Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict is a must-see for anyone interested in art. The painting-studded biography that plays as part of the Vancouver International Film Festival's Style in Film series tonight (September 30, 6:30 p.m. at the Playhouse) and October 9 (6:15 p.m. at SFU Woodward's) is a whirlwind tour through her enclosed life as a privileged heiress, her escape to Europe, and her hugely impactful role as a collector and supporter of artists like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. The film also recounts her part in saving many modern masterpieces and several artists from the Nazis. 

Her story is not just about her influence on art, but about her refusal to conform to societal expectations of women of the time--including many a sexual escapade. She also seemed to suffer more than her share of pain and suffering, something Guggenheim seems to almost shrug off in her suprisingly candid interviews.

But what really makes the film so remarkable is not just its wealth of both archival photographs, artworks, and interviews, but the fact that it centres around the late Guggenheim's own words: director Lisa Immordino Vreeland  (who helped VIFF 2013's Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel ) found the tapes, recorded in the last two years of Guggenheim's life (1978-79), in the home of the collector's biographer,  Jacqueline Bograd Weld.

The Straight caught up with Vreeland in London before the film opened this week to talk a bit about her painstaking adventure putting together the stylish documentary.

On discovering the tapes of Guggenheim at her biographer's house:

"She was really gracious. We optioned the book and she opened up all of her research. She had all these big boxes of research and one day she said, 'I have these tapes but I haven't been able to find them in a really long time.' They could have been there, they could have been in many different places. So I'd go and spend all this time at her apartment. She had these two Portuguese water dogs and they ate paper, so you had to be careful with the research!...I asked to go in her basement and I found them in a box.

"I absolutely love hearing her voice and I didn't know if it was going to work. It was a very difficult and lengthy process of putting it together."

On why Peggy Guggenheim makes such a good subject for a film:

"What intrigued me about her is I like these stories of people who reinvent themselves and get more out of life--especially at a time when women didn't have a serious role in society. She was privileged but she was unhappy. Before she made something of herself she lived the high life. She was very driven but not by ambition. She was very selfless and wanted to share her collection. What she wanted was to share her experience with these artists. They went against the grain of everything in society at that time.

She was hanging out with the guys who were the bad boys and they ended up being the big names in the artworld."

On Guggenheim's sense of personal style and her impact on Venice as a contemporary-art centre:

"When she was in Venice, primarily in the 1960s and '70s, she was photographed incessantly. She'd be in a palazzo with a fur coat on. There are so many pictures of her with a fur coat on. She was a real personality there...Anyone of any notoriety wanted to see her collection of modern art. She really kickstarted what Venice is today." 

On her openness and ability to reinvent herself:

"She came from a family that clearly had rules, and she did not want to be a part of that. When she found her path in life she didn't want to go back. With so much pain she just had to move forward in life. It was very audacious. And that confidence she had was very attractive to men. The men she had relationships with were very important in history."