Guy Maddin Keyhole PROFILES
Guy Maddin
Iconic Canadian director Guy Maddin is presenting his latest mind-bending opus, Keyhole, here as a Special Presentation. Shot in his trademark black and white, the Odyssey-inspired film stars Jason Patric as Ulysses Pick, a gangster who returns one stormy night to his house after a long absence, in an effort to see his wife Hyacinth (Isabella Rossellini) who is hiding out in a room upstairs.
This is initially a gangster story, so what were you plotting when you devised it?
I wanted to cross-pollinate a ghost story and a gangster story and capture the flavours of both haunted house and gangster mov- ies. They seem to go well together, like peanut butter and bacon. But it’s also the autobiography of a house. For years I was treated to a cycle of dreams featuring a caval- cade of dead relatives, but in recent years that has been replaced by dreams of homes, including my childhood home, in which people weren’t visible. There were all sorts of chambers in architectural structures in these dreams. So in this film I wanted to recreate these dreams for poster- ity. In many ways, making a film is a therapeutic device to move on.
So the film is about a house rather than a version of The Odyssey? I used the plot structure of The Odyssey because I’m not a drama- tist. I’m a big fan of The Poetics Of Space by Gaston Bachelard which was a bestseller in the 1950s and explored the phenomenological
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Keyhole
power of spaces in a house. That is the compass and what I used to poke around the subject.
Did you shoot in an actual house? I wanted to but it was too compli- cated and eventually we built a set. The film is a fairy tale anyway so I love the idea of rooms shifting around. I also change the point of view. Most of the film is from Jason Patric’s point of view but towards the end I pull a switcheroo and change it to his son’s eyes to show the house can be experienced through many points of view.
Nick Broomfield Sarah Palin – You Betcha!
Nick Broomfield, the director of such films as Kurt & Courtney and Biggie & Tupac, returns with a typically revealing portrait of a captivating US public figure, Sarah Palin. The project shot mostly in Wasilla, Alaska starting in October 2010 and is funded in a large part by the UK’s Channel 4. When it became clear the project might work as a theatrical feature, Broomfield and his producers sourced more than $30,000 from Kickstarter and brought in private investors. Cassian Elwes has secured a US theatrical service deal through Freestyle Releasing. Con- tent is handling international sales.
Why did you decide to turn your spot- light on Palin now? I’ve done a series of films about iconic people and Sarah Palin seemed to fit, in that she was very representative of the incredible changes taking place in the US and particularly in the Republican Party over the last 10 years.
There are plenty of testimonials from Palin’s disillusioned former associ- ates, but precious few talking heads who come out in support of her. Why?
We tried to get hold of a lot of her old friends from school and the basketball team [she played on] but she doesn’t have a lot of friends, frankly, from her days [as mayor of Wasilla] or as governor [of Alaska]. We must have tried 15 or 30 times to get people. My over- all impression is there’s a feeling in Wasilla that the Palins have moved on, so old ties in the com- munity were kind of exhausted and people felt they had moved on to higher places and weren’t inter- ested in their old friends.
Palin herself appears on camera when you attend book signings but she doesn’t take part. Why? We tried very patiently to get hold of her. She’s been so beaten up in the press that it didn’t have much to do with [a fear of our] putting a foot wrong. I think if you had come with a strong recommendation from Rupert Murdoch or the Koch brothers [it might be different], but a straightforward journalist… I don’t think anybody would get in.
What do you think Palin represents to the US people? I don’t think she has a very firm
n 38 Screen International at the Toronto Film Festival September 10, 2011 Nick Broomfield
political position — she’s a popu- list. But the frightening thing about her at the moment is there’s a real sense of panic among the elector- ate over the economy. The feeling is party politicians have failed the electorate and she’s really trading on it and she’s trading off people’s fears and this polarised anti-immi- grant and anti-welfare sentiment.
What is next for you? I’m doing something a little differ- ent. I’m adapting Ronan Bennett’s The Catastrophist, a love story set in the Belgian Congo [around 1959-60] at the time of the Congo- lese independence movement leader Patrice Lumumba. We’re going to shoot it in Tanzania. Jeremy Kay
Did you enjoy working with Jason Patric? He is a force. He is Odysseus in real life and he has incredible menace which doesn’t stop after you say cut. But then his earliest memories growing up are on the set of The Exorcist with his father [Jason Miller, who portrayed Father Karras] so maybe that’s not surprising. I went out drinking every night with him, Udo Kier and Louis Negin, and realised the next day that this was how John Huston felt every morning. Mike Goodridge
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