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March 05, 2007
Guy Maddin on transparent dishonesty
"If you’re being as transparently dishonest as most filmmakers—you know, Martin Scorsese having a taller alter ego in Robert De Niro—you might as well just come out and say who it is," explains Guy Maddin of using his own name in his dreamlike feature work, to José Teodoro in the Photography Issue of StopSmiling. "Besides, you have to be pretty sure that your alter ego, if he isn’t named after you, is doing pretty interesting, 
compelling things, whereas I feel like you’re buying a little extra goodwill from the audience by naming the character after yourself. It’s tricky, of course. You’re all of a sudden engaging yourself in an act of masochism if you’re making yourself look bad. You’re really indulging yourself in self-pity if you’re depicting your horrible childhood, and that can only be withstood by an audience for a few minutes before they hurl. So it’s strangely liberating just being up-front about it, saying, “This is me,” because every character in the movie is me anyway. All I can go by is what I myself would do in a certain situation." But are the Winnipegger's dreams anything like movies? "No, almost never. Every now and then I have a dream that I’m watching one of my own movies, and it becomes much better than it really is, and I realize that I should have been a little more daring, or a little more ambitious. There’ll be long tracking shots and I have no idea where they’re going to go. It’ll be really intriguing and the curiosity mounts, and then there’s a great payoff. Rarely when you wake up can you write it down and then act on it, of course. But these dreams remind me to try harder, work harder. I have this longstanding battle with my ambition. Sometimes I get really lazy... I used to try to make Atom Egoyan into a rival, but he’s too nice and makes completely different kinds of films."
Posted by Ray Pride at March 5, 2007 03:14 PM
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