How to get legless in Winnipeg

There are stranger film directors than Guy Maddin, says Jonathan Romney. But not many...

One of the latest films from Canadian director Guy Maddin is a melodrama set in the 1930s, about a Winnipeg hockey player who finds himself transplanted with the amputated blue-stained hands of his girlfriend's dead father, a Haitian hair stylist. Maddin insists the film is autobiographical. Why should anyone disbelieve him - the hockey player is called Guy Maddin, after all.

The fact that Maddin's films exist at all is one of the most magnificent aberrations of contemporary cinema. Since the mid-Eighties, he has been making surreal, poetic, dryly hilarious films that seem to channel his febrile obsessions straight from his unconscious into the visual textures of a hazily-remembered silent cinema. Notwithstanding their outright absurdity and torrid, yet oddly demure, erotic fixations, these films could at first glimpse be long-suppressed works by silent-era masters such as Frank Borzage or Erich von Stroheim.

Two Maddin films are highlights of this year's London Film Festival. One is the aforementioned "autobiography", the hour-long Cowards Bend the Knee. The other is The Saddest Music in the World, incongruously based on an original script by novelist Kazuo Ishiguro. Set in a snowbound Depression-era Winnipeg, it features Isabella Rossellini as a legless brewery owner who organises a contest to find the world's most lugubrious music. As klezmer bands face off against mariachis, flamenco singers against bagpipers, the film increasingly resembles something that horror director Tod Browning - himself a specialist in amputation stories - might have made if he'd managed to usurp Busby Berkeley on one of his musicals.

"Not many days go by without me thinking of Tod Browning or Busby Berkeley, that's for sure," Maddin admits. "When Isabella Rossellini came up to Winnipeg to watch movies with me, we watched a lot of Lon Chaney pictures, just to get into the spirit of leglessness. We learnt a lot of legless tricks that we could do on the couch - I'd throw popcorn into her lap, that sort of thing."

The Saddest Music... has an unusually starry cast by Maddin's standards, although he admits he was terrified at first of filming Rossellini: "You can't help thinking of all the great photographers who have gone before you, including the ghost of Herb Ritts. And here was I with my Super8 camera trying my best." The film also stars Portuguese actress Maria de Medeiros, her bizarre Cupid's-bowed physiognomy an ideal fit for Maddin's period visions. But perhaps the cast's finest asset is lead actor Mark McKinney - part of Canadian comedy team Kids in the Hall - who has a perfect stony-jawed Thirties look and a delivery with the authentic Howard Hawks' snap. "He wore a hairpiece and grew a moustache," says Maddin, "and once you slick his hair down, you realise he's got giant Clark Gable ears. So he would lead with his moustache into a scene and whenever he turned his head, his ears would hold up his performance."

Maddin's home town of Winnipeg is an unlikely locale for the story, which Ishiguro had originally set in contemporary London, but Maddin felt it his mission to fly the local flag. "Canadians don't know how to mythologise themselves. I thought Winnipeg would be the perfect place for the story. It's literally the epicentre of the old Depression dustbowl and in the depths of winter it's the darkest and coldest place in North America." The film is an example of how projects occasionally drift Maddin's way and produce entirely idiosyncratic results. Ishiguro's script came to Maddin via Atom Egoyan, who at one time considered directing it and ended up as executive producer. Despite the radical changes made by Maddin and co-writer George Toles, Ishiguro - "Ish", as Maddin calls him - stayed around as script editor.

Similarly, Maddin's sublime wordless feature Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary - soon to be released in Britain - was a commission to film the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. Maddin says he was bored with the Dracula myth and didn't even like ballet, but accepted the job because he was broke; yet the film is as Maddinesque as any he's made. The decisive moment, he says, came when he re-read Bram Stoker's novel: "I realised it was a really clever portrait of the way men behave during mating season. Jealous males create this omnipotent rival from another land and xenophobically malign him. I'm surprised they didn't start accusing vampires of stealing their jobs."

Altogether more personal from the start was Cowards Bend the Knee, originally designed as an installation to be watched through 10 peepholes in a wall. (Maddin realised it wasn't working when he saw viewers emerging with red eyes and scuffed foreheads.) Elements of Maddin's own life are involved: his mother ran a beauty salon, and his father managed the Canadian national ice hockey team. But severed hands? "The movie is completely autobiographical - not literally so, but it's spiritually completely true. There's a character with my name who has his hands amputated by a woman, and that's happened to me," he says with a nervous laugh. "It really has felt like my life has been lived in somebody else's hands at times."

Maddin has sometimes been seen as a perverted archivist making fake Twenties films about real Twenties films - a nitrate-era Tarantino pursuing fogeyish fancies. However, he insists, "My movies look like they're about other movies, but I'd never set out to make films that are just about surface. My favourite film-makers are the great storytellers - Preston Sturges, Ernst Lubitsch, William Wyler, Frank Borzage. I'm a primitive, that's all. I don't really have anything to say about cinema," Maddin claims, "I'm just using it to tell my own stories."

'The Saddest Music in the World' and 'Cowards Bend the Knee' are screening at the London Film Festival (020 7928 3232), which starts on Wed. 'Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary' is released 12 Dec