The book My Winnipeg comes off somewhat differently than the film — it reads like a sort of long poem (with footnotes)…
I have so much trouble with poetry myself that it’s not something I can — there are not many poets I can read that enter into me. Most of them make me feel like I’m on the wrong side of the exclusivity fence.
It wasn’t my goal to match the tone of the film with the book… nor was it, delightful as the idea strikes me, an attempt at a novelization of the movie. I’d love to try to write one now. I’d like to take one of my old movies and write a novelization of it. There would be no demand for it, just as there is virtually no demand for the movies themselves, but just the idea. With novelizations you don’t even need to write well. Maybe I’ll hire someone.…”
There are other differences too. The book has much more material than the movie did.
There was so much stuff that I wanted to put into the movie — I literally had enough for Winnipeg Alexanderplatz, a 16-hour TV series — it seemed such a shame that none of that stuff would see the light of day. Some of it didn’t make the movie because I had to admit that it was really — the screen was not the best ultimate place for it. Some of the stuff seemed that it needed to be read, rather than looked at or listened to. And so this was my chance to cram some of that stuff in.
Plus there’s one other throughline narrative that seemed to belong alongside the family narrative in the movie — the story of my dad’s mother and how she poked his eye out on his first birthday. And they just seemed to go together so nicely. I was tempted to include it in the movie but there just wasn’t time.
Now the film was commissioned by the Documentary Channel, but it takes a pretty interesting — not entirely factual — approach to “documentary.”
Now that I’ve finished the movie, finished the book, finished with all that stuff, I actually had some distance and I was musing about what I’ve been doing. For the last few years I’ve identified for myself what melodrama is, and I’ve decided to make melodramas because I love the idea.
I read this definition of melodrama in an Eric Bentley book on the theatre, and he just talks about, melodrama is not — what everyone thinks it is — an exaggeration of the truth. That would suggest, in the act of exaggerating, distorting the truth. What it is is an un-inhibition of the truth.
Think of what your dreams are like. If you’re lucky, you get to possess the person you lust after, you get to cry out loud in public, you get to hit people. You get to act like a child. Your dreams can be like a form of childhood wish fulfillment or a display of childlike fears. They’re complete un-inhibitions of what you repress in civilized life.
Good melodramas skilfully un-inhibit the truth so you can see it better. It doesn’t really distort it, it un-inhibits it….
But I realized that I’ve been using the same approach with documentary, just un-inhibiting my feelings about my subject. And so I’ve basically made — not a “docufantasia” which is what I’d called it — a documentary melodrama, or a melodramatic documentary. It’s completely uninhibited.
So the truth is all there in all my childlike... they’re childish, they’re almost puerile wish-fulfillment things. I wish that the Winnipeg Arena were back so I have someone raising it again. I wish I could live in my childhood home so I, for the sake of the movie, I sublet the place and move back in. I wish my brother were still alive so I hire an actor to play him. It’s really melodramatic, puerile wish fulfillment, but it’s all true. People have asked me how much the movie is true, and they mean the literal truth. But I’ve always said it’s all true.
You’re essentially a Winnipeg storyteller. Did you set out when you started making films to chronicle your hometown?
No, I didn’t. When I started out in the ’80s, I already had 25 years under my belt of watching Canadian movies that I clearly didn’t like and I was determined to react against them and to make things that couldn’t be pinpointed as Canadian, let alone Winnipegian. But right away after my first movie I actually, in an attempt at a metaphor, identified a setting as The Dominion of Forgetfulness. And I remember [Toronto Star film critic] Geoff Pevere wrote a review citing the Dominion of Forgetfulness as Canada itself, or something like that. And so I realized, I better just go with this.
Besides, it was fun… putting it on film — which to me, a child of the 20th century, was the best way of mythologizing something. I just had so much fun that I had to abandon my initial promise to myself… and I had to go about aggressively, in an American way, or at least anything but a
Canadian way, mythologizing things.
Canadian movies always seem to create discomfort in the room as if a loud and inappropriate noise from the body had just been heard by everyone…. But I’m pretty Canadian.
Why is mythology important to a city?
You really feel the lack of it. Growing up in Winnipeg, my view of the world was mostly through the picture tube… and it just really seemed like we weren’t partaking of the world. We were never mentioned, we weren’t part of the fun mythology….
It’s just important to try to confuse myth and fact and make it part of your fabric, but we didn’t have any in Winnipeg. It just feels — there was nothing real — or even fake — about us at all. There was nothing we talked about amongst ourselves. Not only amongst Americans in TV-land, but even amongst ourselves. I didn’t even hear about “If Day” [the strange-but-true tale of a full-dress mock invasion of Winnipeg by the Nazis that took place during World War II to encourage fundraising for the war effort] until I heard about it from an American shooting a movie.
I had wanted to mythologize Winnipeg, but I was worried, “who’s going to want to watch a travelogue about Winnipeg?” But then I realized that there’s such a thing as piling up the specificity so high that it just becomes recognizable as every city. Maybe even world capitals.
In the book and the film, you return again and again to your desire to leave Winnipeg. Why do you think people always feel the need to break out of their hometowns?
We’re all aware of how big the world is and in your wildest dreams you always feel that you owe it to yourself in a short life to go live somewhere else, and if you’re not doing that you always feel like someone’s looking down on you, especially if you do come from a pretty humble place. Believe me, as a filmmaker, I’m asked in every Q&A, “what the hell are you still living in Winnipeg for?”
But you’ve achieved a tremendous level of success by the standards of art — or experimental — film. Have you ever even been tempted, as a filmmaker, to go to Hollywood, and do something more mainstream?
If I have a regret, it’s that I wish a few years ago someone had pushed me to reach outside myself and try to make something more conventional.
But I think I would have failed at it. I just don’t think I have the technical expertise, and I was never going to be offered the kind of budget that would afford me a crew of support people that would see me across — I would have just been handed a project that would have immediately left my control.
And besides, I’ve really enjoyed myself these last few years making pictures that are completely self-generated, working with my usual collaborators. I’ve been lucky. I didn’t plan to be a filmmaker and I’ve never planned a single step of my filmmaking career, so I’ve been pretty lucky.”
In the book, during the interview with Michael Ondaatje…
For which I was really hungover, by the way. I wish I wasn’t, but I was.
… you talk about curing yourself of obsessions by making films about them. Did the film cure you of Winnipeg?
I was really hoping it would cure me of Winnipeg, but it kind of cured me of the need to leave it. So now I’m quite comfortable with spending part of the time there and part of the time here [in Toronto].… There’s no need to even ask the question “should I leave it?” now. I’m really comfortable living in more than one place. I’m a WestJetsetter.”
One cliché of Canadian identity that turns out to have been a huge part of your life is hockey. Your father was the coach of Team Canada and you say you were born at Winnipeg Arena. Have you ever thought of making a movie about hockey?
I have a bit of a problem with sports movies. Sports is just something that matters in two time periods. It matters in the past as lore and it matters only in the present as a mechanism of suspense. Once the suspense — watching a pre-recorded game feels wrong. It fills you with that sort of post-masturbatory ickiness, you’ve just achieved something in the wrong time and place by watching sports again.
I don’t think you can recreate in a fictional context the kind of sports thrills that you get from watching real sports in real time. It’s just as tough to get as it would be to adapt a philosophy text.…
You know, I should just do it already. But it’s got to be the right story. I should take Euripides' Trojan Women — which I’ve never read but it probably still plays after 2,500 years. I love Electra and Medea, I’m sure it’s just as great. Is Trojan Women the one where all the men have to walk around with two-foot phalluses? Just put some hockey tape on them and away you go.