“You have to forget you’re an asshole in order to function in this life.” This is director Guy Maddin’s crude way of conveying the importance of confidence. His lesson ended up helping me when I met the filmmaker at IU Cinema over the weekend.
After his lecture, I waited in line to meet Maddin, shakily holding the article I wrote about him, which I wanted him to sign, to approve.
Our phone interview and email correspondence was pleasant, but meeting in person felt awkward. Maddin happily signed my article, but I sensed that he didn’t read it — or enjoy it. Before I left, he looked down at the article in my hand, and hesitantly said, “Thanks for the...uhh...coverage.”
Not that I expected him to gush over it, but the encounter felt like a bit of a bummer. That’s not to say it wasn’t still an uber-cool opportunity, but I left feeling like I got an autograph I didn’t deserve.
I re-read the article outside the Lilly Library, under a banner promoting its Orson Welles exhibition. The fact that I was lucky enough to be in this situation — reading my profile of an acclaimed filmmaker steps away from a treasure trove of cinematic relics — makes me feel like a brat for being mopey.
As I read the article, I found myself cringing, especially after discovering that the word “own” appeared several times in it...
“Maddin was inspired by the way his relatives presented their OWN past.”
“His family helped him realize that he could make the familiar territory of his OWN life seem fantastic and otherworldly.”
“Since he was poking around in his OWN earliest years…”
It was a minor nit to pick, but it drove me nuts. I found myself ashamed of the article, and I wanted to crawl under a rock.
Then I remembered what Maddin said about the way he approaches filmmaking, how he finds inspiration in the way his daughter draws pictures.
“Her feelings go straight from her heart to her paper,” he said. “She’s always drawing — quickly, confidently churning out really beautiful works, pronouncing them finished within seconds or minutes. I vowed after visiting a few extra slow-moving, boring-as-hell movie sets that I would take my daughter’s approach to making art.”
As Maddin suggests, sometimes you should just throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks.
A few things stuck in my profile of him. For example, I’m pretty fond of this sentence: “The films in Maddin’s ‘me trilogy’ are shot in hazy black-and-white, as if filtered through the dreamlike fog of his memories.”
Is the article perfect? No, far from it. But I tried my best. And I will keep trying. Hell, Maddin doesn’t always like what he throws at the wall either. But he keeps at it. As he says, “You have to forget you’re an asshole in order to function in this life.” Maybe when he signed my article, he was reminding me to forget and telling me to keep trucking.
