Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg opens with the filmmaker’s own droning voice repeating the name of his hometown three times before moving on. It wasn’t a stylistic choice, he revealed on It Happened in Hollywood — he simply hadn’t written a script.
“I was too daunted by the prospect of writing 75 minutes of voiceover,” Maddin said. “So I went in for five minutes a day and just improvised, just talking forward, promising myself I just would never stop talking. … I start the movie by saying the word Winnipeg three times. It’s because I didn’t know what to say after the word Winnipeg went in there.”
The 2007 film, which Maddin calls a “docufantasia,” blends real Winnipeg history with invented mythology so seamlessly that even he sometimes loses track of the line. It’s one of four Maddin films screening this weekend as part of “A Weekend with Guy Maddin” at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, running July 11-13 with the director in attendance at every show.
The project began as a commission from a short-lived Canadian outlet called The Documentary Channel. “I said, ‘Just assign me something and I’ll make it,’” Maddin recalled. “He said, ‘Well, make a documentary on trains, or on Winnipeg.’ … I chose Winnipeg instantly because ever since childhood I felt that Winnipeg just needed to be mythologized in film emulsion.”
He didn’t have a script until a Q&A in Paris, when an audience member asked what his hometown was actually like. “I just explained for about 15 or 20 minutes what Winnipeg was like,” he said. “And I basically just freestyled the script for my Winnipeg.”
Some of the film’s strangest claims are true. Maddin confirmed the story of horses that drowned crossing a freezing river during a 1920s paddock fire, their heads left visible in the ice through the winter. “It’s real,” he said. “Their heads got caught in between during this really bad cold snap … their frozen heads stuck out of the ice for the entire winter.”
Other details are invented for emotional rather than factual truth — including Winnipeg’s supposed sleepwalking epidemic and a law requiring residents to carry keys to their childhood homes. “Some of this stuff is intentionally untrue because I wanted it to be emotionally true,” Maddin said, “and there was no way to film emotions without staging them.”
That blurring extends to the film’s family scenes, in which Maddin hired retired film noir actress Ann Savage (Detour) to play his mother inside a rented replica of his childhood home. He initially let people assume she really was his mother. Maddin also described inventing, as a child, a memory of a nonexistent TV show called Ledgeman — a man talked down from a ledge daily — which he now believes was how he processed the death of his brother by suicide.
Asked about the resemblance to Nathan Fielder’s recreation-heavy series The Rehearsal, Maddin didn’t hesitate. “No wonder I like him so much,” he said. “I have no idea if he saw My Winnipeg or not. … He just takes it so much further than I do.”
The episode also touched on a 2007 encounter that has become one of Maddin’s favorite stories: a Reykjavik audience Q&A where he’d privately committed to lying on every even-numbered answer and telling the truth on every odd one — until Björk, sitting in back, asked whether the drowned-horses story was real. “It was her turn to get a lie,” Maddin said. “I was piling it on like crazy with Björk.” She and then-husband Matthew Barney later took him for whale burgers, which he ate reluctantly as a committed opponent of whaling: “I felt terrible because I’m strongly anti-whaling.”
Maddin also recounted directing Shelley Duvall in the mid-1990s, describing an impromptu multi-day road trip around Manitoba that included farmhouse stopovers and a detour to a drive-in showing “Independence Day” because Duvall’s friend Harvey Fierstein was in the cast. “She had one of everything at the concession,” Maddin said. “She got half of it for free because she was famous.”
“A Weekend with Guy Maddin” runs July 11-13 at the Academy Museum, featuring a new 4K restoration of Careful (its U.S. premiere), The Green Fog, The Saddest Music in the World and My Winnipeg in 35mm, with Maddin present at each screening.
The full interview is available now on It Happened in Hollywood.
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