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Fellini’s a guy that has an obvious eye for casting. Abel Gance, the silent film director, he had the most uncanny eye for faces as well. You know, he’s got these really large casts with no two people looking at all alike. It’s not like Rules of the Game or something, where you have to watch it three times to tell everyone apart.
Cecil B. Demille is great as well for that. I see these peoples’ work and I write on a Post-It note: “Pay more attention to casting.” And then of course I lose the Post-It note. My second feature had two women that looked so similar that it might as well have been the trick that Buñuel pulled off in "That Obscure Object of Desire." They were supposed to actually be two different characters, not the same character.
In "The Saddest Music in the World," the face that stuck out most to me was Maria de Madeiros. She looks like a modern day Louise Brooks.
Yeah, she definitely looks like she’s been brought to you by a time machine with that almond shaped face and those oversized eyes. Or maybe by a Japanese anime company or something.
I remember having some vivid dreams about her after seeing Henry and June...
Yeah, well the porn dial was turned up just enough on that one to enflame dreams after a screening I think.
It’s interesting, both her and Isabella Rossellini are brunettes with hard to identify accents and you’d think they would be easily confused in the movie, but Isabella is just so famous that it’s not that hard to tell them apart at all. And I guess she’s missing her legs too, and that always helps.
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That’s true. It seems like amputation is a bit of a running theme in your work. What’s the fascination?
Well, see, at the risk of sounding politically correct, which I’d hate to sound like, it’s not that I’m obsessed with amputees at all. I really love the films of Lon Chaney, and fairy tales – those are things that are really emotional and powerful to me.
Anything that has the allegory of disability in it, where somebody’s different or disabled somehow. In another movie I completed this year, Cowards Bend the Knee, I have a character whose hands are missing as well. What he’s really missing are his nuts. It’s a metaphorical castration. You lop off his hands and there you have it. It’s not to say that some of the ballsiest people in the country aren’t missing their hands.
That’s why I want to stress -- that my motives aren’t of the gawking, morbid and fetishistic kind.
You mentioned "Cowards Bend the Knee," which played at the Siskel last fall alongside "Heart of the World." The pacing on that was far more frenetic than in this picture.
Yeah, it felt good to get that one charged up. It was a hysterical melodrama and I just wanted to keep everything hysterical.
Is that pace something that you planning on exploring further in the future?
Yeah it is, actually. I’d like to make some really briskly paced film noirs or horror films or fairy tales. Keep the hysteria high, keep everybody’s pupils dilated as much as possible. My next project I hope will be like that.
I thought that piece would work particularly well with a punk rock soundtrack...
Yeah, I’m an old creaky punker. Love my basement bands. And even today I’m writing an article for The Believer, if you’ve ever encountered that relatively new publication.
I just have my Dick Dale and the Del-Tones turned up as loudly as possible as I’m trying to write, which adrenalinates everything nicely.
So this piece you're writing is for The Believer?
Yeah, it's their music issue. I'm writing something amusing, just a short 1,000 word piece. I didn't have time for anything else. I write occasionally for The Village Voice, which Peter, the publicist who set up this interview, and the ones I have in England, have started to exploit the fact that I've done some writing for magazines. I've been lucky.
I'm not a trained writer or anything, but I have a special filmmakers' path into the back door of these publications. They have me writing for Sight and Sound and the Guardian and The New York Times.
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005: Guy Maddin
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