It's a ballet and it's in black and white. OK?

Adored and abhorred in equal measure by cineastes, cult Canadian auteur Guy Maddin is finally shimmying towards a (very slightly) wider audience. "Not that I've ever had to worry about that, luckily," he explains in louche tones. "I've been working at the level where I still have complete artistic freedom."

He's made pro-war and pro-incest movies where body parts are minced with poetic narrative, but recent works have upped the ante. The Saddest Music In The World, a crazed adaptation of the Kazuo Ishiguro book, starring Isabella Rossellini, will be his most high profile work to date.

First up, though, is the quintessentially Maddin-esque Dracula: Pages From A Virgin's Diary - a hallucinatory rush of ballet, vampires and a pant-sniffing Van Helsing. Working with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet's version of the classic novel, Maddin quickly abandoned the dance film format, closing in on the action rather than framing it. "All the symmetry disappears when you're up close," he enthuses. "It's more like a rugby match with skinny people."

"I wanted to turn up the xenophobia dial, make it more of a clash of the sexes as well. A clash of good versus evil is just boring to me," says he of his take on the story. "I read Bram Stoker's original and found it was really a cleverly put together portrait of the way men treat women when they're faced with rivals. And during mating season which is 12 months long for us boys."

And what of the pant sniffing? Maddin implies his intentions should not be written off as naughty winks. "I need to have some sort of banner of mischief with which to work. I've often thought that by working on projects with some sort of irritants, like a grain of sand in an oyster, the irritants mischievously planted would stand a chance of, some day, producing a pearl. Skye Sherwin 12 December 03

Dracula: Pages From A Virgin's Diary, on selected release 12 December 03.

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