Guy Maddin: Weird Guy

In a month or so, the Canadian film director Guy Maddin will be back in his home town, Winnipeg, directing what promises to be his most ambitious movie yet, The Saddest Music in the World. He has recruited Isabella Rossellini to star as a legless, Lon Chaney-style beer baroness, in what comes billed as "a tale at the depths of the great Depression in the most depressing city in the world – Winnipeg – on the eve of the repeal of prohibition".

The plot hinges on a contest to determine which country has the saddest music in the world. The Portuguese actress Maria De Medeiros (best known for her turn opposite Bruce Willis in Pulp Fiction and as Anaïs Nin in Henry and June) is to co-star as Narcissi, a woman who has forgotten that her son has died. "She plays a nymphomaniac who's trying to screw herself into a happy forgetfulness," the director explains.

To anyone who knows the 47-year-old's work, this new project can't help but seem strait-laced. He is among the most eccentric and exotic film-makers in world cinema: a visionary with a flair for melodrama, whose movies have more in common with early 20th-century silent tearjerkers such as Broken Blossoms or steamy erotic tales such as Pandora's Box than with anything coming out of Hollywood.

The Saddest Music in the World is a departure for him. It has been scripted by the Booker Prize-winning novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, who was introduced to Maddin by the producer Niv Fichman, who is also adapting Ishiguro's A Pale View of Hills for the screen. "He [Fichman] thought that maybe a wildly unrealistic adaptation of Ishiguro's script might be the best approach to take."

If, by some unlikely chance, the movie is a success, Maddin might finally be recognised as more than just an oddball stuck in the Canadian provinces. If it fails, he'll no doubt carry on making his own arcane home movies. Whatever the case, British audiences are likely to be exposed to more of his work shortly. A UK distributor has finally been found for Maddin's Dracula – Pages From a Virgin's Diary, his Emmy-award-winning silent ballet version of Bram Stoker's Gothic potboiler, and there's a strong chance that his latest movie, Cowards Bend the Knee, might also surface here.

Cowards received its world premiere as an installation at the Rotterdam Film Festival this week. To watch it, you have to peer through one of a selection of peepholes in a wall. The holes were originally intended to be at knee height, but Maddin decided that even the most devoted voyeurs were unlikely to be able to kneel for long enough to see much of the film, and so put them just below head height instead."I've never watched a movie through a peephole myself and so I've got no idea what the eye fatigue is like," he confesses.

The film is billed as his (heavily veiled) autobiography. It's silent, 10 six-minute chapters long, black and white, and full of sex, medical experiments and hairdressing. Maddin's ancestors, he claims, moved to Canada as "part of the Icelandic diaspora from a bunch of volcanic eruptions in the 19th century". His mother ran an Icelandic beauty salon, and he used to peer through cracks in the floorboard at her elderly customers under the hairdryers. ("Icelanders live for a very long time. Those customers were not just octogenarians or nonagenarians. They were 'hundredagarians'.")

Full of shots of lascivious hairdressers servicing clients in a salon that doubles as a brothel, Cowards plays Bunuel-like jokes at the expense of male voyeurs, who are mocked in the very title. As part of his research, Maddin also scanned videotapes of silent movie erotica and is happy to make comparisons with more modern fare. "This stuff has got nuns and priests going at it. It's got more plot and a little more comedy, but as porn," he notes disapprovingly, "it's probably not as good."

That Maddin was able to make this film at all suggests a revival in a career that faltered badly in the late 1990s. In 1998, Maddin made his most expensive movie, a loose adaptation of Knut Hamsun's mystical novel Pan, called Twilight of the Ice Nymphs. It was a disastrous experience. He fell out with his lead actor (whose voice he subsequently dubbed). The film suffered from his own doubts about it. He seemed unsure whether he was making a conventional narrative feature (albeit one with more ostriches than actors) or another of his experimental efforts. The end result pleased nobody, the director least of all.

Stuck in Winnipeg, he seemed to be sinking back into obscurity. "I was just about ready to give up, but then word of mouth – thank God – started to come round on what I'd been doing."

Dracula – a job he did for hire – helped revive his career. Perhaps surprisingly, it eschews irony or camp, staying closer to its source material than any of his other work. Yet Maddin concedes there were aspects of the novel he found repellent. "To the chauvinistic English males raging against him, Dracula is the archetypal evil foreigner. And the women are stalked as carriers of tainted blood because they dared to display sexual tendencies. Why has a novel written in a mediocre voice proved so durable? Because it's an allegory of misogyny and xenophobia."

According to Maddin, we'd be far better off watching Lon Chaney movies. "In The Unknown, Chaney plays guitar with his feet and lights cigarettes with his toes – he makes great entrances, he'll come hopping in on one foot followed by a midget. In his films, the malformed characters are never gratuitous. They're central to the story. I'm a huge fan."

Isabella Rossellini shares his enthusiasm for silent cinema, which is one of the reasons he approached her to appear in The Saddest Music. And it seems she's already been getting into the Maddin spirit. "She has been practicing playing the guitar with her feet," he notes proudly, "though she doesn't have legs in this movie, so you won't get to see that." The director claims to have struck up an excellent relationship with Kazuo Ishiguro too: "Ish is a great guy!" The febrile, eccentric Canadian and the punctilious writer of Remains of the Day make unlikely bedfellows, but that, Maddin insists, is the point. "The strangest fit often works the best."

'Dracula – Pages From a Virgin's Diary' will be released in the UK later in the year