Fifteen days with Louis Negin’s scrotum in your face

In Keyhole, Guy Maddin reconfigures The Odyssey as a gangster-noir set inside a haunted house that might actually be purgatory (sort of). He’s the first to admit that he’s not actually sure what’s happening in his newest film, but it doesn’t matter. The viewer enters a kind of fugue state as Jason Patric’s thin-lipped gang boss Ulysses make his way ever deeper into an old dark house beset by disloyal underlings, screaming ghosts, dead sons, chronic masturbators, and his father-in-law—naked and looking like a withered cherub—chained to his wife’s bed. Interestingly, Keyhole—which also stars Isabella Rossellini as Hyacinth, and Louis Negin as her father, Calypso—feels closely related in some ways to one of Maddin’s earliest features, 1990’s Archangel. And that's where our conversation with the filmmaker begins. Maddin is reclining on a hotel room bed in Toronto when the Georgia Straight reaches him:

Georgia Straight: In 1990, I asked for and got your autograph.

Guy Maddin: You’re kidding?

GS: No, I’m not kidding. I think you were presenting either Careful or Archangel at VIFF.

GM: If it was 1990, it would have been Archangel. Wow, that would have been, like, one of 10 autographs I gave last century. I’ve given almost that many this century already, and this century’s only 12 years old.

GS: I just remember that you were puzzled and amazed that anyone would want your autograph.

GM: It still makes no sense to me. I don’t know what to do with real celebrities, let alone, like, a Canadian, aspiring celebrity. Well, actually, when you even arrive at full Canadian celebrity-hood, you’re smaller than life still, somehow. But anyway, thanks for asking, you must have been eight then, or something.

GS: I was 22 or 23, maybe…

GM: Aw, that’s cute.

GM: ... and I was in love with your movies. And the thing is, since then, you’ve gone from being a fascinating obscurity to a member of the cultural elite.

GM: Ha! Yeah, that’s right. Canada’s 400.

GS: It has to be said—Isabella Rossellini exhibits an inspiring lack of vanity in your new film, Keyhole

GM: Well, she’s a wonderful person. She had a long run as a model, looking glamorous. She’s never really wanted to be glamorous in the films she’s made. Right out of the gate with Blue Velvet—her first famous feature—she made a point of being unglamorous. She and I are both big fans of Lon Chaney’s work, and she likes the way he would disfigure himself, contort himself to fit a character who was mentally twisted, and she likes to do the same thing. She’s been doing it with me for quite a while, and in this one… I was thinking how she was mostly bed-ridden for the entire movie. I think that was just a lack of imagination about how to block a scene on my part. There was some sort of scheduling mix-up. I basically had to shoot everything with her in one day, so I just flopped her down on a bed and, you know, I learned this when I was directing Ann Savage in bed, she played my mother in My Winnipeg—that she was less ornery when she was lying down. Her memory was sharp. Her lines were delivered in a more measured manner. I’m actually lying down completely horizontal right now. It’s just something happens to you when you’re lying down, so she just sort of went supine, and relaxed, and she sort of channelled more her Scandinavian than her Mediterranean half there.

GS: It must have something to do with the distribution of the blood.

GM: Yeah, well my feet have just gone up a couple of sizes earlier this morning, so I’m lying down and they’re coming back to size 12.

GS: Louis Negin… am I saying his name right? Nee-gin?

GM: You are, and you know what? I’ve been saying it Louis Nay-gin for as long as I’ve known him, which is 23 years, and he finally corrected me about a month ago.

GS: He was just being polite for 23 years? Why stop now?

GM: I don’t know what the hell… Anyway, he’s my real muse, I have to say. A lot of people assume Isabella is, and she kind of is. She’s been very important to me, but important in ways that muses aren’t. Louis—he’s the guy I think of when I think of photographing someone. I need those big, rubbery lips, I need that fantastic voice—especially for my talking pictures—I need that body, which makes me into a landscape photographer when I point my camera at him, you know? I feel like a great Canadian landscape photographer when I’m shooting Louis Negin. He just makes me feel great. He fits the bill of muse far more than Isabella does. She’s more of a collaborator and a friend.

GS: Well, speaking of an inspiring absence of vanity, Louis is naked for most of Keyhole.

GM: Oh, he’s vain. He’s in the tanning salon, and he’s got the, you know, the designer sunglass on, the Jackie O’s—but he’s brave. He’ll do anything for the movie, just to finish your thought, if I’m going in the right direction: he seems to be willing to do just about anything. And wait until you see the bonus features on the blu-ray of Keyhole.

GS: Have you ever seen the film Sir Henry at Rawlinson End?

GM: No!

GS: Well anyway, I was reminded by Louis of Sir Henry’s man-servant, Old Scrotum, otherwise referred to as “his wrinkled retainer.”

GM: Old scrotum. Speaking of that, I got so used to Negin being naked that I completely forgot about it. At one point, you know, in the rush to get a hundred shots done in the day, sometimes I just rest my camera on the nearest available thing, and I rested my elbows on either side of his knee, and I was sort of shooting up his upper body, towards Isabella’s face, and focusing, and I realized as I focused that his genitals were in the immediate foreground, and the lens of the camera, as a matter of fact, was on his scrotum. And as I was focusing it was kind of twisting around like a camera assistant pulling focus for me. And I let go of it, and it unfocused again because his bag sort of pulled it back, and… I was just so comfortable around him that I didn’t even notice. And he went, ‘Oh, Guy…’

GS: Speaking of brave…

GM: Well, it was just sort of a matter of forgetting, you know? It was, like, day 15 with Louis Negin’s scrotum in your face.

GS: It would be almost tedious, after a little while.

GM: Well, like I say, it’s fun to film, and I like things in the foreground. I like a closed frame, as they say, a little something at the top, a little something at the bottom.

GS: I recall reading that Lars von Trier took his clothes off to make his actors feel more comfortable when he made The Idiots. How about you?

GM: Oh, that’s hilarious. I will not take my clothes off in public. That’s a favour I am doing for everyone.

GS: You can probably tell from my line of questioning here that I take a sort of infantile glee from the very idea of people being naked.

GM: Yeah.

GS: I’m not going to pretend that I don’t get the same vibe about you from your movies.

GM: Well, we’re really finding some common ground here because infantile glee is what I’m really just after all the time, and it sort of annoys me that every now and again I get too dead serious on a film, and so that’s why it’s important to have Louis Negin around, and just every now and then just let the viewers look at him, and just, I dunno, be delighted. Or, I hope. It’s not to everyone’s taste, perhaps. It’s not for me to say about Louis’s naked body, which is wonderful, and he is my favourite.

GS: You blew my mind with your AV Club interview for Keyhole, where you talk about Jason Patric being Jason Miller’s son. I didn’t know that, and it made me think about a book I read when I was a kid about the making of The Exorcist, and all the terrible things that supposedly happened...

GM: One of them was just Jason Patric’s childhood.

GS: Well, yeah! But I also recall in the very first chapter, one of Jason Miller’s children is hurt in a horrendous accident…

GM: Oh, I didn’t know that. Do you remember what it was?

GS: I think someone was hit by a motorcycle.

GM: Jason Patric never mentioned that. It might have been a sibling of his, then. I think he’s the oldest, though. Maybe I mention this in the AV piece—I don’t remember doing the interview, actually—that’s when his father left and said, ‘Jason, you’re the man of the house, now,’ and so he’s kinda been the man of the house ever since. I wonder if he was a little sissy boy up until that moment, and then became an alpha male on that day in 1973? He’s strikingly handsome and almost uncomfortably masculine. He’s very frank. We got along, and basically when he was telling me about how his father left during this big year that he was having—star of The Exorcist, and a Pulitzer Prize for his play, and then finishing the trifecta by abandoning his family—I realized that he understood the Odyssey from the abandoned son’s point of view. And then I realized that if he didn’t understand the script any more than I did, he was at least given an excuse to be lost and confused by the nature of his character. I was very pleased to work with him. And he was very old school. I felt a lot like John Huston out with Humphrey Bogart at night. Like, every now and then he’d just punch me in the face if I wasn’t drinking fast enough. Every morning I woke up screaming, drowning out the sound of my alarm, screaming like John Huston, and the only thing that got me out of bed was the notion that I felt as bad as John Huston did every day of his life. He made some mighty fine films so why shouldn’t I go out there and at least drag my ass through the day?

GS: David Lynch turned down the opportunity to direct Return of the Jedi. Have you had any goofy offers like that?

GM: I never got anything quite that good. Actually, Sigurjon Sighvatsson, who produced Wild at Heart, he and I got together briefly to do a remake of The Omen, but we both sort of petered out on it after a couple of months. That’s the closest I’ve come. I would have accepted that Return of the Jedi job, and there’d be a lot fewer Star Wars nerds out there right now. And I would have done the world a great service.

Georgia Straight, April 2012