Since his feature debut, Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988), Guy Maddin has directed a further 11 features—including The Saddest Music in the World (2003), My Winnipeg (2007), and The Forbidden Room (2015)—and dozens of shorts. Maddin has been described by J. Hoberman as “one of contemporary cinema’s great originals,” and by A.O. Scott as a “fantasist and director as pretzel maker.” Maddin’s work is indebted to everything from German expressionism to ‘40s melodrama to Hitchcockian suspense (to cite just a few influences). His projects have premiered in traditional cinemas and in gallery installations. It’s a canon that’s stylistically explosive, deeply personal, and eternally playful. As Roger Ebert wrote in 2008, “If you love movies in the very sinews of your imagination, you should experience the work of Guy Maddin.”
In January 2024, Maddin took a break from post-production on his newest feature, Rumours (2024), to speak with Broad Sound editor-in-chief Ethan Warren for the first edition of the Broad Sound interview.
EW: Could you tell me about a work of art that you fell in love with when you were very young?
GM: There was—I don’t know what the proper term for this is—kind of a nature and wildlife painter and sketcher, one of those old-school types of people that used to be hired in the 19th century to go do landscape paintings of the colonies and things like that. This guy was one of the last of them, a delightful man—I even met him. My Aunt Lil took me when I was four to a show by this guy, Clarence Tillenius, who had one arm. He was missing his right arm—I think it got chopped off in an airplane accident. He walked into the propeller of a pontoon plane on one of his nature excursions to sketch animals in their habitats. And I’m left-handed, so my aunt arranged for me to come to this show where he had beautiful naturalistic, realistic drawings and paintings—caribou, and elk, and mountain lions, nothing too exotic—he certainly didn’t have a modernist or postmodern take on any of this stuff. But as a little kid who liked to draw, I was awestruck by how good he was, and the fact that the artist was present. My aunt introduced me to him after our visit to the gallery, and that meant we had to shake hands. But I was left-handed, and he was missing his right hand, so—it was the first and only time I’ve ever done this—we shook left hands. At age four, that was quite a consecration, this moment between artist and little boy, that I quite liked. My aunt bought me prints of his animals, and we hung them in my bedroom. I loved them.
Can you tell me about an early creative project of yours?
This is so typical of me, and I didn’t realize it ‘til later: when I was about eight or nine, I got one of those Aurora Frankenstein models. They had the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and Wolfman, and Dracula, and some other things. And I made it, and he’s just walking on a few square inches of graveyard. And I just felt that wasn’t enough.
I had some role models. My older siblings were always working on model trains, and things like that. So I built a pretty big landscape for this Frankenstein model, maybe like six feet by six feet, and filled it with lichens and twigs and plaster of Paris, and built a really Gothic landscape. It would have been pretty quaintly Gothic, considering my young age, but I entered it in a model-making contest at the Bay, which is a department store in Canada. We all went there, all of us young Winnipeg model makers. It was a model-making contest for model airplanes and model cars and model ships, and I showed up with this six-foot-square landscape of Frankenstein walking across a nine-year-old’s idea of a Gothic cemetery.
They gave me a prize, and it’s printed in the newspaper—I’ve still got the clipping. It’s very yellowed. It was the first, second, and third place winners in the airplane, ship, and car categories. And then, best model in the novelty division was Guy Maddin. And I feel like I’ve been operating in the novelty division in my entire life somehow. So it was a triumph for me, and it felt really good to get my name in the paper. Our family, like so many people, was intoxicated with celebrity. Even when someone died, and we got our obituaries in the paper, we felt like we had finally achieved this species of celebrity just by buying some obituary inches. At least I didn’t have to die to get that novelty division win.
I don’t remember what happened [to the model]. My dad had a practice of putting things in the garage—a thing he nicknamed “the launchpad.” He put things in the garage, and if we didn’t notice they were missing in something like a week, then he took them to the landfill. So I guess it just went to the landfill. I must have found some other thing to get obsessed with, and it was way too big to keep. So it got chucked.
I gotta tell my wife about that. She’s gonna start doing that one-week grace period thing.
You had to be alert around my dad, he would just come in the room and start looking at things and you’re like, God, no! You go to the garage, and you’d get your bike or something, and everything seemed normal, then you’d look up—the garage had rafters, and there’d be all these toys and things, things you really loved. They’d be up there, and you could save them. You had a week to be on your toes and save some things. They all eventually ended up in the launchpad. When my dad died, he left like five shirts, two pairs of shoes, seven socks, and a glass eye. He was a minimalist, whereas I’m kind of a hoarder. A tidy hoarder.
If you could imagine that your work finds the one person in the world that it is most perfectly suited for, what effect would you hope that it has on them?
Oh jeez, how do you expect someone to answer that? I guess you do harbor fantasies like that while you’re alone in the editing room working on your picture.
Ater a childhood passion for going to movies by myself—even monster movies, anything sort of little boy-ish—I abandoned cinema for a while until I was about 24. And when I came back to it, I fell in with some friends who were maniacal cinéastes. One of them introduced me to Luis Buñuel’s L’Age d’Or. Another one introduced me to Erich von Stroheim’s Foolish Wives, and also Busby Berkeley’s 42nd Street—I know it’s directed by Lloyd Bacon, but it’s really Berkeley, come on—and we just fetishized these things. It felt like a whole new world for me, especially L’Age d’Or. The idea that this movie, which was made up not of great actors—there’s one solid, experienced actor in it, Gaston Modot, and the rest are just friends of Luis Buñuel –
That’s the one where the greatest expression of erotic passion is biting each other’s hands, right?
Yes, finger sucking. It culminates with Tristan and Isolde playing on the soundtrack. I just love the way the movie seems to be cobbled together out of ideas for gags or sketch comedy that weren’t particularly funny or timed well, and that it moved through its boring stretches, even, with the inexorability of a dream that insists on being dreamt. And it was just so exciting for me that someone could make a movie like this that worked, and even demanded—and got—a patience from me. And I’m an impatient film viewer. But it felt like a narcotic high.
And then, a little later, I got the same narcotic high from Eraserhead. I think for the first decade or so, I made movies with the hope of reproducing that high. I was also emboldened by interviews I read with Vladimir Nabokov, who said that the object of his writing was to produce a little tingle—maybe he even said narcotic—some sort of tingle at the base of his skull. It always felt like I was getting airborne when I got that, and I was just discovering the world of cinema for the first time. This whole new world of stuff that was out there, from every decade of cinema’s history, would occasionally produce these effects in me. I was trying to do that in my early films—Tales from the Gimli Hospital and Archangel and Careful. No idea if I succeeded, but that was what I was trying to do.
You know, the experience I had the first time I saw Eraserhead was quite an experience. And the experience I had the first time I saw My Winnipeg was quite an experience. So that’s comparable, blowing your hair back, I didn’t know this was possible kind of stuff for me. Just to let you know, it did happen.
Cool.
Do you play favorites among your own body of work?
Yeah, there’s some of that. For the longest time, I was really proud of Archangel. Had a great time making it, really felt confident while making it, and then when it finally premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, it had an 85% walkout ratio. A lot of people were really unhappy with how boring it was, and how disconnected it was, and how much it fell short of whatever the hell they were hoping for. And so I kind of stuffed it up in my attic for many years, and wouldn’t let it come out. Which is not the kind of treatment you’d expect for a favorite, but I just wanted to protect it from the world. I was really happy to be able to restore it to 4K this past summer and get it back out. I went to a couple of screenings, and there were no walkouts, it played pretty much the way I wanted it to. It gets off to a slightly slow start for my taste. But once it gets going, it’s pretty much exactly the movie that gave me the narcotic tingles when I was making it. So I do like that one.
I like a real underdog film of mine, Cowards Bend the Knee, a silent film that’s a pretty ferocious retelling of autobiographical episodes in my life, but structured around a 2,500-year durable Euripidean account of Elektra. I felt emboldened by this proven structure, this super durable structure of timbers that weren’t going anywhere fast, because the thing’s been in print for millennia. And so I could just drape my own autobiographical shame on top of these things, and the result is a pretty frenzied, insane, Greek-tragic-infused account of my own character. Pretty proud of that.
And I love watching The Green Fog over and over again, maybe because my partners, Evan and Galen [Johnson], mostly are responsible for the cut of that, so I can just step out of it, and not feel any regrets for my mistakes. But it’s not like I sit there and watch my movies. I didn’t believe Luis Buñuel when he said, in his book—the autobiography [he] released just before dying, My Last Sigh—that he only watched his movies once, during their premieres, and then never watched them again. I didn’t believe him at the time, but I believe him now. There’s almost no pleasure to be gained from rewatching these things. They’re just a massive inventory of your mistakes, regrets, shortcomings.
When it feels like something is not working, how do you know whether to keep at it and find a solution, or just walk away from that idea?
I wish I just walked away from some sequences in Archangel. But I kept them in. Mostly it’s just with experience, you come to realize when things aren’t ever going to work, that you’re kidding yourself. And then you watch them at the premiere, and you can’t kid yourself anymore. Not that the audience is reacting in any way, they’re not necessarily walking out, or squirming in their seats, or moaning. But you have to be more honest with yourself, because there’s a room full of people. And you go, Why did I kid myself? Why did I keep that stuff in? So I have learned to be more ruthless, and take things out, and it doesn’t matter how much time it took to shoot this thing, how much money it cost—none of that stuff matters. If it’s got to go, it’s got to go, and I’ve learned to feel great about it going. I’ve never been one for sticktoitiveness in the editing room. Sometimes things are just shot so poorly that no editor could fix them. So I’m usually quick to walk away. Back in the old analog editing days, when you’re actually editing with a ribbon of film, I used to edit scenes directly into the garbage, even, instead of a bin, or a reel collecting the film for possible revisiting later. I just had a garbage bag there with my half-finished lunch, with mayo on a sandwich dripping on the celluloid, and would just get it right in there. There was no going back. Felt great.
I do have some regrets. Since I started making movies 35-plus years ago, there are long lost friends in that footage, relatives who’ve grown up, friends who’ve passed away, and it would have been nice to have it as souvenirs. But other than that, it’s funny watching the end credits of these restored movies. Quite often, when you travel with a movie, you go to a museum or a festival or something, and you’ll go out for a while, just so you don’t have to watch the movie yet again. But you’ll usually come back, so your host isn’t nervous, about five or ten minutes early, and you watch the last bit of the movie, including the end credits. And reading the names off the end credits is like beholding a cenotaph, almost. A movie that’s 35 years old, there’s so many dear old friends that have passed on, or had their lives horrendously altered, or positively altered, or slept with your wife, or betrayed you in some way, people you hated for decades and have recently forgiven, people who’ve been transformed by hard luck. And some people that you’ve just forgotten about for decades, and have existed in some shadowy limbo until the moment you beheld the cenotaph. The end credits aren’t just end credits anymore. They’re like your whole life playing very slowly, in a roll, before your eyes. It’s kind of emotionally variegated to the point where a name will sometimes sucker-punch you, and you find yourself tearing up. Other times, you feel yourself swollen with shame over your behavior toward a certain person, and the pettiness of it all viewed backwards through decades of memory.
I can’t even remember what your question was. Sorry.
You nailed it. That’s beautiful.
Do you listen to music during your process?
I’ve always listened to a lot of music. It’s really important to me. Music always mattered to me, especially around the time I discovered cinema. I was listening to a lot of punk and post-punk, and that encouraged me, too; the primitive DIY approach to putting together music really affected me, and excited me, and created worlds. This is the pre-internet days, so Winnipeg is the most isolated city that I know of. And it created the sense of an exciting world out there somewhere, a music-driven world, in London, or Berlin, or New York, Los Angeles. Music created big towers and spires and landscapes. And so when I started making movies, I thought the world was ready for the DIY film. I thought that people would be as excited by movies that were cobbled together in the same spirit as basement bands were banging out tunes, even though they never did learn to play their instruments properly. And that emboldened me to start.
But what I discovered was, the conspicuous punks and hipsters of the musical movement, whenever they showed up at my movies, they were always the first ones to walk out. They probably liked their Star Wars and things like that. So I wasn’t connecting with the very people that I felt had inspired me to make movies in the first place. So I listened to a lot of that stuff just because it made me happy. But I learned that the images I’d shot could be completely changed in meaning by the music they were projected with, and by certain soundscaping elements—that the shots could come to life, that the performances, no matter how wonky, could be given a legitimacy by the music. You’re borrowing a lot of power from Wagner, or Bernard Herrmann, or something like that, when you’re just playing it along in the editing room. And all of a sudden, the images get just totally converted into something with meaning.
It’s kind of the Kuleshov effect, which famously ascribed meaning to an actor’s ambiguous facial expression by juxtaposing that shot of the face with another of a baby in a coffin, a lunch, a lasciviously posed woman—it changed the expression on the face, even though the face was the identical shot for each juxtaposition. That sort of thing happens with everything; everything changes the expression on the face, so to speak—changes the expression of the movie. I don’t even understand why. And when I look at a scene and say, This needs something, it’s not like a pharmacist who can just go, It needs this, and write a prescription for it. I still have to do trial-and-error things. And that’s why working with composers is often difficult, because you really count on the composer having a strong intuition.
I finally had to ban Bernard Herrmann from my editing room, especially the cues he used in Vertigo for Jimmy Stewart just driving, following Kim Novak. Because that piece of Herrmann makes anything play. And you actually find yourself unable to cut—you just want the equivalent of a close-up of Jimmy Stewart behind the wheel of a car in front of rear screen projection. You want that equivalent of a ten-minute shot. But I always used a wind-up Bolex that had a 25-second limit on shot length. So I finally had to ban Bernard Herrmann. I would just listen to the oddest things, very agitating post-punk music in the early days. Nowadays, my music tends to be more experimental. I’ve had a long, slow getting acquainted with classical music—the older stuff, and then some contemporary classical music, just anything. But whenever I listen to music, it’s almost always with the idea of borrowing its power for film. When I’m hearing a song for the first time, I’m always trying it on inside the context of a movie, before dismissing it as probably something that should just be enjoyed as a song. Or maybe getting obsessed with it and playing it 100 times in a row and trying it with different images.
Can you recommend a contemporary classical composer?
Some of it David Lynch has already used—the Penderecki and stuff like that. There’s some Icelandic composers that I like, and I’m having trouble with their names right now. Hildur Guðnadóttir, she’s already a big deal. She actually performed for me—I did a live music version of Tales from the Gimli Hospital back in 2011. Hildur was one of the, like, 11 Icelandic musicians onstage that did the music for that. It’s really lovely. She’s a really lovely, nice person.
I know your Icelandic roots.
I’m not really very Icelandic. I don’t speak the language. I’ve visited. But it’s where my mom’s family was from. My grandmother was born there in 1879. She fell down the stairs in our house and died when I was 14. But she was born 16 years before Buster Keaton, 23 or 24 years before the Wright brothers flew. And I grew up in this beauty salon in the middle of the Icelandic Canadian neighborhood, so all the customers spoke Icelandic, and my mom spoke Icelandic, and my aunt. They were the hairdressers in this beauty salon. And they were obsessed with genealogy, and how we were all related to each other. I’m seventh-cousin-three-times-removed with the customer in the chair over there—that sort of thing. And so I made my movie, Tales from the Gimli Hospital, as a response to that, in a way. I couldn’t stand the respect paid to genealogy. The simple act of being related to each other needed to be taken down a bit. If Buñuel started Un Chien Andalou with an eyeball being sliced open, some sort of irritant that he hoped would produce the pearl that the movie really is, I felt like I borrowed that strategy—not with eye-opening power, I just felt I needed to work beneath a banner. And for that film, I knew the banner was, Just irritate the relatives as much as they bored me when I was a little kid. Now that I’m older, of course, I am a little bit more interested in that stuff, my connection to Icelandic this and that. But not much. I don’t like all that tribalism much.
What do you think of Iceland? I’ve been there a couple of times, it’s quite a landscape.
Striking. It’s really worth the time you spend on the plane. By the time I finally started traveling with my films, I was in my early 30s, and I was a little bit disappointed to find that countries just reminded me of various parts of North America. Like Sweden, which should have been this amazing revelation, just kind of looked like a cottage country about an hour’s drive outside of Winnipeg. Even the road signs had the same fonts and the same colors. I wanted a real transformation. When you go to Iceland, you get it. Everything smells different, looks different, feels different. But it feels good, too. Lunar.
How do you manage disagreement between collaborators?
It hasn’t always worked out very well. I’ve always collaborated with dear friends, and they become even closer friends during the process, because you’re sharing your fussy worries, and your relief when something finally comes out. You go through a lot, like trenchmates in the war; you become close. But when you do disagree, it can create some pretty lasting wounds. In my case, I’ve learned that to bring up the true nature of the disagreements, and to communicate well—I’ll just sound like a marriage counselor now—is really important. But it has to be in your temperament, and your collaborators’ temperament, to generate that kind of conversation. My dearest friend in my life, George Toles, and I had some falling outs that I still don’t understand the nature of, because we tended not to talk about them. I think they were writers’ room [disagreements], I’m not sure. But luckily, we’ve just decided to quarantine our disagreements and become dear friends again. We just don’t talk about that stuff. We don’t happen to be working together now, but maybe we will again someday. I hope so. He’s a dear friend. We get together every Tuesday and watch a movie. But we both paid dearly by just not seeing each other for the better part of two decades.
My current collaborators, we tend to be very direct with each other—direct to the point of sometimes eviscerating bluntness. But at least we know where we stand with each other. Doesn’t mean that eviscerating bluntness isn’t exhausting and injurious, but at least there’s no mystery. We know where we’re at with each other. We just finished working together in Hungary for ten straight weeks, and I even lived with my collaborators. They’re my co-directors, Galen and Evan Johnson. I still adore them and admire them to the hilt, but we need a break. That’s just human. I’m not saying anything scandalous. And I’m not saying anything that we haven’t said to each other.
Is there a project that you’ve never made that you would still like to go back to?
I always look at failed projects as bullets dodged, things I wasn’t quite ready for. It would have been nice to finish—Evan, Galen, and I made this internet interactive project, Seances, where we adapted lost films and reshot them. And eventually, a lot of the material ended up in the movie The Forbidden Room. But it was supposed to be a pretty ambitious project where we shot about 100 films and loaded them all up into the internet. I don’t have the time left on this planet to do it, but it would have been nice if we just had a little more time to work out the kinks in it, and had the money to shoot all 100 days that we were going to shoot, instead of just the 36 days we shot. By the time the thing all got uploaded online, it was corrupted by the fact that some of the footage had to be used in The Forbidden Room just to finance the project. It would have been nice to test it with users, to see where attention spans sat with the average viewer. It just needed some kinks run out of it, and I would have loved the chance to keep working on it and finish it. But the National Film Board of Canada, which financed it, spent a lot of time—and a lot of money—on it, and I understood completely when they said, That’s it, no more.
So many things went wrong on a project that had so much potential. At one point, I even felt so optimistic about this project being great that I was beginning to feel guilty for all the really chronic internet addictions that I would be causing in the world’s population. That was how crazy my megalomania was: I really thought this project was going to be so great that it would ruin lives. At least I know that’s crazy now. There’s probably no one more megalomaniacal, outside of fascist dictators, than young male filmmakers. Just put a camera in a boy’s hand, and he thinks he’s doing you a favor by giving you a 300-page script to read, or by showing you a rough cut. It’s no favor.
What is the worst advice you’ve ever gotten?
It was well-intentioned, and it might have even been good advice given to anyone else. But I was working at a bank, and I was really miserable. It was going nowhere. It was just a branch administration manager trainee job. I had been married very young, but my marriage had just ended, and I felt that freed me up to do something I liked, rather than work at some job I hated. And my sister, who always stays out of my affairs, insisted that I stay at the job at the bank, at least for a few years, to build up a résumé. But I didn’t like where that résumé would have been pointing me. And besides, I found myself weeping in the vault every day. So I quit the bank, and she insisted that I not quit, and then she got really mad at me, and stuff like that. But I’m really glad, because as soon as I quit, I bumped into all these people for whom film, lit, and theater—and just creating stuff—mattered a lot. And it changed my life. And so I guess it has to be the worst advice, but I ignored it.
If you’re asking about the worst advice that I actually took, I don’t know. Probably the advice I give myself: Why not marry? You can always just get a divorce! The idiotic rationalizations.
What work of art have you consumed the most times?
It might be Buñuel’s L’Age d’Or. Most films that I really love, I still only watch like five times, or something like that, total. But L’Age d’Or, I’ve probably at least watched stretches of it—because I teach, and I always show it when I teach, too—maybe 50 times, or something like that. And it just renews my faith in the approach I took right at the beginning. I didn’t finish my first feature ‘til I was 32. I felt like a late starter. But using the methods of Buñuel, by just building ahead—he had some technical knowledge, obviously, but he just wrote these scripts of ideas and didn’t worry about having great actors, and just managed to secure some locations from friends and patrons and things like that, and then just made a beautiful movie.
And then, I haven’t seen Eraserhead many times, but it feels like I have, because I revisit it in my head often. I’ve probably only seen it three times or something like that, but in the first 20 years of my filmmaking career, I was probably thinking about it all the time. So it’s a joint answer: one of them, I’ve literally seen many times, and the other one, I’ve just revisited in my head, but that was just as legit. Because David Lynch had made a movie about me—about someone who had married someone because of an unplanned pregnancy (or started living with someone; the wedding, if there was one in Eraserhead, seems to be elided)—but just suddenly finds himself in a domestic situation he didn’t plan or expect or even quite remember properly. I’d been through exactly the same thing, except my daughter was much cuter than the Eraserhead baby.
But I remember getting up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night in those early days of my Eraserhead chapter, those delirious days—my dad had died. Suddenly, my girlfriend or ex-girlfriend—whatever she was—came to visit me, the night before my dad died, to say she was expecting a baby and we needed to get married. And next thing I knew, I was getting up in the middle of night with a baby in a crib and taking a pee. And that was the only time of my life where thoughts were clear. I knew, Oh yeah, my dad’s dead. I’m a father. I have a daughter and a wife in the next room. And then I would go back to bed, and the sleep deprivation of a crying baby, and a wife angry at me for knocking her up. It was my story, and I couldn’t believe that someone would think to make a movie about that. It seemed like the least commercial thing one could make a movie about: the fathers of unplanned pregnancies. That’s quite a box-office demographic. But, of course, Lynch made it so stylishly that even people who hadn’t gone through literally the same experience found it engaging and mysterious and agitating and all sorts of other things. But it just spoke so directly to me. I couldn’t sleep after seeing it for the first time.
Do you consider yourself a spiritual person?
Certainly none of the big religions. I might even be an atheist. But I’m also a hypocrite, and I’m inconsistent, so there are times where there seems to be something spiritual at work. When film and music are working together really well, with a screenwriter and a performer, I can briefly believe that something beyond understanding, but certainly within scope of feeling, exists. And then it goes away. As a kid, like many people my age, I would watch The Ten Commandments on television every year on Easter. I would watch this movie—this is how stupid it is, but it’s just pure feeling—I would watch this story of Moses and The Ten Commandments and come away feeling like a reinforced Christian, somehow. But I think that’s just the power of C.B. DeMille. A great filmmaker. No one could be less in fashion right now, but I’ll stick up for him as a great storyteller. He had the power to convert me to Christianity once a year for about six hours.
I always think of Cecil B. DeMille as Norma Desmond’s friend. That’s why he’s special to me.
Yes. He’s very gracious and tactful in that moment.[1] And he’s a good red router-outer. He’s keeping America democratic.
Thank God for that.
And now, bonus question: would you like to flip the dynamic—make you the interrogator, and ask me a question?
Oh, wow.
You’re a film writer—what gives you your thrills? What’s the most intoxicating, or pleasing, or head-swelling cause to that effect? What drives you?
It’s the rush of seeing something I’ve never seen before. I like to be assaulted by a movie. My favorite movie of the past few years was Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, which is a truly gaudy work, but I would go again and again, and sit in maybe the third row, and just be pummeled for a few hours.
Yeah, he’s guilty of assault and battery on many counts.
You could even accuse his movies of bad taste, however you want to define that.
Absolutely. But that’s what’s glorious about them, and I kind of like that courage. It’s like a sawed-off shotgun of imagery blasting you point-blank, and the editing and the sound mixes and everything. I got a profound headache watching his Moulin Rouge!, and decided I hated it. And damned if I wasn’t in the front row the next night. Again, I just felt I had to go back. And I dragged my daughter, who also said she got a headache, and now she speaks fondly of it. Every now and then, she’ll put a Baz Luhrmann movie on—she insists on showing her own daughters Romeo + Juliet, and stuff like that. But she loved Elvis, and so did I. When I became friends with Isabella Rossellini, way back when, she even bought me tickets—because I’m always broke, she bought me expensive Broadway tickets, and took my daughter and me to his Broadway show. Is that La bohème?
He did La bohème, yeah.
We enjoyed that, too, because he figured out a way of making Broadway shows an assault.
And I’ll say, the hit that I get from your work is the hit of the, I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s assaultive in the way that I’m looking for. It seems so strange to say, in a complimentary way, to an artist, You assault me. But that sort of pleasurable overload in your stuff—it’s like you said, the narcotic tingle.
Well, thanks. That’s the best compliment I’ve ever received, maybe, because even though a lot of my movies I find are too slow, in retrospect, I refuse to compromise about being alienating. I just know that if you normalize too many aspects of those films, there’s nothing there anymore. I’m thinking in assault-like terms even when making a very slow and quiet, dreamy movie. I’m hoping to put people to sleep and assault them while they’re dreaming.
[1] Ethan and Guy are referencing DeMille’s cameo as himself in Sunset Boulevard (1950)
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