Guy Maddin isn't naive about how people see movies - he's mostly watched his on a small screen

From soul-searching 'My Winnipeg' to reimagining Bram Stoker as a dance movie for 'Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary', Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin singularly made the movies he wanted to make for nearly four decades. There's no one else quite like the cult director, who deploys Old Hollywood tropes, from silent films to talkies, in a language all his own. His feature debut, 'Tales from the Gimli Hospital', was shot at midnight after its premiere in 1988, but proved a rare find - until now, as Zeitgeist Films releases a new 4K restoration of the black and white, hour-long feature.

It was one of Maddin's craziest experiences and a blueprint for the kind of stories he would go on to tell. Set in the eponymous unincorporated village in Manitoba, "Gimli" centers on a fisherman who brings an outbreak of smallpox to his community. The film blends Icelandic-Canadian lore and real-life events with historical fact bending, pre-Code sensibility, and wild, outrageous sequences of necrophilia and homoeroticism, as one sick fisherman fights another. smallpox patient for hospital nurses ailments. .

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Like Jack Smith's orgiastic "Flaming Creatures" from 1963, John Waters' "Pink Flamingos" from 1972, and David Lynch's mind-blowing debut album "Eraserhead" from 1977, "Gimli Hospital" heralded a vision iconoclast of the world of cult cinema, and deliberately displays its lack of good taste.

IndieWire spoke with the filmmaker about the restoration, his career, his thoughts on the exhibit and how films are consumed ("it would be nice if you didn't check your emails, your Instagram , the casserole"), and the revealing moment he lied to Björk during a Q&A in Iceland in 2007 for "My Winnipeg".

Then Maddin has the augmented reality project "Haunted Hotel" debuting in the London Film Festival's Expanded section. He then hopes to bring the project – a moving, interactive paper collage of news clippings from Maddin's corny personal archive – to the United States.

IndieWire: After watching your movies for a few decades going back to 'The Saddest Music In The World', I was still surprised by 'Tales from the Gimli Hospital' because I had never seen it . Watching the screener on my laptop was always a crazy experience.

Guy Maddin: Most of my film education was on VHS tapes on a crummy TV in the 80s, and since then I've had the Criterion Channel, but I watch everything on my laptop. I edited "Tales from the Gimli Hospital" on a small screen. It was very blurry, so I'm used to not only watching other people's movies, but also my own on a tiny, laptop-sized viewfinder. It was cloudy and shimmering. In fact, I've only really seen the film once, properly, on the big screen when it premiered in 1988, and then properly again 34 years later at TIFF. You really see a lot more detail in the image than I've ever seen before. The restoration technique that I'm a big fan of, 4K transfer. You get more of what's on the negative than ever on the original print at the time. There's a lot more color grading.