A scene from My Winnipeg Courtesy of IFC Films

I am curious about the repeated image of the mother's lap superimposed over the confluence of rail and river lines, depicting Winnipeg as this magnetic pole that you cannot escape from. In some ways it reminded me of Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines, as you seem to be meditating on the power of lines crossing the earth.
Oh yeah, great. I don't know here it came from. When I wrote the narration, it was improvised verbally in front of a microphone. I found myself mentioning "the lap, the forks, the fur." It sounded rhythmically pleasing to me and then I realized I'd have to come up for some sort of visual equivalent to that. I just showed the movie to my mother for the first time. I am a grown-up. I can do whatever I want. For once in my life I was able to focus the camera and so pubic hair is visible. I managed to distract [my mother] whenever that lap came on [screen]. But that giant close-up of the vagina does appear on screen often.

In all of your films, you go back to family and you also cover a lot of sexual taboos. And once again you reintroduce your family here, and you touch on some homoerotic memories from when you were a kid. These are things many would be reticent to bring up in a documentary about their city. How does your family and do you feel now after having exposed this?
I don't expect anyone to care about my sexual thoughts and you run the risk of making people sick by talking about them, but we are sexual beings [from] the earliest of ages, and if you are talking about a home and what matters to your home and what happens in it and what happens in the privacy of a shelter, you are going to have to talk about that stuff. As far as the lap goes, I just noticed that a map of the forks of Winnipeg just looked like a lap, and we all come from laps. It just seemed to make sense: my mom's lap. The hardest part was just getting her drunk enough to get her to take her girdle off... [laughs wryly]

Speaking of the mother figure, where did you find Ann Savage?
Except for cameo as a non-speaking nun in a movie, she hadn't spoken a line of dialogue since 1955. But I felt that she was the only person to play my mother when it became apparent that I would rather not put my mom through this because she is 92. So I lamented to a friend of mine who lives and works in Hollywood, "If only Ann Savage was still with us, because she is the only person who can play my mother in this project." I remembered her from the film Detour. She is literally the most ferocious femme fatale in film noir history. She is just so... savage. And I just thought, this is the only force of nature that even comes close to her Canadian counterpart, my mother. If only she was still around to play my mother, then I would be set. And this guy I was talking to said, "Ann Savage was just at my wedding! I have got her phone number and you can just call her up." So I started a lengthy seduction process where I lured her out of retirement. She had been asked to do a number of film appearances in scripts [but they] reminded her too much of Detour. This was the first time where she had been offered a script that had nothing to do with Detour so she was very flattered and excited about taking on a role that had something to do with her age now.