Live Brains
Guy Maddin brings his distinctive 'Brand' to Los Angeles
By Andy Klein
The summer film roster of 2007 - as in every summer for the last three decades or so - is dominated by blockbusters like Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, Transformers, and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Their huge budgets and elaborate effects may be what passes for showmanship these days, but the truest showmanship of the season will take place for only a few days - and on a more intimate scale - with the American Cinematheque's L.A. premiere of Guy Maddin's Brand Upon the Brain!
The engagement lasts a week, starting June 8. For the first three nights, this silent film will be accompanied by an 11-piece orchestra, five sound effects artists, a live narrator, and (allegedly) a singing castrato. It's an experience that has to be seen/heard to be believed.
The film is about a house painter named - by strange coincidence - Guy Maddin (Erik Steffen Maahs), who returns to the tiny island where he was raised, in order to fulfill his mother's last wish - two fresh coats to spruce up the old homestead. The homestead, in this case, is a lighthouse, where Mom (Gretchen Krich) ran a now-abandoned Dickensian orphanage, while mad-scientist Dad (Todd Jefferson Moore) performed horrific experiments.
Surrounded by memories, Guy's mind begins to dredge up the past - cue flashback - recalling how the lives of young Guy (Sullivan Brown) and his sister (Maya Lawson) were changed by the arrival of Wendy and Chance Hale (both played by Katherine E. Scharhon), more famous as twin teen detectives the Lightbulb Kids. What ensues is a stew of murder, drugs, and incest - in short, everything that keeps life interesting.
This may all sound ... a little strange ... to those unfamiliar with Maddin's work, but fans will instantly realize that it's just the tip of the strangeness iceberg.
If the subject matter isn't out of the norm for this wacky Winnipegger, the method of presentation certainly is. Maddin did not initially conceive the film to be the center of a live extravaganza. "I had finished a project and had this frightening void ahead of me," Maddin explains to me in an interview a few weeks ago, "when I got a phone call in the middle of the night. I very clearly remember thinking, just before the phone rang, that, jeez, I should have planned ahead and been working on something.
"The call was from this crazy, utopian, not-for-profit film studio in Seattle, who offered me complete artistic freedom, as long as I used their crew and facilities. I never asked what the budget was, and they never asked what the script was about. Suddenly I had a feature film project with a shooting date barreling in on me. "
With the shoot set to start in less than two months, Maddin wrote the script in about a week, so he could leave some time for sets to be built. The film was shot in nine days. "But then the editing was slow," he says, "and touring with the show feels like forever. I've newfound empathy for even the lowest of rock bands, just traveling from town to town, dragging their tired asses off a plane and going immediately to do a sound check."
Indeed: Maddin rehearses a different narrator for every performance. "That means watching a movie once or twice for rehearsals and then watching it to make sure the narrator's okay during the performance, and to make sure the sound is fine. I'm kind of stage manager as well, and it gets ... well, one isn't meant to watch one's own movies that often.
"The acoustics for every place is different and that drives me crazy, too," he adds.
I ask if he's at the soundboard during the performances.
"No, although I should be ... with a weapon. Sometimes, I just want the narrator to be more audible, but there's always some sound expert telling me that feedback is making that impossible. I'd like to see what happens if I shoot him in the biceps and say, 'See if any feedback came out of that!'"
In fact, this complicated production had humble beginnings. "I started thinking more and more as a showman than a filmmaker while shooting. I didn't have time to write a talking picture, so I thought I would try to make my big silent childhood recollection picture. Then I started asking the producers for things. First, I wanted live music accompaniment during shooting, which used to be done in Hollywood's silent days to help the actors get into the mood. So they gave me a pianist and a violinist for the shoot. Then I started thinking it would be nice to have live music for the presentation, and the producers thought that would be a good idea.
"And then I realized some sound design would be desirable," he continues. "So I started thinking of having live Foley artists and, a little later, a singer and, finally, a narrator. If I had thought of it all at once, it would have been too much for the producers: it's a really complicated, prop-heavy way to distribute a film."
The Foley artists travel with the show, but in each city Maddin works with a new orchestra and a new set of narrators, more than a dozen for the New York engagement alone. They've all been recorded, which opens up the possibility of a multitrack DVD. "Isabella Rossellini, Crispin Glover, Joan Chen, Alanis Morissette, Geraldine Chaplin," Madden proudly reels off. "Eli Wallach was a real thrill. The poet John Ashbery is pretty amazing. One of my favorite ones is by Edward Hibbard, who's kind of a reincarnation of the old character actor Franklin Pangborn; he's unbelievable." Some of the readings amount to major reinterpretations. "They change the temperature and the tempo and the pitch of the entire movie. I'd love to be able to be self-indulgent on the DVD release."
In addition, a lot of these people are Maddin's heroes. "It's just a cheap thrill for me to be linked forever, IMDb-ishly, to them. Just two degrees away from Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Clift and Clark Gable, through Eli Wallach [who costarred with those three legends in The Misfits]. The whole world of Hollywood history opens up for me."
While Maddin seems bowled over by most of these collaborators, he has a special affinity for Glover. "I feel like we're soulmates, and some cruel fate has kept us separated this long." As a Maddin devotee, I almost slapped my forehead: Of course! The bizarre intensity of Glover's style - walking a thin line between the ludicrous and the deadly serious - makes perfect sense for Maddin. Glover, in his Hollywood films, often seems to have wandered in from a different movie ... maybe a different decade or century of movies. In short: from Maddinland.
While it's obviously optimal to see the live presentation, there's still plenty to enjoy innthe standard projected print - featuring Rossellini - that will be used for the last four days of the Cinematheque run. "I'm fine with that version," Maddin says. "The film still feels nice and raw and immediate; as long as the music is turned up, it still sounds great. And Isabella's voice is astounding.
"But I've always preferred basement bands to overly produced groups and concert albums more than studio ones," the director adds. "For the DVD, I'm going to remix it to bring out more of that feeling."
Published: 05/24/2007
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