INTERVIEW WITH MARK McKINNEY:
When shooting the film, did you have any sense of how the footage would turn out?
Not a complete sense, no. But I did have a sense of how the story was going to turn out.
So much of the film is the style, how much style was present on set?
I think a lot. I knew [director Guy Maddin's] work. I didn't come to this cold. I knew his stuff and I liked it. I knew it was going to be a sort of surreal, dreamscape-y kind of piece. But still a lot of the narrative would be straightforward, but that he'd be cutting the way he did.
To you this was a linear script?
Well, to me, Mark the actor, it was kind of a linear script, because there is no way to conjoin with what he's doing as a visual director and stylist and artist. You play the character.
What did the script read like?
God, you should read it. It is so good. It's one of my favorite reads ever. Like the movie, I think it sucks you into a sort of dream state, but there's nothing illogical about it. When you have Maria De Medeiros talking about, "My tapeworm says to me…," it makes complete sense in the context of the script.
How did you develop your voice pattern?
I didn't. That's me. I didn't put on a '40s pattern. I didn't speak up. The dialogue had a certain rhythmic cripsness to it that I just kind of followed. I think I started off by saying what I thought would be a clever '40s character and I dumped it because it seemed phony. The scenes had their own dramatic-comedic playability. I found that I was playing it straight.
Maybe since we've seen you as so many different characters, we don't know your real voice?
Perhaps. One of the things about it is when I saw it at the premiere in Toronto, I sort of was sitting off to the side and I didn't get the full soundscape of it. When we played it in Sundance, it was in this really beautifully equipped theater, and you could hear what the sound engineer and Guy were up to with the sound itself. I remember reading or talking to him about how he likes to listen to crackles and pops sometimes, and make that part of the texture of the movie itself. So maybe there is a certain tweaking on my voice, I don't know.
On set, was Guy Maddin preoccupied with technical things or available to the actors?
Very available. We did a bit of rehearsal, actually independently of Guy in the beginning. But it was a very open, very free set.
Were you aware of his work on technical matters?
Well, I think the technique he uses and admires from a lot of the old movies is sort of simpler in a way. There weren't CGI and green screens obviously, or incredibly complex camera movements. He was carting around the camera on his shoulder.
Did Isabella Rossellini feel restricted by her character's stationary nature?
I don't think so. I mean, if she felt that way, it certainly doesn't look that way on screen. She's really dynamic.
Did sketch comedy prepare you for the tonal shifts that happen in this film?
I don't know. In comedy, like in the kind of comedy I did where we'd write all different sort of pieces, and some of them were fairly dramatic - or at least the acting was played dramatically - or we would go into weird areas or we would use style shifts in sketches to add another layer to whatever we were writing about. And also I personally, in a lot of my sketches, I like to write a funny sketch but have the character be something you'd play really straight so that he's winking at the audience.
What is your saddest music?
Oh, Guy's got the best answer to that. He says, and I agree, the saddest song in the world is Happy Birthday. Not because it means the advance of age. It's the moment the birthday cake is put down in front of you, there's an expectation of joy you never quite seem to achieve.
What do you think of current sketch comedy?
It's weird. Comedy shifts, morphs into different places. I think at any given time, there's two or three great comedy labs going, and it can be everything from "Spongebob Squarepants" to "The Daily Show," to "Conan" to "The Office." I think there was a while where sketch comedy troupes were sort of more en vogue and I think that's not right now. But I think there will be another one. I'm sure there will be another one that comes along, like "Python" and "SCTV" and "Saturday Night Live."
