through the keyhole
Inte rvie w by Anna Bielak I l l u st ra t io n by An g us M ac p h e r s on
Guy Maddin
LWLies: Keyhole explores a lot of different topics, which you are personally obsessed with. Why did you decide to look for truth through keyholes? Guy Maddin: As a kid I spent lots of time looking through keyholes and trying to find out what was inside them. I had always thought it would be nice to look through the little holes to secretly watch what could happen behind closed doors. What is important for me is the mystery when you cannot see the whole picture. If you know how to hide certain things, you know the way to make a really good piece of art – and I’m not talking about my movie right now. Let’s recall thriller movies, for instance, or those with a crime narrative. Imagine that somebody is dead. You try to find out who the killer is. You open door after door, finding nothing. You’re looking for the truth. When you finally open the right door, the game is over. There is no more pleasure waiting for you. In truly great art the more you find out, the deeper the mystery is. I am happy to just keep opening the doors and making things more and more confusing. The cinema-going experience has changed a lot since the dawn of digital technology. You often work with footage taken from the silent cinema era and are referred to as an ‘experimental’ filmmaker. How do you feel about that? I like to be considered as a sort of fake pioneer, a time traveller who dresses up in old clothes. Yet I am working in digital and my next big project is
about the internet. I am going to direct 100 short films in 100 days in four different countries. I’m starting shooting in Paris with Charlotte Rampling and Matthew Amalric. So I feel like a genuine pioneer, too. But, you know, on the other hand, there is nothing new in me. When you’re listening to your grandmother’s bed stories – if she is a good storyteller – you totally sink into them. You don’t want her to go, but at the very same moment, you crave to see every character from the story but her. I am just like a grandmother who tells you a story. Watching Keyhole is like setting out on a journey. You feel like a fearful kid sitting in a small passenger car entering the Ghost Train at the funfair. All the motives in the movie are connected with sadness, loneliness and are a bit ghostly at the same time. There is a recent tragedy in the air, but everybody is still functioning. They are like ghosts that are having dialogues with each other. Dialogue in Keyhole is a sort of vehicle that allows me to put everybody in one movie and immerse them in the same story. Ghosts? I see them in the same way I see memories. I find it interesting that my dreams and memories start talking with each other as well. What is your approach to introducing humour into your work? I don’t want anyone to think that I’m a serious guy or a wanker so I include comical incidents within certain scenes. Besides, life is funny, isn’t it? Humour pops up suddenly and it shouldn’t surprise anybody. I’m a bit of a laughter whore and if I see laughter among the audience, it means that someone is paying attention to me.
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F E AT U R E
e speak to Canada’s prime exponent of retro, cine-literate phantasmagoria ahead of the release of his typically lunatic new film, Keyhole.