1. Guy Maddin is known for his fascination with lost Silent-era films and for incorporating their aesthetics into his own work.
47 Facts About Guy Maddin
1. 2.
Guy Maddin began serving as a visiting lecturer at Harvard University's Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies in 2015.
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Guy Maddin was born on February 28,1956, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, to Herdis Maddin and Charles "Chas" Maddin.
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Guy Maddin attended Winnipeg public schools: the Greenway School, General Wolfe, and the Daniel McIntyre Collegiate Institute.
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Guy Maddin studied economics at the University of Winnipeg, graduating in 1977.
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That same year, Guy Maddin's father died suddenly after a stroke, and Guy Maddin married Martha Jane Waugh.
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Guy Maddin began to take film classes at the University of Manitoba.
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Guy Maddin attended, as did some early collaborators, including his friend John Boles Harvie, the future star of Guy Maddin's first film, and filmmaker John Paizs.
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Guy Maddin appeared as an actor in two of Paizs' short films, as a student in Oak, Ivy, and Other Dead Elms and as a transvestite, homicidal nurse in The International Style.
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Guy Maddin drew early inspiration from the films of John Paizs, as well as experimental shorts by Stephen Snyder.
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Guy Maddin plays a masked character on the show named "Concerned Citizen Stan".
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Guy Maddin began shooting The Dead Father in 1982 and finished the film in 1985.
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The style of the film owes much to the work of the Surrealists, with Guy Maddin citing Luis Bunuel and Man Ray as its main influences.
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At the festival Guy Maddin met Atom Egoyan, Jeremy Podeswa, Norman Jewison, and began to form connections with Canadian filmmakers across the national scene.
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Guy Maddin next began work on his feature film debut, Tales from the Gimli Hospital, shot in black-and-white on sixteen-millimetre film.
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Guy Maddin had himself endured a recent period of male rivalry and noticed that he found himself "quite often forgetting the object of jealousy" and instead becoming "possessive of my rival".
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Guy Maddin received a grant from the Manitoba Arts Council for CA$20,000, and often cites that figure as the film's budget, although he has estimated the actual budget to have been between CA$14,000 and CA$30,000.
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Guy Maddin received a Genie award nomination for Best Original Screenplay.
19.
Guy Maddin modeled the film on the style of a part-talkie, an early cinema genre.
20.
Guy Maddin pursued casting hockey star Bobby Hull, but ended up casting Paul Cox.
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Guy Maddin consequently flirted with the idea of moving to Los Angeles to become a director-for-hire.
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In 1995, Guy Maddin became the youngest recipient ever of the Telluride Film Festival's Lifetime Achievement Award.
23.
Twilight of the Ice Nymphs featured Shelley Duvall and Frank Gorshin; The film's star, Nigel Whitmey, had his name removed from the film's credits after Guy Maddin chose to remove Whitmey's voice from the film and replace it with Ross McMillan's.
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Guy Maddin then entered a relatively "fallow period" although he continued to make short films, music videos, and advertisements.
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Guy Maddin then wrote and shot The Heart of the World in the style of Russian constructivism, taking the commission at its literal face value, as a call to produce a propaganda film.
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The success of The Heart of the World marked the beginning of a productive period for Guy Maddin, who produced five feature films within the following eight years.
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Guy Maddin elected to shoot the dance film in a fashion uncommon for such films, through close-ups and using jump cuts.
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Guy Maddin stayed close to the source material of Stoker's novel, emphasizing the xenophobia in the reactions of the main characters to Dracula.
29.
The Saddest Music in the World won a number of awards, including three Genie Awards and Guy Maddin was nominated for Best Achievement in Direction.
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Guy Maddin received the same nomination from the Directors Guild of Canada, who awarded the film Outstanding Achievement in Production Design, Feature Film, and Guy Maddin won the Film Discovery Jury Award for Best Director at the US Comedy Arts Festival.
31.
Guy Maddin 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.
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Guy Maddin meanwhile falls in love with the ghost of his dead lover, not recognizing her, and competes with his own father for her affection.
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Guy Maddin based the film's premise loosely on the story The Hands of Ida and Euripedes's play Medea.
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Guy 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.
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In 2006, Guy 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.
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In 2007, Guy Maddin became the first artist-curator of the UCLA Film and Television Archive.
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Guy 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.
38.
Guy 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.
39.
Guy Maddin shot his tenth feature film, Keyhole, digitally rather than his usual method of shooting on sixteen-millimetre or Super-8.
40.
Also in 2011, Guy Maddin participated in Performa 11 with Tales from the Gimli Hospital: Reframed, an ambitious live performance that reframes the original 1988 film.
41.
In 2012, Guy 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.
42.
Guy 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.
43.
Guy Maddin was commissioned by The Power Plant gallery in Toronto and, in an installation curated by Philip Monk, produced a series of ten short films.
44.
The main text is followed by an interview with Guy Maddin conducted by Robert Enright.
45.
Guy Maddin's book contains the film's narration as a main text surrounded by annotations, including outtakes, marginal notes and digressions, production stills, family photos, and miscellaneous material.
46.
Guy Maddin includes an angry e-mail from an ex-girlfriend, collages and notebooks pages, and an X-ray of the dog Spanky from the film.
47.
Caelum Vatnsdal, a director, producer, author, and actor, published a book of interviews with Guy Maddin discussing his filmography film-by-film.