“There’s kind of a silent movie mime heavily shot through with diplomatic mime vernaculars,” says Rumours director Guy Maddin while describing the political leaders at the heart of the film. “It’s very important that they come off as personable and hilarious.”
Rumours introduces the members of the Group of Seven, or the G7 leaders of the world’s top nations, as a gaggle of political animals assembles in Germany. There’s pageantry, photo-ops, platitudes, and all sorts of neo-liberal gobbledygook.
They’re an amiable bunch, though, with a sexy Canadian Prime Minister (Roy Dupuis) with a bronytail and emotional issues, a composed and level-headed German Chancellor (Cate Blanchett), a sleepy American President with a discernibly British accent (Charles Dance), a mansplaining Frenchman (Denis Ménochet), a sausage-sporting Italian (Rolando Ravello), a deferential Japanese leader (Takehiro Hira), and a straight to business British PM (Nikki Amuka-Bird). The latter desperately tries to keep the leaders on track whilst drafting a provisional statement about the state of the world in times of ambiguous crisis.
The wickedly funny film observes the ineptitude of these leaders when a strange presence takes over the woodlands that surrounds them. Bog people crash the party like unwanted protesters, while a giant brain materializes, throwing the whole odyssey further off kilter. Rumours finds some great laughs as Maddin reunites with his The Forbidden Room co-directors Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson to create a scenario that uncannily echoes all the empty acrobatics of political jargon. But while, or perhaps because, these figures don’t necessarily say anything, Rumours may be the most spot-on political satire of the year. If these are the leaders of the free world, then we’re all fucked.
That Shelf had a quick chat with Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson via Zoom ahead of the theatrical release of Rumours.
That Shelf: Was there much debate between the team about including a Trump figure in Rumours? He might have been such an easy source for jokes.
Galen Johnson: We never even mentioned him. Everyone’s so exhausted with him and he’s hard to parody because he always–
Guy Maddin: He comes complete.
GJ: He’s already a perfect object. Why would you even touch him?
Evan Johnson: Just to clarify, Galen’s not an ardent Trump supporter. [Laughs.] In fact, we were trying to take the general idea of the cartoonish image of world leaders in our minds, but never any particular ones. You enter the realm of a very particular kind of political satire. The leaders in our movie are of a general by-the-numbers neoliberal politician-type and Trump doesn’t fit into that. Trump is the pseudo-fascist or dictatorial-whatever-type and there are a little bit of those happening. Europe is electing figures of this type, and Italy arguably has one now. I think those people are more or less similar ideologically to most of the others. If you’ve managed to become a G7 leader, you’re allowed a certain worldview. Certainly the type of people that I have voted for or would vote for would never be allowed in the G7. Lenin and such. [Laughs.]
TS: When you’re writing the script, what were your sources of inspiration for the platitude salad we get from all the politicians? Are there things that you’re drawing right from life?
EJ: I read some of the provisional statements, or the statements when they were no longer provisional, that the G7 puts out at the end of every summit. That was so that we could write the final statement at the end of this movie, the big speech delivered by the Canadian Prime Minister. If you read news and you hear politicians speak on subjects long enough, you understand the house style of empty rhetoric. It was a matter of just having that down, having a pool of it in the back of my head and then letting the characters turn my brain off, and just see what they did.
GM: Evan’s got a great ear for this stuff and just a great mimic. Whether politicians ever let down their guard and quit speaking this way, I kind of doubt it after a while. Career politicians, they probably do, but it was almost like Evan went into a trance and was speaking as a medium for all these people.
EJ: Sometimes, if you get quotes off the record, hear behind-the-scenes or read memoirs from other people who were there, you’ll learn that they do let down their guard, they do speak in different ways. Biden will use swear words and stuff like that, but we don’t like swear words much [in the script]. They don’t offend me. It didn’t feel like our world. We wanted to imprison these people in their own empty language. Rather than let them be totally real, we wanted them to be trapped.
GM: They had nowhere to go. Whatever problem they have to solve, they still have to use that same language,
EJ: And they’re not allowed to know anything about the world except what’s happened at previous G7 summits. They’re trapped like the dinner party guests in Exterminating Angel are trapped on the roof and can’t figure out a way out.
GM: They all have a fly-in-a-bottle approach to solving the problem.
EJ: More than one of ’em suggests suicide is the only way out.
TS: I hope you guys do swag of the G7 suicide pills like the ones in the tote bag Cate Blanchett hands out in the film.
GJ: For people who particularly didn’t like the movie.
GM: They give the potassium cyanide out at every premiere.
TS: Does the film play differently at home in Canada versus abroad? Do jokes land differently audience to audience?
EJ: It is been somewhat hard for us to tell because we don’t sit through screenings anymore. We’ve seen it too often, and it’s a small sample size. It did play well at the audience we were with in Canada. I do think Canadians find the Canadian Prime Minister to be an amusing figure. But I think the Canadian Prime Minister is an amusing figure regardless of where you’re from. It’s probably plays better in English-speaking countries just because comedies are harder to translate.
GJ: So much of the source of the comedy is the dialogue and the back and forth pitter patter. I’m not sure how well that translates to other languages because I don’t speak those other languages.
GM: I was very pleased with its reception at Cannes, but a lot of the people in the audience speak English there, and the film is subtitled in both French and English there. I don’t know, but the reception was nice. Maybe you start getting further north in Europe and maybe you get gloomier temperaments, who knows how would play.
TS: But there’s also a lot of visual comedy, even say with the Prime Minister of Canada. That shot of Roy Dupuis whipping the condom off and tossing it away got the biggest laugh when I saw it. What role did finding humour outside the dialogue play? Whoever thought of that condom shot is brilliant, by the way.
GM: Evan thought of it, and it’s, you know, “Canadians play it safe.”
EJ: I certainly didn’t design the shot in particular. It’s just a moment in the script.
GM: How do you strongly suggest without showing sex that sex definitely happened unless you have the Canadian Prime Minister snap the condom off?
EJ: We wanted a dismissive gesture. When I write, I’m very dialogue-y and I’d rather be more visual, but it’s so easy for me to enter a state where I just can produce just massive reams of dialogue. And so it’s tempting to just do that.
GM: “Right now, I’m removing my condom!”
GJ: Visual gags, when you’re reading a script, don’t read as well as dialogue gags because [a script] is just dialogue. So the temptation is you want your script to read really well. You put a bunch of dialogue gags in there, but you don’t necessarily always want to do that because you want to leave room for visual stuff.
EJ: If I could do it all again, I’d probably try to replace some dialogue gags with more visual ones.
GM: One visual one you removed was when the Canadian Prime Minister, Maxime, first encounters the brain. You had him at one point looking at it, studying it, taking a picture of it, and then pulling out a handgun and shooting it. I loved that gag that a Canadian Prime Minister, of all the leaders, would carry a handgun and then shoot this brain. But that would undercut everything that followed about the brain. It would make very ambiguous how Alicia Vikander’s character loved it. Was it still alive? Was it dead? Was it ever alive? So it just went, but I really did love it. But mostly we were just going by gut instinct in the room—what stayed, what went.
TS: What inspired the brain, because that’s such an interesting, strange element in the film that throws everything off-kilter. Your films, Guy, have really been rooted in a lot of classic film, German expressionism. Were there references that inspired the aesthetic of Rumours?
GM: I’ve convinced these guys to at least grudgingly admire mid-20th century fantasy fiction and pulp fiction art, cover art. A giant brain pops up in these super powerful alien presences that come down. They often have bigger brains than us earthlings. I’ve just been a fan of the giant brain.
EJ: I just want to say I’m not a begrudging admirer. I really love this stuff. Guy’s emailed them to me, giant brains on the covers of some of these pulp comics. What we particularly love about them, and also often struggle with when we try to write something, is to capture the feeling of seeing a giant brain completely decontextualized on the cover. It’s the lack of context that is so exciting to us. Once you read the comic and the source of the giant brain is fully explained, something’s lost. You’re like, “Oh, there’s some rational explanation for this giant brain, the seed of rationality.” It’s that lack of context that we were trying to capture by placing a giant brain here. The exciting thing then is not what does it mean or how did it get here? The exciting thing is, what is everyone going to do about this giant brain? It turns out nothing. They aren’t going to do anything about it, but how do they respond to this is the question rather than what does it mean?
GM: They don’t do much about anything,
TS: When you’re making and now promoting a film that’s a political satire, do you find there’s an expectation to have an answer or a stance on different things happening in the world? To what extent do you have to play politician?
GJ: There haven’t been that many questions. I’m surprised that we haven’t been asked more pointed questions about what’s going on because we were ready to get those questions. But no, people are asking, “What does the giant brain mean?”
EJ: We knew we were making a political movie where the subject ostensibly is politics, but really it’s not that interested in the down-to-earth nitty-gritty of politics. It’s about other things maybe, which isn’t to say that we’re not strongly opinionated politically, as we generally are. But I also worried that I would try to articulate a very specific political program or opinion, fail at it badly, and then be counterproductive. That is another thing I’m scared of doing, so I wanted to stick to what we knew we were good at and hoped we could come at our own politics obliquely. The movie’s depicting a kind of empty neoliberal politics that we despise and think is going to destroy us all, even though there’s other threats to us. There’s political threats other than empty neoliberalism, but that’s the dominant one in the world.
TS: You’ve been making distinct formalist films throughout your careers, and it seems like you are going bigger first with the scale of Forbidden Room and now with the most “mainstream” appeal by getting stars like Cate Blanchett? How is the climate for getting these films made and out there?
GM: It was a bit of a struggle. The state funding bodies were behind us a hundred percent and that wasn’t the struggle, but it was hard shooting it outside the country because all of a sudden, you’re not eligible for quite as much.
GJ: Things just became twice as expensive after COVID, too. So this is a really low budget movie, but it still cost a lot.
GM: Just putting together the financing was always harrowing and we’re always on thin ice, but it got finished, but we wish it weren’t so stressful. It seems every movie producer has a million war stories, but this was not simple compared to the earlier micro budget films I used to make where you could pretty much just do it with a grant and some backing from the state. But this was more complicated. I know the streamers will sometimes just cut a cheque for a film, but this was definitely not that
GJ: There’s something that John Waters talked about: when you’re early in your career, you can pay your collaborators in pizza and beer because you’re not that famous and it’s a bunch of teenagers or people in their twenties doing a creative thing together. But when you’re having retrospectives and stuff, you can’t really do that. You’ve got to have a properly financed structure. Guy, especially, is a figure of note.
GM: As much as I’d like to nostalgically exploit the volunteer hours of workers, I just can’t anymore. [Shrugs.]
