We couldn’t leave the 2015 Sundance Film Festival without snagging you an interview with Guy Maddin, the iconic Canadian director of The Saddest Music in the World and Brand Upon the Brain! We all had fun reviewing sexy romantic comedies and earnest coming of age dramas, but Sundance is also a hot spot for revolutionary art house cinema, and it doesn’t get much more art house than The Forbidden Room, a kaleidoscopic anthology of fever dream stories, based on the plot descriptions of lost silent era movies.
Check Out: Sundance Review: You Can’t Leave ‘The Forbidden Room’
William Bibbiani sat down with Guy Maddin and his co-director Evan Johnson to find out more about The Forbidden Room, and let the filmmakers try to explain themselves. Ask Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson about poisoned skeleton leotards and they will happily tell you all about it. Bu ask them why Udo Kier has an irrepressible butt fixation, and suddenly they get coy.
Sundance may be winding down but our coverage most certainly is not, so keep checking back for more reviews, interviews and exclusive videos from Sundance 2015!
Check Out: Five Exclusive Teasers for ‘The Forbidden Room’
From the Press Release:
THE FORBIDDEN ROOM is Guy Maddin’s ultimate epic phantasmagoria. Honoring classic cinema while electrocuting it with energy, this Russian nesting doll of a film begins (after a prologue on how to take a bath) with the crew of a doomed submarine chewing flapjacks in a desperate attempt to breathe the oxygen within. Suddenly, impossibly, a lost woodsman wanders into their company and tells his tale of escaping from a fearsome clan of cave dwellers. From here, Maddin and co-director Evan Johnson take us high into the air, around the world, and into dreamscapes, spinning tales of amnesia, captivity, deception and murder, skeleton women and vampire bananas. Playing like some glorious meeting between Italo Calvino, Sergei Eisenstein and a perverted six year-old child, THE FORBIDDEN ROOM is Maddin’s grand ode to lost cinema. Created with the help of master poet John Ashbery, the film features Mathieu Amalric, Udo Kier, Charlotte Rampling, Geraldine Chaplin, Roy Dupuis, Clara Furey, Louis Negin, Maria de Medeiros, Jacques Nolot, Adèle Haenel, Amira Casar & Elina Löwensohn as a cavalcade of misfits, thieves and lovers, all joined in the joyful delirium of the kaleidoscopic viewing experience.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
