Among cinephiles, Guy Maddin has long reigned with the celebration and consolation of being “the most accessible avant-gardist.” Since breaking out of obscurity with Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988), Maddin has been drawn to a filmic primitivism that borrows from silent-era conventions, casts non-actors or non-stars, and relies on an associative surrealism over formal coherence. However, after 40 years of formal experiments, Maddin is experimenting with normalcy; as The New York Times puts it, “Guy Maddin’s new comedy is radical for being almost … normal.”
This characterization is a stretch, no doubt, for a film that operates in an apocalyptic netherworld of its own logic, including a Volkswagen-sized brain and primordial bog zombies. Rumours finds Maddin reuniting with collaborators and co-directors Evan and Galen Johnson, who push the director from some of his silent-era flair toward post-Brakhage aesthetics, trading iris-ins and iris-outs for frame burns and end flares. The Rumours script, penned by Evan, does tend toward a more structured, chronological telling, even if it does so with sizeable gaps between cause and effect. The premise is this: the G7 leaders, including a Merkel-esque Cate Blanchett and an American president who is inexplicably British in Charles Dance, have convened for a conference in Germany with the express objective of drafting a perfect provisional statement in response to an undefined crisis. What follows needs to be seen to be believed, and even then remains almost impossible to understand, much less describe.
On the occasion of the film’s release, I had the privilege of speaking with Maddin and the Johnson brothers about their new film.
Conor Truax: I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving.
Guy Maddin: Oh, yes. Thank you. And a very happy Columbus Day or Indigenous Day, or whatever it’s called in America now.
CT: I’m actually Canadian, too. I’m back in Canada right now for the holiday.
GM: Where the kind of geopolitical speak [from Rumours] is hanging in the air.
CT: Exactly. The language of my youth.
GM: Are you like the child of a diplomat or something like that?
CT: A bureaucrat.
GM: I love it.
CT: Rumors is unconventional in the sense that on paper, the weight of your collaboration comes in direction, rather than writing. Was there any collaboration between you three as Evan was writing?
Evan Johnson: I think the official credit is right: the story is by the three of us, and the screenplay is by me. The premise of the film was a group conception; so was the tone. We got as far as coming up with scene ideas together, or bits of dialogue, and I would go off and write.
GM: Usually Evan was in a flow state and producing many pages of dialogue every day. He was really on a roll. He was just channeling this stuff like a medium. And he surprised me often with plot developments that we hadn’t discussed.
CT: It’s certainly a film that has a lot of surprises, and it’s hard to categorize them or define them. Was there a particular reason you were interested in the G7 summit? And Evan, were you channeling any influences with the diplomatic-speak throughout the script?
EJ: I’ll answer the latter question first. I think it’s osmosis. I don’t recall needing or wanting to study the language in particular. It’s always been my curse and sometimes my blessing that I don’t have my own style. When I write, I just write some other style that I have in my head.
I don’t think I studied [any heads of state]. We studied the history of the G7 — what they were like each year, who went to which ones, why it was created in the first place and what they do at them, various criticisms of what they do. Our initial fascination with the G7 conference started from their media presentations over the years. As you know, one world leader by themself can be a funny cartoon figure, but if you get them together, they become stranger and funnier than they would otherwise be. We’re enamored by the spectacle.
GM: I can’t remember the question, but you seem to have answered it.
Galen Johnson: Well, we’d been writing a bunch of screenplays before, and the G7 was popping up as a subplot, which sort of tells you how bloated these screenplays were. We realized that the screenplays that we were writing were unfilmable. A lot of good ideas, but they were just not congealing. We decided, well, why don’t we just take the G7 because it poses some restrictions: seven characters, limited location, a certain language, a certain goal (to write a statement). We had been struggling writing screenplays, so we could identify with this group writing struggle, so that was the genesis of why we decided: okay, we’re making a G7 movie.
CT: When did Ari Aster get involved in the process of executive producing?
GM: The script was done already, as was another feature script that we’d written, which remains on a desk somewhere right now. Ari knew my work from childhood even, and he just wanted to reach out. I guess he’d formed his new company, Square Peg, with Lars Knudsen, and he wanted to ask if we had anything that we wanted to develop.
We became friends and started working on Rumours. He didn’t give us any real notes, or I don’t recall any. They’re not really note-givers; they’re cheerleaders, or enablers. Yes, they bring out the worst in us. No, they’re cheerleaders and supporters and they’re wonderful that way.
CT: Back to the point around the context and the setting of the film: some of your films have a very strong sense of place, like The Green Fog (2017), and some are more purgatorial, like The Forbidden Room (2015); it exists in what is almost a non-space. I read that you were looking for something very specific in the location. What was that?
GM: Well, I was a location skeptic because I’d always shot in studios before these forests. I was like, just put the brain anywhere. I was selling the location short, because the location we did choose for this giant brain was exactly right. These little pathways that various characters had to emerge from or run away down — they were very specifically needed.
EJ: A lot of the forest locations end up being practical. It’s too expensive to build a forest in the studio, basically. So what we’re specifically looking for was a nice spot for a specific script moment, like the location of the giant brain. I think that giant brain looks good there. It looks like it’s nestled nicely. There’s a love scene in the movie and it has a giant log in it, and it looks [so] good. It almost looks like a soap opera set in the forest.
GJ: Plus, locations have to be like half an hour away from my Ritz Carlton or something.
[Laughter]
GM: As a scout, I was just looking for a place to pee and nap in the forest, and it was frustrating because I wasn’t allowed to do either. Next movie, if there is one, I’ll be more respectful of the [location scouting] process.
CT: How did it work with the three of you directing the ensemble in the Hungarian forest?
GM: It worked out pretty well. We all just wanted to get the movie done. I was concerned before because it was the first time we’d be on set with stars with three directors at once. I just didn’t want it to become an issue where different people were calling action, and the actors would start playing favorites, like little kids do with parents.
We all stood around the monitor during takes and watched and discussed what was good, what could be better. It was very easy to present a unified front, but sometimes directors have to make a choice on the fly.
It also turned out that Evan had run some rehearsals with [the actors], and it evolved such that the actors ended up going to him quite a bit. Or, it was because he’s a faster runner than I am from the monitor, which was often hundreds of feet away from where the actual set was in the forest. Cate Blanchett was the only actor who would come back to where the monitors were for the take to be played back, and then she’d decide for herself without saying anything. She’d say, “go again,” and we’d run it again until she was satisfied.
Sometimes I felt like I wasn’t directing the actors enough to call myself a director. We were all just filmmakers.
CT: This film has a global outlook that tends toward Canadian interest. For instance, the Canadian prime minister’s scandal and impending prorogation was hilarious, but I wondered how non-Canadians would understand it. My question here is twofold: did they understand it? And, do you think there’s a need, specifically in Canada, to explore Canadian identity in film?
EJ: I think the international critics and audiences have understood that the Canadian scandal alluded to in the movie is boring in a Canadian way. Like, “Oh, that’s boring and Canadian.” That seems to make sense. In general, I’m bad at caring about whether a joke will be broadly received. There are private jokes in the movie that only the three of us find funny, but we kept them anyway, because we have to follow our hearts, you know, and some of the humor about Canada in the movie is like that.
GM: I like producing the feeling in viewers that they might be missing something. It’s like when I’m reading an Irish novel by, say, Flann O’Brien, and you know you’re not getting all the jokes, but it just feels like you’re being blasted in the face by so much personal mythology and Irish-specific mythology that come to you and make you come into the novel.
To partly answer your question about new filmmakers, I really love Matthew Rankin’s movie, Universal Language (2024), which defamiliarizes Winnipeg. I found his approach to the same subject that I’ve explored in My Winnipeg and some of my other films really exciting.
I don’t know much about other Canadian filmmakers. I feel like I’ve been a bad Canadian. I feel like I should promise to learn. Whenever I come to Ottawa, actually, I meet a lot of young Canadian filmmakers and they seem to be really sharp and on the button, so I’m pretty convinced I’d hate their movies. [Laughter]. I’ve promised so many of them that I’d watch their work, and in the few cases that I have watched, I’ve really been impressed.
CT: To the point of Irish writers, and Flann O’Brien’s favorite, next time you’re in Ottawa you should check out The James Joyce Society.
GM: Why is that in Ottawa of all places? I wonder.
CT: There are a lot of Irish Catholic descendants kicking around the Ottawa Valley; the accent here is a little bit Irish, I’ve been told. And I’m being told we’re up on time. Congratulations again on the film.
GM: This was fun. Until next time.
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