Your films have always been autobiographical. Wasn’t the first about your dead father?
It was. It was called The Dead Father. He had died a few years earlier, and I kept having dreams in which he kept coming back, not to life, but coming back to the family. I dreamed he had not died but had gone to live with a better family. He was only coming back to pick up something that he forgot, and I had 30 seconds to convince him to stay. It was like a game show. I would fail every time, but I could remember his voice in my dreams and I couldn’t in my waking life, and so the dreams left me feeling distraught, but they also left me feeling wonderful because I was hearing and seeing him very clearly. Capturing these feelings on film was what I set out to do.
In My Winnipeg, you mention your brother, who committed suicide as a teenager.
I sort of took it as far as I felt it needed to be taken. I just mentioned that he’s passed away. It’s something that affected everyone in the family enormously. It’s the Everest of our family past. So it had to be mentioned, but it’s a big subject, best dealt with in another medium.
Do you find your films therapeutic?
I do find them therapeutic, but in a way that surprised me. I choose a subject that I’m obsessed with or a subject that’s been haunting me. But making a movie requires hard work. You spend a year, a year and a half, making a movie, and then you end up talking about it and sitting through it a number of times and you’re just sick of it by the end of the process. So what once was the object of your obsessions becomes something that almost induces coma or nausea. Not at this stage — I’m happy to talk about it now, but at the end of this year, say, I won’t want to talk about or think about or even want to live in Winnipeg. So, yes, it is therapeutic, but it’s more of an aversion therapy than a working-through of problems.
But I’ve exploited my poor family enough already. I think I’ll leave it at that. I’ll go back to conventional filmmaking without autobiography. I think the character Guy Maddin has made his last appearance. If someone wants to put out a Guy Maddin action figure, you’re welcome to.
