Winnipeg filmmaker Guy Maddin filmed his latest movie The Saddest Music in the World in what he is convinced is the coldest city in the world.
"We built our sets in an abandoned factory in Winnipeg. There were days the temperature dipped to -45C. The crew suffered indoor windchill," says Maddin.
The freezing temperature put a chill on Maddin's plans to shoot nude scenes with his two leading ladies, Isabella Rossellini and Maria de Madeiros.
"They had both agreed to nude scenes but it would have been inhuman of me to hold them to their promises given how cold it was in our makeshift studio.
"I actually contemplated dragging portions of the set to their hotel rooms, but the cost was prohibitive."
In Saddest Music, Rossellini plays Lady Port-Huntley, a beer baroness in Depression-era Winnipeg, who hosts an international competition to find the most mournful music in the world.
De Madeiros plays a nymphomaniac with amnesia who's the current lover of an American showman, played by Mark McKinney.
The Saddest Music in the World has been a hit with festival audiences from Venice and London to Asia, Australia and Toronto.
It's a surrealistic, impressionistic musical comedy that Maddin says pays tribute to American cinema of the 1930s and is a project he almost turned down.
"The original screenplay had been kicking around for almost 15 years. It was written by Kazuo Ishiguro, the author of Remains of the Day, based on a book he wrote in the 1980s," explains Maddin.
"Atom Egoyan brought the script to me. He had toyed with the idea of making it until the opportunity came up for him to film his pet project Ararat."
Maddin says he was "starving and unemployed but I was still reluctant to tackle it because it was set in London in the 1980s. It was something that didn't connect with me."
That's when Maddin's long-time writing partner George Toles came up with the idea of setting the bizarre story in Winnipeg during the Depression.
Maddin coaxed Rossellini into coming to Winnipeg for almost three months, which most people in the Canadian film industry consider a major coup. "I wish I had a real Hollywood-style version of what happened but it really is disappointingly uninspired.
"I sent her the screenplay. She phoned me. We talked. I told her I didn't have any money. She said she thought it sounded like fun and the next thing I knew she was in my kitchen talking about my movies, this movie and movies in general."
Maddin admits he was a bit shocked when he picked Rossellini up at the Winnipeg airport. "Somewhere en route to Winnipeg she'd gone into an airport washroom and cut her own hair. She also wanted to be blonder as a tribute to her mother (Ingrid Bergman).
"Instead of tampering with what hair she had left we decided on giving her an outrageous blond wig. It worked because if she turns her head a certain way, she becomes Ingrid."
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