Guy Maddin names his favourite movies of all time
Having worked as a bank manager, house painter, and photographic archivist before becoming a filmmaker, Guy Maddin was familiar with travelling multiple different paths before he’d even turned his creativity into a full-time profession.
Since debuting with the 1985 short The Dead Father, Maddin has expanded into feature-length in addition to regularly serving as the editor and cinematographer of his own productions, as well as further credits including camera operator, art director, production designer, and sound designer, not to mention his status as a published author, creator of numerous art installations, and occasional Harvard lecturer.
A multi-talented maverick who’s always marched to the beat of his own drum, Maddin may not be held on the same lofty pedestal as the industry’s foremost auteurs, but there’s nobody else like him. It stands to reason, based on his eclectic professional odyssey, that his inspirations and favourite movies would run the cinematic spectrum, which was proven true when he named them to Sunset Gun.
Maddin’s selections date back to the 1920s, with Alexander Dovzhenko’s Zvenigora winning him over with how the director “has his own film vocabulary,” described as “quirky, mythopoetic, brazen and downright perverse”. As he explained, Dovzhenko “wields it to create the oddest portraits of whatever he’s thinking about” before suggesting “no one has the heart and voice of this man”.
Tod Browning’s circus-set melodrama The Unknown is – in Maddin’s words – “as bizarre as this macabre auteur’s work gets,” but remains “far more universal than one would think possible,” thanks in large part to “under-praised genius” Lon Chaney.
Segueing into the 1930s, Jean Vigo’s Zéro de conduite is ripe for re-watching as “each time out it’s more thrilling, mysterious, and revolutionary,” with Frank Borzage’s Man’s Castle labelled a “masterpiece” for the way in which it “expresses itself in a mannered naturalism”. Special praise is reserved for Luis Buñuel’s L’Age d’or, though, decreed by Maddin to be “the most assuredly jagged, trope-packed, gleeful, swaggering and mischievous filmic salvo of all-time”.
Max Ophuls’ Letter from an Unknown Woman is the only candidate from the 1940s but makes the cut by way of being “maybe the most bracingly masochistic comedy possible,” with the next two decades being skipped entirely before he gets to Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye. In Madden’s eyes, the satirical mystery thriller is “some sort of evanescent miracle that produces viewer euphoria and regret in equal portion”.
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 1998 feature After Life focuses on a group of people finding themselves trapped in the most mundane version of limbo imaginable following their deaths, in a parable Maddin interpreted as a “strangely playful yet moving wonder”. David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive marks “the master’s most vertiginous peak” in Maddin’s estimation, with Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life yielding “a purity of intent something like minimalism” that emerges as “gorgeous and cathartic” in its final form.
Guy Maddin’s favourite movies:
- The Unknown (Tod Browning, 1927)
- Zvenigora (Alexander Dovzhenko, 1928)
- L’Age d’or (Luis Buñuel, 1930)
- Zéro de conduite (1933) Jean Vigo, 1933)
- Man’s Castle (Frank Borzage, 1933)
- Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophuls, 1948)
- The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973)
- After Life (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 1998)
- Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch, 2001)
- Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011)
