Home
sign up| features / film interview |
 content by: editor |
 the saddest music in the world interview
 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.Director Guy Maddin gets legless. When supreme stuffed shirt Kazuo Ishiguro, who penned The Remains Of The Day, put together a story where countries vie to create the saddest music in the world, he was writing a political allegory. Some years and several rewrites later, the germs of his tale hit the screen as high melodrama involving double amputees, glass legs full of sparkly beer and amnesiacs who blame all their actions on giant tapeworms. What happened? The short answer is Canadian auteur Guy Maddin. “With this story premise, it seemed like I could reach a few more people,” the director says without a hint of irony. Granted, his previous film head-spinners range in subject from incest to cannibalism, in worlds where snow-shaker skies are filled with white rabbits. While Maddin uses obsolete visual tricks, resurrected from the silent era, and his films are often described as pastiche, obvious is one thing they are not. His fans inhabit the shadowy outer limits of the arthouse film circuit. He continues dreamily, “I never really wanted to confuse people and keep them in the dark before, but it just worked out that way.” What makes The Saddest Music stand out straight off, though, is star presence Isabella Rossellini working her otherworldly charm to the hilt as legless brewery mogul Lady Port-Huntley. Maddin has always resisted casting known actors, afraid they might detract from the “timeless universe” he aims for. “But,” he says, “the fact is, she’s just really neat. Every now and then she morphs into her mother [Ingrid Bergman] and she drags behind her decades of film history as well. I think I was being a little narcissistic in my concerns.”  The film hurtles along like a tripped out speed-freak’s idea of Marx Brothers-style screwball comedy, with zany lingo camped up to the nth degree, courtesy of Maddin’s screenwriting partner George Toles. “He actually speaks like all those lines he’s written,” enthuses the director. “He’s not typical.” But in the face of the riotous excess he is both loved and loathed for, Maddin’s Saddest Music has a tangible new coherence. Ishiguro working his influence perhaps? “We had to change the script quite a bit for me to get excited. I’m used to behaving kind of recklessly in my film projects. Ish was always a challenge as a story editor,” he agrees. “It did force me to be responsible and that wasn’t a bad thing.” For a moment it sounds like Maddin’s crazed imagination has been tamed. Not so. “I want to keep making really micro-budget movies where I have the freedom to do whatever I want,” he says. “I also want the freedom to spread a big stain in other directions as well.” Watch out.
Skye Sherwin
The Saddest Music In The World, on selected release 07 May 04.
 conversations
Read members' comments.
|
 |
see also
also on bbc.co.uk
books  books and comics archive Author interviews and reviews from 2002 to 2008. |
send to a friend
the saddest...
access 1000s of articles
