Tales from the Gimli Hospital: Guy Maddin Talks About His Now-Reconstructed Debut, 34 Years Later

By Liam Lacey

Set in a late-19th century hospital during an epidemic in the Manitoba town of Gimli – longtime home to Icelandic immigrants - Guy Maddin’s first feature, Tales from the Gimli Hospital, depicts the rivalry of two men:  Einar the Lonely (Kyle McCulloch) and the recently widowed Gunnar (Michael Gottli), who vie for the attention of their nurses.

Dense with visual invention, humour and melodrama, Gimli, established the 32-year-old Guy Maddin as a unique sensibility in world cinema, with 12 features, short films, three books and art installations. But, until he was approached by Ron Mann a couple of years ago with the idea, he hadn’t really thought of a restoration.

Kyle McCulloch fishes for attention from his a nurse in Tales from the Gimli Hospital.

 Because of his fascination with the look of old film stock, he always thought: “This is a film that will never need to be restored. It will just get better the more destroyed it gets. But I didn’t anticipate digital streaming and things like that. There’s no way that the VHS or DVD caliber transfer is good enough. It’s full of digital and analog artifacts that have nothing to do with the way film decays, which you know, I was obviously into. I was hot for that at the time.”

In fact, Maddin was never happy with the original film stock Gimli was printed on and now sees something closer to the film he had in mind: “While it still retains its noir and expressionistic shadows, those shadows are blacker, and more nuanced and reveal more stuff. It’s less austere now. In other ways, it looks the way I wanted it to and was disappointed it couldn’t look like 34 years ago.”

Over a digressive phone call (edited for length), Maddin talked about the surprisingly personal story behind the complicated artifice of Tales from the Gimli Hospital and how he forged an approach to filmmaking in which, “way too much is almost enough.”

CLICK HERE to read about Telefilm’s Canadian Cinema — Re-ignited, which sees Tales from the Gimli Hospital Redux in national release, and other Canadian classics resurrected in 4K.

Tales from the Gimli Hospital Redux: TIFF Bell Lightbox, Sept. 30-Oct 6; Static Cinema Festival (Australia) Sept. 30-Oct.6; Cinéma Moderne Montreal (Oct. 5-Oct. 11), The IFC Centre, New York (Oct. 14). The American Cinematheque, Los Angeles (Oct. 16). Tales from the Gimli Hospital Redux debuts on Hollywood Suite Nov. 9.

ORIGINAL-CIN:  Who was the guy who made Tales from the Gimli Hospital 34 years ago?

GUY MADDIN: “I’m not sure I know the answer. I think I do remember this. I was, most of the time, very confident that I knew what I was doing. What I was supposedly doing, I’m not sure now.

Guy Maddin

I felt I was making some sort of trippy experience that felt good that would be submerging viewers in long forgotten or maybe just unknown audio and visual textures that I really enjoyed. And I thought, “Geez how could other people not enjoy these too?”

I actually thought I was doing the world a favour by giving them these experiences. I know it sounds like monomaniacal hubris, with a fever on top of it or something like that. But I was just sort of quietly confident that I was making something that wasn’t just a wanky art film.

I had just enough autobiography in it, and not just the Icelandic Canadian culture I grew up with. The beauty salon that my mom and dad ran had an almost exclusively Icelandic clientele.

I had been through a pretty harrowing nightmare of jealousy for a few years, just in a miserable relationship where jealousy was provoked at every turn, with a bucket of gasoline thrown on top of it for good measure. And I, really, by the time I finished this movie, I’d worked out my agonized relationship with jealousy and kind of conquered it, almost like beating smallpox, or beating COVID, or something like that.

This male rivalry had got so intense that, even after the female corner of the triangle was removed from the equation, that rivalry still had so much intensity and momentum, it was almost into queer and questioning territory. By the end you know, this obsession with one’s rival became so impassioned it definitely transcended gender and sexuality.

Anyway, I survived that and I thought, well, there is a plot sort of wafting around in the vapours of this movie. This is how one can pass through the fevers of jealously and come out the other side with a cooler head, not necessarily a better person but alive and a little more acceptable to society. It was grounded in something I understood.

I had also started off trying to make an adaptation of Doestovesky’s The Eternal Husband which has a similar premise: A man is confronted by another man who he’d cuckolded, and this is long after the woman who cuckolded him, where one of the triangles members is gone. 

I started off sort of trying to rhyme that Doestoevsky story with my own life and it sort of gave me courage that this was a story with a great pedigree that I could build on. But I reread the book recently and found almost nothing of the Dostoevsky. It was just a way of starting and then knowing what I wanted to make — something to drive my Icelandic relatives crazy.”

O-C: I once interviewed the author and professor, W.D. Valgardson, who was from Gimli. He talked about the psychological trauma of immigration of the Icelandic community who fled a devastating volcano and were unprepared for the brutal Manitoba weather, followed by the smallpox epidemic. Viewers might be surprised how much of the film was rooted in that nightmarish history.

MADDIN: “The traumas were piled so high they became almost hilarious.   Not, of course, if you had relatives slain by the many afflictions visited upon them. But they were really piled on almost to Monty Python-ish heights. But it’s about real people whose descendants in Gimli I know.

In a way, Icelanders have a way of telling these stories that seem timeless. When my mom told me stories about her childhood, it sounded like she was describing a childhood in the 11th century. She just had a way of using really broad strokes and there was a lyricism to it.

She wasn’t a writer, but she told a story from that right saga distance — they don’t bother describing what faces look like or anything, but everyone is a full-bodied figure in a tapestry yarn.

There were all these customers talking in Icelandic or accented English beneath the roar of the hair dryers in our family beauty salon, and I was inundated with Icelandic stories and genealogy.

They’re obsessed with genealogy. I was really pushing back against all this with my movie, but now that I’m older, I think a lot of the bratty little shit I was to be doing that. But I just had  to do it, you know? Now that it’s 34 years later, and all those people are 34 years more in the past or gone forever in most cases, I’m deeply moved by what they went through and their take on their own pre-histories.”

O-C: One of your stars, Kyle McCulloch, who played Einar, has gone on to success as a writer, on South Park and SpongeBob Square Pants. The other, the late Michael Gottli, who died in 2014, was severely  injured when his car hit a moose in northwestern Ontario in 1994, leaving him with speech and mobility issues. Can you talk about how he came to be part of the “deleted scene” in Tales from the Gimli Hospital Redux?

MADDIN: Michael’s injury gave us a chance to work together again, and we shot what we decided to describe as a “deleted scene” from the Gimli Hospital 11 years after making the movie. That’s the one thing that sort of makes this film a “redux” in the Francis Ford Coppola meaning of the word [i.e. Apocalypse Now Redux].

The scene is early in the movie, where there’s a puppet show being performed in the hospital as a sort of anaesthetic for Gunther to take his mind off his leg surgery. With the puppet show, he seems to be in a dream or hallucination in which a romantically involved happy couple run into trouble when the male hears a siren call of two fish being slapped together.

And he kind of transitions into another gender of sorts and then there’s big orgy of sexual confusion resulting in him being caught in a fish net. And then the thing ends and it’s back to the puppet show.

So that’s something we shot in 1999 in one day, on the day that John Kennedy Jr. died, by coincidence, which happened to be on the TV in the next room to my bedroom where we shot it.

I always told Gottli that I would try to get it into the movie someday and now Ron [Mann] has given me the chance.

I actually think it helps the movie a little bit: It gives it a kind of adrenaline and a little preview of the cross-cut hallucinations toward the end.