(This interview originally appeared in September, 2006, as part of our coverage of the Toronto International Film Festival)

Great clouds of mystery swirl around Guy Maddin’s eighth feature. While there have been no advance screenings of Brand Upon the Brain!, press releases and Internet rumours suggest that it’s another exploration of the Winnipeg auteur’s twisted, mythic biography, mingled with a kind of gender-bending Hardy Boys adventure and Grand Guignol violence. Like his earlier peep show melodrama Cowards Bend the Knee, it’s an entirely silent picture, in black-and-white Super 8.

The first public screening promises great surprises: Brand Upon the Brain! will screen with accompaniment by members of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, live narration by actor Louis Negin, special sound effects and a performance by a genuine (according to Maddin) castrato. From his cottage on Lake Winnipeg, the filmmaker spills a few more juicy details.

So why all the secrecy surrounding this particular film?

Well, we figured it worked for Snakes on a Plane, so why not this? No, there’s a practical reason, and it rhymes with a thematic reason. The film isn’t finished yet, so there doesn’t exist with a version anywhere with a score. And the narration hasn’t been completely written yet. I want to massage that with Louis Negin before the performance in Toronto. And then later re-massage it with Isabella Rossellini, when she does the narration for the New York Film Festival. But thematically, it suits me as well, because in this highly autobiographical work, I get to talk about how secretive my family was. Or how secretive a child my family produced. I just learned early on that if whatever news you brought up was going to be greeted with instant hostility, then don’t bring up anything. I’ve always envied families where kids could talk about things, about the weather even, without opening a big can of hysteria. (Then of course there are daughters who promptly phone their parents with news that they’ve slept with you.) There are all sorts of places on the openness spectrum; I’m not sure I envy all of them or that all of them are healthier than mine. But secrecy just comes with so many adjunct pleasures. Just being stuffed in a closet so long makes everything seem illicit. It might make you a slightly shifty, creepy person, a sketchy individual, to others. But you can envy all those sketchy people skulking around. It’s like they’re at a secrecy spa, really enjoying themselves.

That secrecy aside, can you give us a little description of the film?

Well, it’s the story of a boy who’s kind of like me. Wait, let me back up. It’s the story of a teen girl detective who visits an orphanage where some pretty eerie abuses have been going on. There she meets the adolescent son and daughter of the proprietors. Gets a massive crush on the daughter. Goes into teen boy detective drag to seduce the latter while the former, the son, gets a big crush on both the original teen girl detective and what he thinks is the teen boy detective. There’s kind of a romantic triangle involving just two people there. I decided I should describe that as dangerous geometry for children.

This is the second time you’ve had a protagonist named Guy Maddin?

Yeah, I did it earlier on in Cowards Bend the Knee.

Yes, and last time we talked about that film, you said the Guy protagonist was a way of having a stand-in for yourself and then publicly punishing yourself. It was an “ersatz way of working through [your] problems.”

In Cowards, I do a lot of pretty cowardly things. It was kind of a way of saying, “Look, I’m owning up to all this stuff now.” But I’m also hoping that people will recognize themselves in me as well. They don’t have to step forward as much as I have, in some kind of evangelical way, and say, “I, too, am a sinner.” But I just want them to acknowledge that this kind of behaviour is a little more common than they might think. Luis Buñuel cynicism, you know. I just want them to acknowledge that I’m an insightful, literary filmmaker [laughs].

The Guy character in this film doesn’t operate in the same way as in Cowards, does he?

No, I don’t think he does. In Cowards, it was easy to just be masochistic. It might be off-putting, but you can’t really be called on it. Here, I’ve set myself up more as a victim, and you can hear referees’ whistles blowing, calling me for gross misconduct of self-pity. I thought I might be able to avoid too much self-pity by being as honest as possible, though. I don’t feel sorry for myself. I’ve always described my childhood as the happiest years of my life. The movie could be construed as an apology for never growing up sexually [laughs]. And when you are letting yourself off the hook for sexual immaturity, that’s no longer just self-pity—that’s outrageously out of line. Who are you to forgive yourself for all the things that people have complained about you over the years? I don’t want to give away the ending, but you’ll see. I think all the people who stockpile charges of self-pity against me during the first 90 per cent of the movie will have to release that stuff by the end. And then they’ll either feel like hosing themselves down or hosing me down.

Where did the project originate?

There’s a film studio in Seattle called The Film Company. A guy there named Gregg Lachow started it about two years ago, and it’s the only not-for-profit film studio in the world, other than state-run things. (Actually, it’s no longer not-for-profit, because they were starting to not be not-profit enough.) But now it’s really mission-driven; they invite filmmakers to submit projects. They don’t ask to see a script, they don’t green-light scripts, and they don’t accept solicitations from other filmmakers. They just give filmmakers a call in the night, inviting them to come. It had to be an all-Seattle cast and crew, which worked out really well. So I got this call from Gregg and soon found myself quickly preparing a script. Got a lot of help from George Toles, my regular collaborator, right off the bat. I knew that I didn’t have time to write a full talking script, because dialogue takes a long time. And I knew it would be best to go back to the personal biography well again. There are some really mythically strange things that happened in my childhood, and I thought now was the time to tap them. While there are details and structures that don’t correspond to my life, the rest just went right in. I knew I could draw from an inexhaustible source—my past—for tons of details. It was just a matter of getting a narrative arc that held it all in place.