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Guy and his sister grow up on an island. His domineering mother keeps watch over everything from the tip of a lighthouse, his eccentric father experiments in the basement laboratory. Then there are the orphans, on whose heads the adoptive parents later find puzzling wounds. Another brother and sister pair is sent to the island: the Lightball Kids, two detectives that are meant to bring light into the darkness. The brothers and sisters are all yanked into the emotional roller coaster of first love, while something cryptic comes to light in the parents' house. Guy Maddin from Winnipeg, the snowiest place in Canada, has found a language that manages to record an inner world of its own. A film language that's so personal that it writes its author's biography anew, indeed takes on his identity. When in the epilogue he unsuccessfully tries to give the house that he grew up in a new coat of paint, it's already too late: The most intimate, the family film, has grown into an opera spectacle in the classic Maddin format: as a silent film with expressionistic pathos. The newly chosen genre of the detective film announces a structure in the depths of the Maddinesque soul. But its unfathomability is too auspicious. 

Stefanie Schulte Strathaus

Synopsis
The protagonist named Guy Maddin lazes away his understimulated youth with his teenage sister on the mysterious island that he one day stands to inherit. They share this island with a horde of orphans all living together in a lighthouse that doubles as an orphanage. Their every move is vigilantly watched over from the top of the lighthouse by Guy’s overbearing and tyrannical mother while his father, a scientist and inventor, secretly works away in the basement, morning noon and night. When the new parents of recently adopted children discover mysterious head wounds on their young, teen detectives Wendy and Chance Hale – brother and sister sleuths known as the Lightbulb Kids – visit Guy’s island to launch into an investigation. Guy is weak at the knees as he falls hard for Wendy, his first hormondriven crush, while Sis is flushed with rosy-cheeked love for Chance, a love that must be kept hidden from Mother at all costs. As the investigation progresses, it leads the kids into the darkest regions of revelation and repression and spins dangerously out of control as the terrible secrets of Guy’s family are laid bare... 

Film as memoir
Interview with the director
Question: Like many of your films, BRAND UPON THE BRAIN! takes autobiographical themes as a point of departure – can you tell a little about how you and regular co-writer George Toles came to create the screenplay, which memories served as a starting-point? 

Guy Maddin: The very center of my childhood – its mystical, imperious and explosive core – was a long-running battle between my mother and my older sister over her freshly blooming adolescence. The two never put this issue into specific words, but that’s what all the trouble was about – you could tell. They might have been arguing about hairdos or hemlines, but it was really the presence in the house of a new, young adult with a will of her own that really placed these two females in violently opposing positions. I knew any childhood remembrances would have to be built around this war. George Toles suggested an orphanage setting that helped saturate the scenario with children. He also suggested the institution be corrupt, an organ-harvesting operation. That’s when it occurred to me to make the proprietors my parents, for what kid ever understands what their parents are really up to?
Once George and I had established a bunch of dark secrets kept from trembling children, it was a simple matter of bringing in a teen detective – a favorite stock character of mine, and something Louis Feuillade should have gotten around to, if he didn’t already. Then I remembered the agonies of first love and how well this kind of agony suits itself to film, so I combined all these elements and was
pleased to find how simply they worked together. Once the framework seemed solid and honest, I could fill in a million details from my earliest years. The thing is literally a true story – only much, much better!

Question: The film is a melting pot of different genres, Expressionist horror, detective movie, Grand Guignol theater. Can you talk a little about the different influences in the film? 

Guy Maddin: I once read a collection of Grand Guignol plays and decided on the spot I would mount one someday. I never got around to it, but when I discovered I’d be shooting in Seattle I was immediately put in mind of lighthouses, which reminded me of this one play I liked a lot that was set in a lighthouse. I think it had a father and son, both suffering from rabies, trying to kill each other before
the next supply ship came to their lonely island. I simply imported the lurid spirit of this play into my script, which fitted the lurid spirit of my own childhood perfectly! That must have been why I liked the play in the first place. The teen detective genre fused easily with my concerns because I find  all adolescent literature very sexual, for everything that’s mentioned and for everything that isn’t! Nancy Drew! The Hardy Boys! I don’t need to say any more! Teen detectives are forever getting themselves into such titillating jams, such horny jackpots! And nothing is hornier than the fantasy of being a young teen in danger! For me, anyway! The Expressionist horror? Well, that just comes when the subject matter is right and it’s filmed with plenty of plot-significant shadows; long shadows; deep shadows;
mystery-concealing shadows! Shadows mean so much more in black and white than in color! In the former, they represent the absence of light, of knowledge; in the latter the darkness is comprised of mauve and brown grain, meaning who-knows-what! True Expressionism must be shot in black and white. 

Question: BRAND UPON THE BRAIN! is your first film to be shot outside of your home town of Winnipeg. How did this affect the idea of the film as a memoir? 

Guy Maddin: The beach at Puget Sound in Washington looks exactly like the lakeshore at Gimli, the site of my family’s summer home just an hour’s drive from Winnipeg. When cinematographer Ben Kasulke and I were running around the beach with our cameras I felt like I was a kid with a new friend at my lake! We filmed everything that whirled around us out there in that vast seaside playground. I was
completely at home in this faraway place! 

Question: How did you go about casting the film? Sullivan Brown as the young Guy Maddin seems cannily accurate and Kellan Larson as Neddie seems so exude such vulnerability that you know something terrible is going to happen just by looking at him. Because it’s a silent film did you cast from a purely visual/physical perspective?

Guy Maddin: Casting director Joy Fairfield videotaped auditions in Seattle and sent the recordings to me. Since this was a silent film, I knew the most important thing an actor could give me was an interesting and expressive close-up. Informative body movement is also incredibly important, but that was something I only asked to see in the callbacks. I liked Sullivan Brown not because he resembled a young me, although he kind of does – only cuter – but because he reminded me of a young Jean-Pierre Léaud, circa THE 400 BLOWS. At least in the audition he did. He was exceptionally restrained, brooding. Kellan Larson I chose in two seconds – he looks and acts exactly as I pictured him.

Question: Was the film always conceived as a silent movie with live accompaniment? What led you to collaborate with Jason Staczek? 

Guy Maddin: I’ve wanted to do a silent film with live music for a long time, really give the people what they used to get all the time in the ‘20s, the real Grauman’s Chinese Theater experience! A lavish spectacle for the masses, only more lyrical than what we’re used to now! Piers Handling of the Toronto Film Festival once bounced the idea off me, but it got forgotten for a while. An event like that is not cheap to mount. It’s all in the timing. A festival has to want to do it and have the money. Jason Staczek is the house composer at the production company The Film Company. He also happens to be very

good. He hung around the set quite a bit playing mood music for our actors on his giant Hammond organ. Improvising for hours on end, he would put us into a spell with his strange keyboard moans. In this trance it was easy to believe the jerry-built sets in which we worked were real rooms, that we were actually in the eerie turret atop a crumbling lighthouse overlooking the ocean. Jason has composed over 95 minutes of original score by working practically round the clock for many months! 

Question: How do you envision the on-stage actions of the Foley artists, singers and narrators interacting with the film? 

Guy Maddin: The sound effects guys will be thoroughly fascinating to watch! I love Foley artists. When I first met Andy Malcolm in 1992, he enthusiastically conducted an audibly plausible car chase and crash before my disbelieving eyes using nothing but a hot-water bottle and his thumb. This guy can make any noise a movie needs. And he has the eyes of a hawk, too! He can spot a missing sound, like the little rustle a man unfolding his crossed legs might make, at a thousand paces. He hears with his
eyes! And sees with his ears! These Foley artists are bizarrely intriguing! I really needed to make them part of the show! Everyone should see what they do! Of course, I want people to watch my movie, too, and they will because when Foley works it’s paradoxically unnoticeable! So I hope everyone enjoys hopping back and forth between the movie’s interior and exterior. I want something similar to happen with the narrator. The narrator, a kind of extension of the old interlocutor used in the early days of the silents to help keep confused viewers on board, is not going to be used so much for expository purposes. Rather, inspired by what I’ve read of the Japanese benshi tradition of movie narrators who offer personal commentaries on the filmic proceedings, I want my narrator to build up a personal relationship with the audience. Both Louis (Negin) and Isabella (Rossellini) have theater experience. I want them to feel the audience and adjust accordingly, to warm to the audience, dial themselves up or down as they see fit, cajole an experience from them. 

Question: While BRAND UPON THE BRAIN! carries many of your recurring themes, there’s a palpable modernity in the kinetic editing style, the speed with which the title cards flash by, the hand-held camera, etc. Its seems much freer and seems to break out of the “wilful primitivism” and “constructed” feel of your previous work. How do you see BRAND UPON THE BRAIN! fitting into your oeuvre? 

Guy Maddin: I hope the movie is the crowning achievement, so far, of my oeuvre! There’s no pastiche! It’s a new hybrid of previously un-combined filmic elements. There’s nothing dishonest! It has its own pace that’s neither slow nor overly urgent! I’m pleased with the look and I love the music! Music takes the shortest route to the heart, as we all know, and these images, by dint of being welded by Jason to his music so perfectly, get to ride this shortcut right on into the viewer’s heart as well – I hope! That’s 
what silent film does best – it reaches people as instantly and as powerfully as music. That’s the effect I’m counting on from BRAND UPON THE BRAIN! 

Throwing out the rulebook 
Born and raised in Winnipeg, Maddin is Canadian cinema’s most idiosyncratic director, renowned for throwing out the rulebook and setting himself new challenges. Six years ago, he directed a thrilling homage to silent movies in THE HEART OF THE WORLD, one of the greatest short films ever made, and 
he takes this passion to wildly ambitious extremes in the full-length feature that is BRAND UPON THE BRAIN! It was shown at the Elgin, the city’s grandest old theater, where 11 members of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra performed the superb score, conducted by its composer, Jason Staczek, with actor Louis Negin passionately delivering the narration from a box high in the theater, a singer performing several songs in a castrato voice, and a trio of Foley artists, wearing white lab coats and headsets and achieving the myriad sound effects with admirable precision. The film is sub-titled “A Remembrance in 12 Chapters”, and although the central character is named Guy Maddin, we can assume that the writer-director is taking wild liberties with autobiography. Maddin embellishes this surreal scenario with wild pubescent fantasies, letting his vivid imagination run riot for a movie that is often uproariously funny and surprisingly touching. A magical experience. 

Michael Dwyer, in: Irish Times, September 12, 2006 

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