Winnipeg-based writer-director Guy Maddin has been commissioned to create a new work for the National Film Board. (Scott Gries/Getty Images)

Winnipeg director Guy Maddin has been shooting a short film, Night Mayor, to commemorate the National Film Board's 70th anniversary.

The nine-minute film began production March 9 in Winnipeg and is set to wrap up this week.

Maddin, whose imaginative documentary My Winnipeg was chosen best Canadian film at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2007, as well as best Canadian feature by the Toronto Film Critics Association, has made 25 feature and short films in his career.

CBCNews.ca spoke to the auteur during a break on the set of Night Mayor, which is scheduled to be part of the Toronto International Film Festival in September.

Q: What did you discover after diving into the NFB archive in order to do research for this film?

A: I had already dipped a toe in the archives three years ago when I started shooting My Winnipeg [because] I was just wondering what was out there, so I started poking around about what things might have footage in it and that's when I saw Paul Tomkowicz's Street-railway Switchman, a nine-minute portrait of guy who just sweeps the snow from the tracks in the winter. It was part of the Faces of Canada series. I was struck by how well constructed and shot it was and I felt retroactively guilty about things I'd said as a kid about Canadian film and I had to re-evaluate my feelings about the progress the Canadian film industry was making. I felt we were getting better and better with each passing decade. But this was made in 1953, and it looked better and stood on its own better than most Canadian films I'd seen. It had no American film influence, which is why I didn't like Canadian films as a kid and I liked American films back then. These films had an identity of their own. I asked the NFB to send me more stuff to look at from the early days of the NFB. My opinion was only confirmed.

I also bought Iceland of the Prairies. It's a colour film from 1941 or 1943. And I've been going to Gimli [Man.] for a while now. [Iceland of the Prairies was made] to reassure Icelandic Canadians that they had chosen a nice place to live. It was a propaganda film, essentially.

That one is really beautiful. It's a technicolour portrait of Manitoba and Winnipeg. So these are real treasures. They are amazing as archival material to be viewed many decades later.

It's really exciting for me that Canadians had been mythologizing themselves after all. I always thought we were the lousiest mythologizers in the world, but we've actually been making Canadian images for Canadians these past 70 years.

Q: How does seeing these films influence what you are attempting to make now for the NFB's anniversary?

A: Well, it frightens me more! I'm frightened because it's really a venerable institution to honour. But, once I've written a first treatment of what I'm shooting I haven't had to — well, nothing I've seen has frightened me into changing my idea.

I wanted to do something that was faintly allegorical about a guy who was not a rail track sweeper but is a public broadcaster who has made a primitive form of television, something to get images of Canada out to the thinly populated areas of this country. It's in 1939, the year the NFB was founded, but also the first year of the Second World War. He uses the aurora borealis as a means of projecting the images. It's very Canadian; Americans couldn't do that. He also uses the telephone lines and his signals interfere with phone signals so the military shuts him down — just like the government perpetually [trying to] shut down the NFB ever since they found it. It's just a little look at this broadcaster just the way Tomkowicz's film is a look at a switchman.

Q: Do you see images in your mind before you write a treatment?

A: Atmosphere and flavour are important to me. Like everyone else, I start with the words, but behind those words there has to be a kind of flavour that we're going for and Paul Tomkowicz is impressive that way. It's really beautiful, because he photographed a black-and-white, 16-mm view of Winnipeg, documentary-style, but everything is clearly staged, sweetly awkward with a really nice voiceover. So there's an artifice, but something true comes out of it, just like fiction films. There's no distinction [for me] frankly between fiction and documentary.

Q: So it seems you are using Paul Tomkowicz as your inspiration.

A: I suppose so, in a way. But whenever I try to plagiarize something, it ends up being so ineptly plagiarized, you won't be able to notice any similarities. It's a starting point and then I make mistakes and I adjust to the mistakes. By the time I finish adjusting everything, it will look so different.

Q: You did a commemorative short for TIFF called Heart of the World back in 2000 and now this. What is it like to do commemorative work?

A: The TIFF one was great because I was unemployed and the other nine filmmakers all had careers. I just made that one short that year, so that felt good. It feels like a competition when you're being asked among nine other people to do something. It did feel like Joe Stalin inviting a trembling Soviet filmmaker to make a birthday tribute movie, so that's why the movie ended up having a propaganda feel to it.

This one, though, it didn't occur to me to make a propaganda film. Right away, I was thinking allegory or a fairytale. I don't want to be accused of making a mockumentary. I hate mockumentaries, with the exception of Spinal Tap and [other] Christopher Guest movies. It's just an excuse to use a hand-held camera. It seems to have run its course for me. If anything I'd mock the Canadian government for being in shutdown mode.

Q: Some view the NFB as a musty institution. What do you hope people will get from your piece?

A: I hope they think [about] what a documentary is. It's always useful to make someone question what they're watching. Then, I hope they actively think [about] what the NFB has done for them, even though they may not have seen any of their movies. Maybe they'll be curious and check them out, a lot of [the films] are online now.

I am hoping they see some connection between what happens to the main character in my movie and what always seems to be happening to the NFB, and I hope they will be touched and annoyed.

To talk about the movie that hasn't been made yet in those terms is asking for bad luck, but that's what I'm going for. Whether I get it or not, I'm not sure. I'm lucky if I get something else and that's fine.