Long one of the country’s most underappreciated directors, John Paizs enjoys a bit of attention when the Royal Cinema (608 College) hosts a mini-retrospective on April 10, co-presented by indie-music festival Over the Top. The Winnipeg native’s most dearly loved achievement remains Crime Wave, an indescribably odd 1985 comedy about a frustrated screenwriter who’s great at beginnings and endings but can’t write middles (we see the fruits of his labours in hilariously abbreviated vignettes). Some believe it to be the funniest movie this country ever produced.

The bill at the Royal also includes the 1981 short Springtime in Greenland and 1999’s alien-invasion flick Top of the Food Chain, which shares Crime Wave’s demented sense of humour even if Paizs considered himself a gun for hire. Director in residence at the Canadian Film Centre, Paizs has been busy teaching for much of this decade but as he noted in an interview last week, the cult of Crime Wave has continued to grow.

For a 23-year-old movie that never really had a theatrical release, isn’t on DVD and has mostly been seen on aging VHS tapes, Crime Wave has had quite the life — when did you realize it had such an ardent following?
In the early ’90s, I was contacted by the South Carolina Arts Commission, asking if I wanted to travel with a print of Crime Wave to six cities in the southeastern states. While [I was] down there, young people would show up at the screenings and say that friends of theirs had made them copies of the video — this happened at virtually every screening. So I saw there was this cult — a very small one and very widespread, but it existed. When I had a MySpace page a few years ago, people would still contact me about the film.

Do you think one reason for its perennial appeal is that it’s a story about blocked creativity?
I think so. There are a lot of people who want to create art, but there’s all the fear that comes with it. In Crime Wave, I have this character who could think of great beginnings and endings but couldn’t think of the middles. That captured people’s imaginations — it was a fun way of describing the creative process. The movie has this lo-fi thing as well so it seems almost tailor-made to speak to people who had very little resources or were just at the beginning of one of these endeavours.

The movie also remains very, very funny. Why do you think Crime Wave’s brand of humour has dated so well?
I see a lot of what I was doing in shows like The Simpsons or Family Guy. They’re always pushing the boundaries of good taste. And there are these sudden cutaways to something that relates to something that was just said, which is another technique I used in Crime Wave. Its humour was maybe a little bit ahead of the curve. That was completely uncalculated, though. I was really just trying to make myself laugh and this is the kind of humour that passed as such among me and my friends.

You’ve made other features since but never another one from one of your own scripts. How close have you gotten to making another?
There was one script I showed to Alliance and it got to the person who’s just below the person who can decide to take it on. When he got back to us, he said almost sheepishly that his boss thought it was too big a movie. These days, it would’ve been done with CGI but then it would’ve been animatronics and it would’ve been quite expensive. If there’s one mistake I’ve made more than once since Crime Wave it’s that I’ve written too large. I made five half-hour 16mm films before Crime Wave and I knew I’d be doing these on arts council grants; I always wrote to the budgets I knew I could get. For some reason, I just lost sight of that very fundamental reality.

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