A scene from My Winnipeg Courtesy of IFC Films

Was it not therapeutic for you to go back?
Yeah. But also going into the Winnipeg Arena while it was being demolished... it made me very sad to go back because it was changed and I realized how irreversible time is. We all know that, but to feel it is another thing. Some things are almost so big that you can't really feel them. You can't comprehend a billion, but if you could actually feel what a billion was it would be overwhelming. The end of something is sometimes just a fact. It is not "feelable." But to be inside an arena or to be inside a home you are no longer allowed to live in had the sadness of irretrievability about it. Yet going in there with a camera somehow enabled me to make that place my own. It made me feel special in relation to the arena for the first time since I had been a stick boy there, and it made me feel like its demolition was mine. I did have so many fond memories and so many sexually defining moments in there.

You've described the film as a docu-fantasia. There are clearly fantastical elements in the film, yet the film's fantasy is rooted in a nostalgia.
Yeah. There is probably a more accurate German word for it involving a lot of regret and torn souls.

But your Winnipeg focuses more on the '60s and '70s and even the time before that. You say you are revisiting it for the last time. Is your leaving both physical and emotional?
I think I will leave because I have learned from the other eight long films that I have made in my career [that]... by the end of the year it takes to make the movie, it just turns the component parts of the film into so much work [that] things that are highly personal and things [that] matter a lot to [the film] somehow get converted into parts and pieces of a bigger thing and you get sick of them. Especially after a film opens and some people give you their feedback; it has finally converted [into] genuine memories. That is when the real false memories kick in. Then you are remembering that they are just facts that need to be edited together and test-screened and then discussed in chats like we are having now... and then finally you just end up remembering the film version of your obsession rather than the actual obsession. So you are cured. It is therapeutic but in a way that you wouldn't expect. I didn't work my way back through the past and find a very telling moment and then confront it and work through my issues. I just buried it under more crap but this time filmic crap until it was quarantined in filmic clutter.

What was your process? Did you just start with concepts and ideas, or was there a shooting script?
Yes, there was. I really tried to cheat the documentary filmmaking tradition because that involves an objectivity, a disinterestedness, a really high shooting ratio. Conventional fiction indie films have, say, a 10:1 shooting ratio. Documentaries have 100 or 200:1 shooting ratio. Sometimes you spend the first year just logging your rushes and then, as the saying goes, you don't find your subject until you are in the editing room. Then you have to go back and re-shoot it. I just wanted to avoid all of that. I had a bunch of anecdotes that I wanted to convey and I felt they sort of spooned each other or found echoes in each other in a thematic way. I just wanted to get those out. And then maybe during the writing of the narration, which I did by improvising in five- or ten-minute brief chunks with a recording engineer, [then] maybe we would be able to cut together something that was a whole. I tried to plan it as much as possible. But this movie of all the movies I have made had the most I-don't-know-what-I-am-doing kind of feeling. I felt really helpless at times.

Was that good for you?
Yeah, it was. It really was. At the beginning of my filmmaking career — alleged career — I used to storyboard every scene and I kept the camera on a tripod all the time. And I would hear story about how [Rainer Werner] Fassbinder who would make six features a year, would just show up on the set in the morning and just decide to just shoot it. And it was very quick and I thought that surely there would be a loss of quality with this approach, but now I have worked up the courage to know that if I just go into a scene much the way quarterback calling audibles at the line knows if he is in the zone, if he's on the march, he will be able to make a play more often than not. More often than not, I feel like I will be able to get lots of coverage.

Does that mean that this potentially will be a technique that you will be employing as you move forward?
Yeah, quite possibly. As long as I know what the artificial limits are or what kind of things I'd accept and reject, just generally, beforehand, then I could make a very quick decision. So it would be kind of like, to continue the football metaphor, after spending a week in practice — really being ready for the game but then improvising. I would have a good idea in my head of what direction I was going into, and then that gives me the courage to go into each day's shooting having no idea what I want to do but knowing where I want to go.