Guy Maddin (Sun file photo)

To start, surrealist filmmaking legend Guy Maddin would like to set a few things straight.

Despite what audiences may assume after checking out his new -- and supposedly autobiographical -- film Brand Upon the Brain!, Maddin did not grow up in a lighthouse, his parents did not run a Dickensian orphanage, and his childhood was not quite as Grand Guignol-esque as the movie itself might suggest.

At least, not his real-life childhood. The childhood he remembers in his mind -- well, that's another story altogether.

"It's 100% emotionally autobiographical, especially those kind of emotions that are pure colour, and pure feeling," says Maddin of the film, from a phone booth near his home in Winnipeg (his own phone was disconnected while he was shopping Brand around the States). "Each one of us becomes a poet when we remember our own childhood, because we're remembering a time before we had made sense of the world."

So it in turn makes sense that Maddin's film -- shot with Seattle's Puget Sound filling in for Gimli -- features such "episodic substitutions" as a telescope that allows his tyrannical mother to keep tabs on him at all times, a gender-bending teen detective who doubles (or should that be triples?) as the love interest, and a nefarious plot involving harvested organs and tell-tale scars.

Also that Maddin's shooting style -- a mix of early silent films, expressionistic horror, and surrealistic coming-of-age stories -- should lend itself so well to what he insists is a reminiscence.

"I'd been itching to do a childhood-recollection film since I first picked up a camera," he says, noting he was inspired by such classics as Zero For Conduct and Faces of Children. "We all tend to remember our childhood both melodramatically and lyrically, and those are two of the things that silent films convey the best."

Pragmatic concerns required Brand to be shot without sound, but Maddin thought it would be a shame if it enjoyed merely "the typical silent film shelf life."

So he rounded up a castrato, some musicians and a couple of Foley artists to create sound effects, then staged the film as a live event with a rotating lineup of narrators -- among them Isabella Rossellini, Lou Reed, Crispin Glover and Alanis Morissette.

"I liked it if they had some kind of echo within the story," he explains. "Isabella likes to wear men's suits ... so she was basically doing a Marlene Dietrich drag routine, echoing the (teen detective's) drag routine in the movie."

Glover proved an expert at reinventing a line reading, and even Morissette acquitted herself admirably at a Los Angeles trade delegation attended by Gary Doer.

But not so much Reed, an idol from Maddin's own teenage years, who apparently didn't feel stimulated enough -- by the script or the images on screen.

"He fell asleep halfway through," Maddin deadpans, adding a ladder had to be raised to Reed's perch in the narration booth so the aging hipster could be roused in time for the end credits.

When Brand is released in theatres tomorrow, it'll be with pre-recorded narration by Rossellini, but Maddin says he isn't worried about audiences missing out on the live audio experience.

In fact, he says he'd heard similar concerns from people who thought audiences might be too distracted by the live goings-on to pay proper attention to the plot.

"I'm willing to have it go either way ... All my favourite films keep revealing things that I missed out on the first couple times," says Maddin. "So I'm happy to have people miss things in mine ... It's a lot better than having softballs lobbed at them."

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