie at a theatre in New York's Greenwich Village. Maddin received a Genie award nomination for Best Original Screenplay.
Archangel, Careful, and Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1989–1997) Maddin's second feature, Archangel (1990), fictionalizes historical conflict related to the Bolshevik Revolution occurring in the Arkhangelsk region of Russia, a concept introduced to Maddin by John Harvie. In the film, Boles, a Canadian soldier suffering from amnesia, arrives in the town of Archangel as World War I is ending. Due to the Bolshevik uprising, it appears as if the townspeople have, like Boles, contracted amnesia and forgotten that the war is over. Boles confuses the warrior-woman Veronkha with his lost love Iris and pursues her throughout the fighting. Kyle McCulloch stars as Boles. The film marks Maddin's first formal collaboration with fellow screenwriter George Toles.
Maddin shot Archangel in black-and-white on 16 mm film, on a budget of CA$430,000. Maddin modeled the film on the style of the part-talkie genre. Film critic J. Hoberman praised the film, and noted that "Maddin's most distinctive trait is an uncanny ability to exhume and redeploy forgotten cinematic conventions." Archangel premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, and in 1991 was awarded Best Experimental Film by the National Society of Film Critics.
Maddin's third feature, Careful (1992), was styled after another early cinema genre, the German mountain film. Maddin was ordered by the producers to shoot in colour, and so Careful became Maddin's first colour film, shot on 16 mm film with a budget of CA$1.1 million (). The colour style of the film emulated the two-colour Technicolor movies of the early 1930s. Kyle McCulloch again starred, alongside Brent Neale and Ross McMillan. At one point, Martin Scorsese had agreed to act in the film as Count Knotkers, but bowed out to complete Cape Fear. Maddin pursued casting hockey player Bobby Hull, but ended up casting Paul Cox.
Careful, also co-written by George Toles, is set in the mountain town of Tolzbad, where the townspeople are forced to repress their behaviour pathologically, since the slightest expression of emotion can trigger an avalanche. Brothers Grigorss (McCulloch) and Johann (Neale) seem secure in futures as butlers, but Johann becomes incestuously obsessed with their widowed mother, which drives him away from his fiancé and towards suicide. Grigorss, who is in love with Klara, begins to work for Count Knotkers, who is also in love with Grigorss' mother. Klara convinces Grigorss to duel the Count, resulting in the death of his mother, Klara's father, Klara, and Grigorss himself. Careful premiered at the New York Film Festival and, although it was not a commercial success elsewhere, "single-handedly saved a struggling art-house cinema in Missoula, Montana," where "sell-out crowds had filled the house twice every night for two weeks."
For his next feature film, written by Toles, Maddin attempted to make an operetta called The Dikemaster's Daughter "set in a nineteenth-century Holland populated almost entirely by opera singers and dike-building navvies" about "a short-lived romance between the titular daughter and a fey opera singer." The singer is killed and the daughter is forced to marry a dike-builder, who is also killed. A local alchemist then constructs an automaton copy of the latter, which the daughter succeeds in having implanted with two hearts (of both her opera singer lover and her dike-builder husband) and a lever that switches control of the mechanical body between the two hearts. The movie was to feature Christopher Lee and Leni Riefenstahl, but Telefilm Canada "declared the project a 'lateral move'" for Maddin and the movie could not secure enough funding, so it was aborted.
Maddin consequently considered moving to Los Angeles to become a director-for-hire. He met with Claudia Lewis, who worked for Fox Searchlight, but did not like the projects he was offered. In 1995, Maddin directed the TV film The Hands of Ida (which he "later repudiated") and married Elise Moore (the marriage ended in 1997). He also directed the short film Odilon Redon, or The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity (which was commissioned by the BBC and won a Special Jury Citation at the Toronto International Film Festival). In 1995, Maddin also became the youngest recipient ever of the Telluride Film Festival's Lifetime Achievement Award.
Maddin's fourth feature, also scripted by Toles and inspired by the novel Pan by Knut Hamsun, was Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997), his second feature film in colour and his first shot in 35 mm, on a budget of CA$1.5 million (). Set in the fictional land of Mandragora, where the sun does not set, a newly released convict returns to his family's ostrich farm and is embroiled in romantic complications involving a statue of Venus. Twilight of the Ice Nymphs featured Shelley Duvall and Frank Gorshin; the film's star, Nigel Whitmey, had his name removed from the film's credits after Maddin chose to remove Whitmey's voice from the film and replace it with Ross McMillan's.