At some point during the production of his first film, “The Dead Father,” Guy Maddin made one of his most consequential decisions as a director. It was the early 1980s, in Winnipeg. Maddin was around 26 and had only recently started watching movies seriously, thanks to a friend who had been sneaking him into film classes at the University of Manitoba. When he had the notion to make his own black-and-white short, he reckoned it prudent to pick up a book on filmmaking. The one he chose mentioned three distinct types of lighting, so when shooting began, Maddin dutifully aimed all three of the lights he’d procured at his lead actor’s face. The three lights produced three nose shadows. He unplugged one light, then another. The third left a single nose shadow. It looked like a Hitler mustache, but Maddin just told the actor to move his head until it disappeared.

When the rushes came back, that single light had created a striking effect, something like 1920s German expressionist cinema. “That wasn’t conscious,” Maddin told me. “I just wanted an image, and didn’t want three nose shadows.” He soon realized, though, that he had stumbled into a style, one that “suggested the past.” “The Dead Father” took its title from a Donald Barthelme novel, but it was inspired by recurring dreams Maddin had been having about his own father, who died unexpectedly several years earlier — “and when you’re making a dream about the past, a time when your father was alive and then dead and then alive again,” he said, the style “seemed to be not inimical to the themes of the movie. So I just went with it. And then by the time I made another movie, I thought, Well, I know how to make movies that look this way.”

In the years since, such idiosyncratic excavations have helped Maddin carve out a singular niche in the world of film: Over the course of 13 features and several dozen shorts, he has established himself as cinema’s premier nostalgist and one of the purest embodiments of the cult auteur. His aesthetic may be decidedly avant-garde — most of his films were shot in grainy black-and-white, on rudimentary sets, drawing on a bygone cinematic vocabulary of iris shots and Vaselined lenses, intertitles and dissolves. But there’s also an inviting sense of wackiness to his entire project, especially in the way he draws on the overheated, melodramatic narratives of the more lurid silent and early sound eras. Maddin’s work is often described as “experimental,” but that’s not quite right; some of the shorts, maybe, but the features are too entertaining for such a humorless and process-oriented descriptor. The best known of them, “The Saddest Music in the World,” from 2003, looks like the sole surviving (and not very successfully restored) print of a Depression-era film, but the plot is hilarious: It revolves around an Olympics-style tourney of mournful songs staged as a promotional stunt by a 1930s beer baroness (Isabella Rossellini), whose hollow prosthetic legs carry samples of her product. (“You can almost hear the typhoon bearing down on a defenseless seaside village through this tortured flute solo,” an announcer remarks during the performance of a Siamese musician.) “What was exciting about his films is they didn’t necessarily feel like they were paying tribute to anything that had existed,” the director Ari Aster, a longtime fan, told me. “They felt like unearthed movies that couldn’t have existed.”

Aside from brief stints in Toronto and Cambridge, Mass. — where he was a visiting lecturer at Harvard — the 68-year-old filmmaker behind all this work has never moved away from Winnipeg, where I visited him in August. “It’s Guy Maddin here! Welcome to sorry-ass Winnipeg!” he texted shortly before my arrival. The following morning, I was scheduled to meet with him, along with Evan and Galen Johnson, the fellow directors of his latest film, “Rumours.” Maddin proposed an itinerary that included lunch at “the Sals, a regular haunt of ours” (“We also lunch at Red Lobster now and then,” he noted), and a swing by the highest peak in the city, a park built atop a municipal dump known to locals as Garbage Hill. “To increase your Pulitzer chances, we should take you to places that make good metaphors,” he added in a follow-up text.