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Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson on The Forbidden Room’s evolution

After hitting what seems like every film festival in the world, Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson have finally brought The Forbidden Room to TIFF. The veteran filmmaker and his younger co-director/editor sat down on a quiet day toward the end of the fest to discuss their giddy nested narrative, which features a parade of movie stars in a series of vintage movie freak-outs.

The Forbidden Room evolved out of your online project Seances, right?

GUY MADDIN It started as an internet project, and will still be an internet project – a massive, life-destroyingly ambitious project. But there just isn’t the state funding accessible for new media. It was [producer] Niv Fichman who suggested making a feature, and it seemed like a good idea. Having a feature and an internet project would be nice.

Evan, Guy’s films have always had a distinctive, antiquated look, but The Forbidden Room does something new. The image shifts and bulges like it’s trying to contain all the weirdness. How did you find this style?

EVAN JOHNSON It is new, yeah. The technique to make it is actually similar to something called datamoshing, which is what happens when you download a video file but only download a fragment of it. You’re missing information, and the result is this weird morphing in the image. 

MADDIN It reminded me of the way film buckles when it gets old, which has always reminded me of ectoplasm in those old spirit photographs. You know, something filmy and gloopy. 

You also assembled a remarkable cast for this one, shooting in both Paris and Montreal. How did you get everyone onto the same soundstages?

MADDIN Luckily, they were just available. We were locked into the three weeks we first shot at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. There were only three weeks available, and that was our shooting schedule. So if Charlotte Rampling was only available for four days, or Jacques Nolot or Udo Kier, they went in on those days, basically. Same with Quebec. In both cases, the casting agent really knew the acting community, really knew who would be up for such a crazy adventure of acting in public, making themselves vulnerable to everyone seeing their mistakes, and which ones wouldn’t be bothered. So no time was wasted and we had a very high success ratio of asking to accepting. Only Frederick Wiseman turned us down.

Well, Wiseman won’t even allow his voice to be heard in his own documentaries.

MADDIN Is that right [laughs]? Of course! Maybe we were asking the wrong person. 

Guy Maddin on the structure of The Forbidden Room:

Evan Johnson and Maddin on audience reactions:

See our review: The Forbidden Room.

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