Early life (1956–1984) Guy Maddin was born on February 28, 1956, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, to Herdis Maddin (a hairdresser) and Charles "Chas" Maddin (grain clerk and general manager of the Maroons, a Winnipeg hockey team). Maddin has three older siblings: Ross (b. 1944), Cameron (1946–1963), and Janet (b. 1949). Maddin attended
Winnipeg public schools: the Greenway School (elementary school), General Wolfe (junior high school), and the
Daniel McIntyre Collegiate Institute (high school). In February 1963, his brother Cameron killed himself on the grave of his girlfriend, who had died in a car crash. After graduating, Maddin held a variety of odd jobs, including bank manager, house painter, and photo archivist. Maddin began to take film classes at the
University of Manitoba. There, Maddin met film professor Stephen Snyder, who held regular film screenings of titles from the school's film library at his home. Maddin attended, as did some early collaborators, including his friend John Boles Harvie, the future star of Maddin's first film, and filmmaker
John Paizs. Maddin appeared as an actor in two of Paizs' short films, as a student in
Oak, Ivy, and Other Dead Elms (1982) and as a transvestite, homicidal nurse in
The International Style (1983). Maddin drew early inspiration from the films of John Paizs, as well as experimental shorts by Stephen Snyder. Maddin joined the
Winnipeg Film Group around this time, and also became friends with producer Greg Klymkiw, with whom he began making a
cable access television show,
Survival (c. 1985–1987).
Survival was a satirical talk show centred around, as its opening credits noted, how "we must survive the inevitable social/economic collapse and/or
nuclear holocaust". The show became a cult hit in Winnipeg and excerpts were re-released on the compilation DVD
Winnipeg Babysitter. Maddin plays a masked character on the show named "Concerned Citizen Stan".
The Dead Father and Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1985–1988) Maddin's first short film (as director, writer, producer, and cinematographer) was
The Dead Father, a 25-minute black-and-white film about a young man whose father dies but continues to visit his family and disapprove of his son's life. Its budget is estimated at
CA$5,000 (). Maddin began shooting
The Dead Father in 1982 and finished the film in 1985. Although Maddin did not feel that the film's Winnipeg premiere had gone well, John Paizs convinced him to submit the film to the Toronto Film Festival and the festival accepted the film. At the festival Maddin met
Atom Egoyan,
Jeremy Podeswa,
Norman Jewison, and began to form connections with Canadian filmmakers across the national scene.
Archangel premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, and in 1991 was awarded Best Experimental Film by the National Society of Film Critics. Maddin's third feature,
Careful (1992), was styled after another early cinema genre, the German mountain picture (or
Bergfilm) — a surprising choice, given that (as filmmaker Caelum Vatnsdal has noted), "Winnipeg's highest peak is, in fact, an artificial hill that had been created by laying sod over a garbage dump." In 1995, Maddin also became the youngest recipient ever of the Telluride Film Festival's Lifetime Achievement Award. Maddin's fourth feature, also scripted by Toles and inspired by the novel
Pan by
Knut Hamsun, ended up being
Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997), his second in colour and his first shot in
35 mm, on a budget of CA$1.5 million (). After being impressed with Dawson's short films, Maddin hired Dawson to work on a short film for the Toronto International Film Festival — Maddin was one of a number of directors (including
Atom Egoyan and
David Cronenberg) commissioned to make four-minute short films that would screen prior to the various feature films at the 2000 festival. After hearing rumours that other directors were planning films with a small number of shots, Maddin decided that his film would instead contain over a hundred shots per minute, and enough plot for a feature-length film. Maddin then wrote and shot
The Heart of the World (2000) in the style of
Russian constructivism, taking the commission at its literal face value, as a call to produce a propaganda film. The plot of
The Heart of the World concerns two brothers, Osip and Nikolai, who compete for the love of the same woman: Anna, a state scientist studying Earth's core. Anna discovers that the heart of the world is in danger of a fatal heart attack (which would mean the end of the world), and the brothers compete amongst the public panic. Nikolai is a mortician and tries to impress Anna with assembly-line embalming, while Osip is an actor playing Christ in the
Passion Play and tries to impress Anna through his suffering. Anna is instead seduced by an evil capitalist, but has a change of heart and strangles the plutocrat, then slides down into the heart of the world, where she manages to save the world from destruction by transforming into cinema itself, the world's "new and better heart — Kino!"
The Heart of the World won a 2001
Genie Award for Best Short, and the 2001 U.S. National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Experimental Film (the same award Maddin had won in 1991 for
Archangel). ''Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary'' was budgeted at $1.7-million Maddin also stayed close to the source material of Stoker's novel, emphasizing the
xenophobia in the reactions of the main characters to Dracula (played by Zhang Wei-Qiang in Maddin's film). The resulting film was greeted with critical acclaim, with an 84% average rating on
Metacritic and an 85% "Fresh" rating on
Rotten Tomatoes.
Roger Ebert gave the film 3½ stars out of 4, writing that "so many films are more or less alike that it's jolting to see a film that deals with a familiar story, but looks like no other." ''Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary'' won first prize (Prague D'Or) at the 2002 Golden Prague Television Festival, two 2002
Gemini Awards for Best Canadian Performing Arts Show and Best Direction, and a 2002 International
Emmy for Best Performing Arts. Originally a television feature, ''Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary'' was released theatrically in 2003. Maddin's next feature,
The Saddest Music in the World (2003) was budgeted at $3.8-million The film was Maddin's first collaboration with
Isabella Rossellini, who subsequently appeared in a number of Maddin's films, and cocreated a film with him about her father
Roberto Rossellini. The film also starred
Mark McKinney (of the comedy troupe
Kids in the Hall),
Maria de Medeiros,
David Fox, and
Ross McMillan. Maddin and cowriter Toles based the film on an original screenplay written by
Booker Prize-winning novelist
Kazuo Ishiguro, from which they kept "the title, the premise and the contest – to determine which country's music was the saddest" but otherwise re-wrote. The action of
The Saddest Music in the World centres around a contest run by Beer Baroness Lady Port-Huntley (Rossellini) to discover which country has the saddest music in the world. Chester Kent (McKinney), a failed Broadway producer, returns home to Winnipeg and competes with his father Fyodor (Fox) and brother Roderick (McMillan) to win the contest and its $25,000 prize. It's discovered that Chester's girlfriend, Narcissa (de Medeiros) was Roderick's wife but forgot this due to amnesia resulting from the death of their son (Roderick keeps his son's heart in a jar that travels with him). Chester reunites with Port-Huntley, his former lover, who lost her legs in a car accident. Fyodor, who is in love with Port-Huntley, has built prosthetic legs for her out of glass (and filled with beer), which she loves although she spurns Fyodor, leading to his drunken death. As the contest proceeds, things end tragically.
The Saddest Music in the World won a number of awards, including three Genie Awards (Best Achievement in Costume Design, Best Achievement in Editing, and Best Achievement in Music, Original Score) and Maddin was also nominated for Best Achievement in Direction. Maddin received the same nomination from the Directors Guild of Canada, who awarded the film Outstanding Achievement in Production Design, Feature Film, and Maddin won the Film Discovery Jury Award for Best Director at the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival.
Cowards Bend the Knee, Brand Upon the Brain!, My Winnipeg (2003–2007) While in pre-production on
The Saddest Music in the World, Maddin directed
Cowards Bend the Knee (2003), shooting entirely on Super-8mm film with a budget of $30,000.
Cowards Bend the Knee is the first in Maddin's "autobiographical 'Me Trilogy'" of feature films starring protagonists named "Guy Maddin", the second being
Brand Upon the Brain! (2006) and
My Winnipeg (2007).
Cowards Bend the Knee concerns the murderous exploits of a young "Guy Maddin" (played by
Darcy Fehr), a hockey player whose forgets his beloved as she dies through complications during an illegal abortion. Guy becomes entwined in a love affair with the daughter of the abortionist, who compels him to murder her mother to revenge the death of her father. Guy meanwhile falls in love with the ghost of his dead lover, not recognizing her, and competes with his own father for her affection. Maddin based the film's premise loosely on the story
The Hands of Ida and Euripedes's play
Medea. Critic J. Hoberman of
The Village Voice called the film "Maddin's masterpiece", noting that the film "not only plays like a dream but feels like one". Maddin was next approached by the Seattle-based not-for-profit film production company called The Film Company and offered a budget to make any film he wanted, with complete freedom as long as he shot it in Seattle with local actors. Maddin ended up producing
Brand Upon the Brain! (2006), from a script cowritten by Toles, shooting the film over nine days and editing it over three months with an estimated budget of $40,000. In 2006, Maddin was presented with two lifetime achievement awards, the Persistence of Vision Award from the San Francisco International Film Festival and the Manitoba Arts Council's Award of Distinction. Roger Ebert wrote, of the film and Maddin's work in general, that "For me, Maddin seems to penetrate to the hidden layers beneath the surface of the movies, revealing a surrealistic underworld of fears, fantasies and obsessions." Maddin's next feature stemmed from a commission to produce a documentary film about his hometown of Winnipeg, for which Maddin's producer directed "Don't give me the frozen hellhole everyone knows that Winnipeg is." Taking what he described as a "docufantasia" approach that melded "personal history, civic tragedy, and mystical hypothesizing", Maddin produced
My Winnipeg (2008), with a budget of $500,000.
Keyhole, Hauntings, Seances, The Forbidden Room and The Green Fog (2008–2017) Maddin soon received two other career awards, the Filmmaker on the Edge Award at the 2009
Provincetown International Film Festival and the 2010 Canada Council for the Arts Bell Award in Video Art for lifetime achievement in the field. Maddin then returned to installation art with a commission to celebrate the opening of the Bell Lightbox cultural centre in Toronto, producing an installation series titled
Hauntings based on the concept of reimagining lost films from the silent film era that are known to have existed or been planned by influential filmmakers, but either destroyed or not produced. In December 2010, Maddin married the L.A. film critic Kim Morgan, and they separated in 2014. Maddin shot his tenth feature film,
Keyhole (2011), digitally rather than his usual method of shooting on sixteen-millimetre or Super-8. Filming began in
Winnipeg on July 6, 2010. The film screened at the 2011
Toronto International Film Festival and the 2011
Whistler Film Festival, where it won the Best Canadian Film Award. In 2012,
Keyhole screened at the
South by Southwest Film Festival, the
Independent Film Festival of Boston, the
Wisconsin Film Festival,
Fantasporto, and the
Berlin International Film Festival. The film was released theatrically in 2012.
Keyhole stars
Jason Patric as Ulysses Pick, a gangster who leads his gang to break into his former home and odysseys through the haunted house (in a plot inspired by Homer's
Odyssey), searching room-by-room to find his wife Hyacinth
Isabella Rossellini. The film was cowritten by Maddin and Toles and also stars
Udo Kier,
Brooke Palsson,
David Wontner,
Louis Negin, and
Kevin McDonald from the comedy troupe
Kids in the Hall. Also in 2011, Maddin participated in
Performa 11 with
Tales from the Gimli Hospital: Reframed, an ambitious live performance that reframes the original 1988 film. Maddin and the composer Matthew Patton gathered a group of musicians to compose and perform the new score which centered on Icelandic musician
Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir. In 2012, Maddin produced another installation for the Winnipeg Art Gallery,
Only Dream Things, for which he recreated his childhood bedroom and produced a short film by manipulating his family's home movies. Maddin expanded the approach of his
Hauntings installation into another film/installation project,
Seances, which combines "a film shoot, an experience and an installation, which will subsequently become an interactive work". Maddin started shooting
Seances in 2012 in Paris, France at the
Centre Georges Pompidou and continued shooting at the Phi Centre in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Maddin and
Evan Johnson also co-directed and shot, concurrently, a feature film titled
The Forbidden Room, with the same writers. Although often misreported as the same project,
The Forbidden Room "is a feature film with its own separate story and stars" while "
Seances will be an interactive Internet project."
The Forbidden Room is Maddin's eleventh feature film, with its world premiere in January 2015 at the
Sundance Film Festival. Maddin's next feature film,
The Green Fog (2017), premiered at the San Francisco International Film Festival on April 16, 2017. The film features a score by composer Jacob Garchik, performed by
Kronos Quartet, and is a collage-film, "a scene-by-scene reimagining of Alfred Hitchcock's
Vertigo Bay Area film footage from a variety of sources — '50s noir, experimental films, '70s prime-time TV, and more." == Installations ==