Family Guy

Canadian director Guy Maddin’s new box set should come with a label. Warning! Contains a ghost abortion, mountaintop sexual frenzies, vampires en pointe and at least one ice titty. Comically demented bizarreness is what Maddin does best, and his faux-vintage films—he often uses anachronistic devices, like intertitles—are beloved among auteurists. The Quintessential Guy Maddin! 5 Films From the Heart of Winnipeg, a collection of five features, six shorts and a Tom Waits–narrated doc, hits shelves Tuesday. We caught up with Maddin to ask him how its contents have held up over the years.

Archangel (1990)
Amnesia abounds in a small Russian town that hasn’t quite realized World War I ended months ago.
“I’ve always kind of loved [Archangel] as some kind of special child that unfortunately circumstances compelled me to hide in the attic…I rewatched this years after making it and couldn’t understand what the hell was going on, then I revisited it about a year ago and I was pretty proud of it…[Critic J. Hoberman] wrote that whatever Archangel was, it was not a smart career move. I was really proud of that compliment.”

Careful (1992)
A severely repressed 19th-century Alpine village turns children into murderous, incestuous monsters—although Maddin, perplexed, noted that some critics ignored the incest aspect.
“I almost wish I still had the naïve and boundless energy I had when I made that film. I don’t think I would even try to suggest constructing a couple football fields’ worth of papier-mâché indoor mountains now…Rex Reed dismissed it as a bunch of people running around with rouge on their cheeks and color-coordinated tunics…I guess the color program of the movie was so distracting that no one noticed that a son was lowering his face over the exposed torso of his own mother.”

Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997)
Lovers betray each other on and off the family ostrich farm.
“I realized [during filming] that I didn’t know what I was doing and it was going to come off like bruised fruit or rotting fruit. I finally just decided to go with that and release a truckload of ostriches onto the set.”

Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2003)
Maddin adapts the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s take on Bram Stoker’s novel.
“I was terrified making Dracula because I had really willfully decided to make all of my movies as proscenium-bound little things, little melodramas that took place in an airless bell jar…I realized that a ballerina needs a couple of acres just to change her mind about going out or something like that.”

Cowards Bend the Knee (2004)
A hairdresser-abortionist’s daughter, Meta, drives hockey player “Guy Maddin” to distraction.
“I started reading some Euripides. At 2,500 years, these story frameworks of his must be durable. I was shocked to find out when reading Electra that I had lived through something like that, a relationship with someone with an Electra complex, and reading Medea, I realized I had gone out with her. After I wrote everything down, I didn’t even once look at the script when filming the movie…[Editing was] just kind of dumping out the contents of a Dirt Devil, and the movie kind of just made itself. It was kind of incredible.”

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