Guy Maddin Movies Are Made to Look Appalling and Alienating — Now, He Says Audiences ‘Don’t Even Know What a Really Beat-Up Film Looks Like’

For over 40 years now, Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin has made some of the strangest, most beautiful movies in existence, films that replicate the magical qualities of cinema in its infancy, both paying tribute to Maddin’s influences and wryly satirizing them. Maddin has said that his goal is “to make something that’s beautiful but stupid,” but a more accurate description would be “beautiful but silly,” for there’s nothing stupid about Maddin’s highly sophisticated visual style and dense network of cinematic and literary references.

In its stunning recreation of now-100-year-old filmmaking techniques, Maddin’s work is best served on the big screen, and this summer, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures will provide an opportunity to see several Maddin treasures in one of the most exquisite venues in Los Angeles: the museum’s Ted Mann Theater. “A Weekend with Guy Maddin” will present four essential features (“Careful,” “The Green Fog,” “My Winnipeg,” and “The Saddest Music in the World”), with Maddin in attendance to participate in discussions at each screening.

When Maddin began his feature filmmaking career with “Tales From the Gimli Hospital” in 1988, he never could have imagined his work would someday be showcased in a mainstream cultural institution like the Academy Museum. “There were some fringe filmmakers working in Winnipeg, and I was even more marginalized than they were,” Maddin told IndieWire. “I was the fringe of the fringe.” That said, Maddin aspired to make something great in the tradition of the movies that had inspired him, David Lynch’s “Eraserhead” and Luis Buñuel’s “L’Age d’Or,” though many of his hopes for “Gimli” were quickly dashed when it started making the rounds of the festival circuit.

“The walkout ratio was at least 85 percent,” Maddin said, adding that the number of audience members fleeing for the exits remained high for his subsequent feature, “Archangel” (1990). “I’d fly across the ocean to some minor film festival to find that only five people had shown up for the movie, and four of them were gone by the 10-minute mark. And the only reason the fifth one hadn’t left is that he had fallen asleep.” Eventually, however, VHS tapes of “Gimli” began to circulate among cinephiles, and Maddin’s work was covered in magazines like Film Comment, paving the way for his reputation.

Maddin followed “Archangel” with “Careful” (1992), a pastiche of German “mountain” films of the 1920s and 1930s. A new 4K restoration of the movie will premiere as part of the Academy Museum retrospective, though Maddin says cleaning up one of his early films was a bit counterintuitive, given that he always wanted his movies to look “old” even when they were brand new. “I set out to make movies that were intentionally degraded,” Maddin said. “I shot on film, and my camera had a light leak in it. I allowed the light to leak in and mess up the film — if I didn’t want a light leak, I used a different camera.”

‘Careful’©Zeitgeist Films/Courtesy Everett Collection

Maddin felt that making his films look old and deteriorating — as though they were movies from the early days of cinema that happened to turn up in someone’s closet or an old storage facility — was a way of future-proofing them. “I thought every time they went through the projector, they would only get better,” Maddin said. “More beat-up, more appalling, and more alienating to people. But I had no way of anticipating digital projection or the amount of films that would be restored, so that now even people open-minded enough to embrace classic cinema rarely watch classic movies that haven’t been restored.”

That’s changed the way Maddin’s early movies, made to look as though they were being screened from prints that had spent decades traveling from revival house to revival house, were perceived by viewers. “Now people don’t even know what a really beat-up film looks like, with aged emulsion and soundtracks that hum,” Maddin said. While supervising the restoration of “Careful,” Maddin tried to honor his original intentions from when he made the film in the early 1990s, but he also made some adjustments so the film would play as intended for a contemporary audience.

“I took some scenes that were wildly overexposed where the chemicals were allowed to really sizzle and toned them down a bit,” Maddin said. “I was able to enrich the palette in a period way that didn’t betray the much younger version of me that made the film originally.” Maddin also converted the mono sound mix to stereo, though he resisted the temptation to play around with the surround channels or drastically alter the original soundtrack.

“It’s not Pink Floyd stereo,” Maddin said. “There aren’t sounds traveling from one ear to another or anything like that. But you’re not doing yourself any favors in mono because contemporary projection systems will project things too quietly if you’re mixed in mono, and you always have to ask the projectionist to please turn it up. And I’m not always going to be around to tell people to turn it up.”

Another highlight of the Academy retrospective is Maddin’s 2003 musical “The Saddest Music in the World,” a film set in 1930s Winnipeg, where a wealthy benefactor (Isabella Rossellini) summons musicians from all over the world to award a cash prize to the country with the saddest music. Mixing formats (including 8mm and video) and styles, Maddin creates a beautiful and haunting dream movie that feels at once like something from the past and like no other movie that has ever existed.

‘The Saddest Music in the World’©IFC Films/Courtesy Everett Collection

“The Saddest Music in the World” gave Maddin his first opportunity to work with Isabella Rossellini, who would become a favorite collaborator. “I was terrified of meeting her, and she told me years later that she was very suspicious of me,” Maddin said. “She said she wanted to come a month early and see the city and run lines with me. 20 years later, she admitted that she wanted to check me out in person and make sure I wasn’t a total flake.”

Rossellini and Maddin became fast friends and would go on to make a documentary on Rossellini’s father, Roberto, together. “She wrote the script for that, and it came straight from the heart,” Maddin said. “There’s no bullshit — she isn’t lying to herself about anything she’s done. I really admire her.” Making “The Saddest Music” with Rossellini was an intoxicating experience for the then 47-year-old Maddin. “I was just thrilled to be in the presence of a triple-header legend: Vogue supermodel, Roberto Rossellini’s daughter, and one of the stars of ‘Blue Velvet.’ This was all enormous for me.”

Maddin had the opportunity to work with a screen icon of another sort when he cast Ann Savage, star of one of Maddin’s favorite noir movies, “Detour,” as his own mother in “My Winnipeg,” an autobiographical documentary that will also screen at the Academy Museum. “She was a ferocious woman, even in her late 80s,” Maddin said. “I’m convinced she could scare Bette Davis up a tree.” Maddin always thought Savage would be perfect casting, but didn’t realize she was an option until he spoke with Dennis Bartok at the American Cinematheque.

“I lamented, ‘If only Ann Savage were alive to play my mother, I’d be all set,'” Maddin said, to which Bartok responded, “She is still alive. I just saw her yesterday.” Through Bartok and film noir expert Eddie Muller, who had written about Savage, Maddin contacted the legendary femme fatale and soon found himself meeting her at the Winnipeg airport to begin work. “I felt like [‘Detour’ star] Tom Neal driving the car. She would nod off, and every now and then I expected her to wake up and turn to me and say, ‘What did you do with the body?'”

Although Maddin doesn’t find revisiting most of his movies to be a particularly pleasant experience, he says the Academy’s selections are “movies that don’t provoke that much shame in me.” While Maddin steers clear of the movies he feels don’t work (“I’m just too uncomfortable”), and even generally avoids the ones that do, given his aversion to seeing how many people are in the credits that have passed on, he’s occasionally surprised by the pleasure they bring him. “A few years ago, filled with trepidation, I watched ‘Careful’ in Paris,” Maddin said. “I had one foot out the door the whole time. But I actually left the theater feeling mostly proud.”

“A Weekend with Guy Maddin” will run at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures from July 11-13.