GUY MADDIN

Guy Maddin for DESK SPACE

DESK SPACE Who?

GUY MADDIN Guy Maddin, largely sedentary filmmaker, fulminator and frequent napper. I should've included a shot of my couch!


DS When did you start becoming interested in film or make your first film?

GM I decided to make a film in 1982, when I was 26, but because of my dronelike sloth didn't get around to it till I was 30.

DS Where do you write or come up with ideas for your work (at your desk/outside/in bed)?

GM Many alleged ideas comes as I write -- I'm sure that's the same for most of your correspondents -- so right there at my desk. But I find strolls unusually productive; walking makes for melancholic, almost graveyard-spiraling, thoughts. I also take a lot of long dry-haired swims in the pool with my friend Steve Snyder. Over an hour the two of us will discuss how to massage our heartbreakingly strange family lives into our fictions. So, equal parts desktime, dogwalk and poolspell.

DS Why do you work where you do (at your desk because it is a quiet space or you can listen to music/ outside /in the park b/c you can smoke, etc)?

GM At the desk because I'm a slave to it. I can answer emails, the phone, do laundry and prepare meals from this central location. I resent the amount of time I spend in this chair, but I haven't mastered the modern teenage girl's ability to write while lying on my stomach in bed while sipping soda from a straw so I am doomed to this sedentary life and the fat ass it's given me.

DS What was the last film you watched?

GM The Old Dark House, just last night. Somehow I'd never seen this picture before even though it features many of the thesps with whom I'm obsessed: Karloff, Laughton,Thesiger, Massey and, now, Gloria Stuart!


DS What are you working on now?

GM I'm trying to write the script for my next feature, a thing called Keyhole, or the Naked Ghost, but the late fall weather is so fine I'm going crazy with euphorically sad yearnings. Can't do a thing! Weather of all sorts creates enervating euphorias in me, something I both cherish and resent.

Coming up

This week on DESK SPACE: Guy Maddin