From taking out Maddin’s garbage to co-director

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This article was published 10/10/2015 (3653 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winnipeg filmmaker Guy Maddin may not be a mainstream filmmaker, but his name represents a distinctive brand of movie — humorous, stylish, with infusions of surrealism and old-time melodrama.

So it is pretty impressive that Maddin’s latest feature film, The Forbidden Room, clearly and freely credits Evan Johnson as the film’s co-director.

A former student of Maddin’s, Johnson, 32, used to take his film classes at the University of Manitoba. In a phone interview, he discussed the journey from student to collaborator.

 

FP: What was your first encounter with Guy Maddin?

EJ: I first met him when I was 20 or 21, taking his class at the U of M. I was kind of excited by the kinds of things he showed, very strange films. He wasn’t a conventionally great professor. His lectures were very funny but badly prepared and digressive.

But I had a great time and I eventually got hired as his personal assistant, sending packages out for him and taking out his garbage when he forgot to take it out, and things like that. Eventually, I got jobs like ghost-writing scripts that he was commissioned to write but didn’t want to. So I tried to get a handle on his writing style and sensibility that way.

FP: How did that lead to co-directing The Forbidden Room?

EJ: Once he started doing research on it, which began a long time ago, I was his go-to guy on that job. Then the research flowed into writing the script and it just kind of progressed until I was co-directing the thing, because I was making a lot of the major decisions.

FP: The film was shot in public places, in Paris in the Centre Pompidou and in Montreal’s Centre Phi gallery. What was it like shooting a movie in front of an audience?

EJ: I hadn’t been on many film sets before, so I wasn’t familiar with the way it usually goes. So it didn’t make much difference to me. But it may have been a little different for Guy. For him, the whole purpose was so he wouldn’t get lazy and phone it in, because there were people watching so he had to put on a show. It seemed to have energized certain performances, and some of the camera movements, because of the controlled chaos.

Guy’s film sets tend towards chaos anyway. He likes to shout directions in front of everybody at the actors while the camera is rolling, just showman stuff.

FP: What was your job in those scenarios?

EJ: In Paris, I was the first assistant director and I wasn’t very good at that planning and organizing so I got an assistant to do that and I kind of stood near Guy and he would shout directions at the actors and he and I discussed the script and shots we needed and effects we could do later. In Montreal, I didn’t have any job except to co-direct, which was preferable.

FP: A lot of Winnipeg filmmakers got their start making Guy Maddin-like films before they found their own voices. Do you have plans becoming a filmmaker outside the Maddin realm?

EJ: I haven’t over-thought it. I work on a project-by-project basis with him, and I like making films and we get along. Right now, we plan to make another feature together.

But he himself is excited to look in a different direction now, which may be why Forbidden Room feels like a culmination, an explosion of his style, intensified.

If I make a film on my own, I’ll figure out what it has to be, but I’m not sure yet.

The Forbidden Room is playing at Cinematheque until Oct. 17.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca