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In Guy Maddin's latest film, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, there is no twilight, no ice but there are several nymphs. Trees and greenery - that favourite habitat of the dryad - also figure fairly prominently. And I can't help noticing that Maddin is wearing a dark, tree-green pullover that blends in pretty exactly with the chairs in the Inter-Conti's Marlene Bar.

Then I realise that I don't need this kind of stuff, because what Maddin says is a lot more interesting than comments about fashion intersecting with furniture intersecting with film. He is also that
considerable rarity: a director who is funnier than his films - though not, I am glad to say, quite as weird.

Maddin, for those who've never been exposed to the full-out melodramatic fantasy of one of his movies - like Careful, where an entire mountain community refrains from sex for fear that their orgasms will trigger an avalanche - is that almost-anomaly, a Canadian cult director. His movies are must-sees, not just for the sad people who go to cult movies, but for people who are themselves cults, like Tom Waits, who has been a fan since he stumbled across a screening of Maddin's second film, Tales From the Gimli Hospital.

The new film is a delirious tale of passion and ostriches set in a land where the sun never sets, shot (intentionally) in the colours of a fifth-generation colour photocopy: magenta, cyan and what Maddin describes as "a sort of urine yellow". It also - untypically for a Maddin film - has stars, including Shelley Duvall, Pascale Bussieres and Alice Krige.
Let's start with Duvall.

"I had a number of people in mind who could do the part," he says. "Amanda Plummer had said at one point she would do it. We kept phoning each other: I kept getting her on her cell phone in her bathtub in Montreal, echoing damply. I remember she phoned me and I was naked and shivering and she was naked and soaking on the other end and we had this long conversation.

"Then, somehow, rather like used to happen in my teenage days, she started not being there. Finally, one day, her sister answered the phone, saying she was busy and things like that...

"So George [Toles, who wrotthe script of Twilight] said 'We need someone like Shelley Duvall'. I started phoning up all the Shelley Duvall types, which became kind of like the philosophical question, you know: Everything tastes like chicken. After a while, everyone looked more or less like Shelley Duvall. I even found myself sitting in Sandra Bernhard's living room, trying to talk her into this movie!

"In the end, I think I'd run through everyone, living or dead, until, finally, it dawned on me: Why don't I just phone up Shelley Duvall? So I did, and she said yes immediately.

"She loved it up in Winnipeg, alarmingly so [Maddin's mother's family was part of the mass Icelandic exodus to Manitoba in the late 19th century, a place they probably chose because there aren't many trees there, either]. Shelley stayed for two weeks after shooting was over. We went for drives that were never ending: Manitoba's huge, it's bigger than Texas. She drives with her right hand on the steering wheel and her left hand holding the camera, taking snap-shots of the sky, which in Manitoba is usually just blue.

"Then you got to a one-hour photo place and you get 48 blue photos back. And she goes 'Look at those! Aren't they beautiful?' You admire them and then get back in the car and drive around and shoot a few more rolls. She is a lot like the character she wrote for herself in Three Women: always got a recipe..."

The origins of the movie?
"Well, we were just sitting around trying to sniff the zeitgeist from our cafe in Winnipeg. We started thinki about Knut Hamsun, who had a bit of a political bumpy time in his late nineties, but who wrote some great unrequited-love stories when he was younger. So we based the script on his novel, Pan, which I think has been adapted into a film about 11 times. We paid off dead Knut's estate: $20,000 for the rights to this thing, but they didn't want credit. As a matter of fact, they demanded: Just the money and no credit!"

And the ostriches?
"George read some Icelandic literature, even though he's just an old WASP. I think he read Halldor Laxness' Independent People, which is kind of an Icelandic saga set on a sheep farm. But the idea of having sheep or chickens on a farm didn't seem very interesting.

"I'd always liked ostriches, and they're starting to have ostrich farms near my home. In fact, it's really surprising to see ostriches running around on a frozen prairie, where it's minus 40.

"The male ostriches are vicious and can kick your face off, but the females
just keep writhing their necks like the reproductive organs of flowers. I like their dusty, floppy little necks: I always think if you strangled one, a bunch of pollen would shake off it.

"They're really dumb, too, but you can control their performances by using the dimmer switch on the lights. Turn the dimmer switch down and they calm down, turn it up and they get alert. But they're really dumb and really stinky.

"Just when you think one is getting friendly with you, it takes a monstrously stinky bowel movement, a great steaming milkshake. And just when you think one is looking at you affectionately, it'll go for one of your eyes because it's sparkling. They ate all the Velcro numbers off the slate. And, because everything had to be synthetic in this movie, we created ostrich noises out of, I think, hog squeals and cicada noises..."

After a while talking with Maddin, his films don't seem so strange any more. I wish I had another page.
 

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