Guy Maddin, Interviews (edited by D.K. Holm) ****

The ticket-holder's line for Sound of Falling snaked right past the store at the TIFF Lightbox. How could I not browse its impressive shelf of cinematic monographs? And how could I pass up the book about a Canadian director?

Guy Maddin has a distinctive film-making style, with comical and avant-garde narratives filmed using techniques from the silent era. He strikes me as a thoughtful and creative artist, which is why I was interested in hearing what he had to say in interviews. I was not disappointed: he makes numerous insightful comments about his work and about art in general.

So few people understand what melodrama is. It's not real life exaggerated. Really good melodrama is the truth uninhibited. ... These are not exaggerated feelings, they are repressed feelings liberated.

He is Canadian, so he also has opinions about hockey: 

I was always struck by early NHL photographs by how noir-looking they were... I guess it's because early sports photography was always done in those darkened arenas with the flashbulb and only the athletes in the immediate foreground were illuminated and everyone else seemed to disappear in thickest night, and so you got the idea that hockey was played more in a back alley, so it felt really lurid and frightening... It seemed like players could disappear into the murk and come back out with the puck in some surprising place and almost mug another player.

I feel as if I got a great sense of Maddin's artistic sensibility, of his career up through My Winnipeg in 2008, and of the persona he projects. Like his films, he is an entertaining mixture of the literate and the silly, the amateurish and the masterful.

My favorite Maddin film, by the way, is The Saddest Music in the World.