Canadian director Guy Maddin embraces absurdity. Along with his co-writers and directors Evan and Galen Johnson, Maddin has added to his surrealist oeuvre with Rumours, a comedy satirizing the G7 Summit. Bringing together a lauded cast led by Cate Blanchett playing the Chancellor of Germany, the film follows the seven world leaders as they get lost in the woods amidst a world catastrophe and simultaneously lose their minds.
As with any G7 Summit, the goal continues to be a vague “crisis” and an even vaguer “statement,” a cacophony of empty words, promises, and goals. The supporting cast are game, with Denis Ménochet shining as the President of France, and the filmmakers even choosing a very British Charles Dance to play the U.S. President. Everyone seems to be game; the subsequent film is better for it, with the interplay between these leaders providing the funniest moments. When these leaders attempt to find common ground, create plan of action, or even agree on what they’ve just seen, they falter and the audience laughs, partially due to relatability and partially due to exasperation.
Rumours will succeed or falter based on one’s patience, both with the Canadian filmmaking team and these outsized, yet not completely off-base, versions of our world leaders. Maddin and the Johnson brothers take the film to wild lengths, including the consistent use of mummified bog bodies, a giant brain in the forest, and a cameo from Alicia Vikander that consists wholly of the actress in conversational overdrive.
Crises seem countless and world issues have become endless. Sometimes it’s hard to stay positive, even more difficult to laugh. Rumours gives audiences permission. I chatted with Maddin and his collaborators about soap operas, writers’ rooms, and a man and his dog.
The Film Stage: How do you find a longer press tour?
Galen Johnson: It’s getting a bit exhausting. We’ve been doing it for the past month or so. At first it’s exciting because the questions are new, and then you get the same questions.
Guy Maddin: It’s a challenge to make your answers interesting for the journalist and even for yourself. I’m always trying to work on that toward the end of the day. You’re getting us daisy fresh, but by the end of the day you’re just reciting, poorly, answers that you thought were okay earlier in the day.
Do you find yourselves talking about the same themes, or ever correcting people?
Guy Maddin: With this movie in particular. It’s been a little bit challenging to talk about, but I’m discovering things about the movie while forced to wring out flavor from the dish rag.
Evan Johnson: Yeah, there’s certain things you don’t understand about your own movie. Why make the movie if you could just articulate what it’s doing?
Guy Maddin: There are movies I’ve made years ago, and I’ll talk about them at a retrospective, and I’ll suddenly realize why I made them. And it’s embarrassing, because it’s almost like everyone in the room knows why I made it and I’m the last person to figure it out. It’s a weird, almost therapeutic thing, talking about your movies, and you have to go past a certain point. You have to talk past the point where you stand it anymore, and then––suddenly––psychological truths about yourself become apparent.
I’m curious about the vagueness within the film: the problem they’re dealing with, the statement, exactly what has happened around them. Why not be more specific?
Galen Johnson: It’s an empty Christmas tree. You can hang all your dumb metaphors on it.
Evan Johnson: I stand by it. It just felt like, “I don’t care what’s timely.” Yet when I know a movie is timely in a very specific way, I will often be swept up in that and enjoy it for that reason. Small movies that are made very quickly just addressing the immediate present moment. Those are usually cheaply made, small, guerilla-like movies. I like that timeliness, but we were not making a movie in that way. We thought it was funnier for us to just be vague about it.
Guy Maddin: I guess there’s practical concerns, too. By the time you finish a movie, the crisis has passed.
Evan Johnson: When we wrote the script, the war in Ukraine was the crisis. And some producers talked to us about, “Does this change anything about your script, that war is broken out in Ukraine?” And we were like, “Well, by the time we make the movie, there’ll be a different, horrible war.” I think we started the film on October 8 or something, and then the atrocities in Gaza started shortly after that and global warming is there all the time.
Guy Maddin: I am delighted by the fact that no matter what the crisis is, they’d be speaking in exactly these extremely vague terms. It’s a one-size-fits-all reaction to a crisis.
How do you decide what to keep offscreen and what to actually show the audience, then?
Guy Maddin: We wanted it to be kept ambiguous. There’s many different accounts about what the bog people were and the gazebo fight was, and that’s important. It was more a matter of taste; we never intended to show them.
Evan Johnson: That type of scene recurs in the movie. It happens a few times, where something stupid happens and then the seven leaders argue about what they’ve seen. What is actually happening, not even, “What do we do about this?” It’s a failure to understand the exact nature of the crisis they’re arguing about.
Guy Maddin: I actually like it. I didn’t write the line. Evan did, but I like it when the American President––after even the audience has seen bog mummies in some ancient fertility ritual––insisting that what he’d seen is just probably some Spanish moss swaying in the wind. Some fog or maybe some ethnic dances or something like that. Every person has a different take on what they’ve seen. It’s just human nature, and why would leaders be any different?
Evan Johnson: Or neoliberal nature.
I found myself almost rooting for the politicians, even though I was immensely frustrated by them. How do you create characters that we simultaneously can’t stand and will still root for?
Evan Johnson: Part of that comes from just identifying with them ourselves. We root for ourselves and are unbelievably frustrated with ourselves. We identified with their struggle––their failure to create some coherent, meaningful response to a world in crisis. That’s what they’re doing, and that’s what we’re doing generally. Our own failure was built in.
Guy Maddin: I always look for autobiographical connections. Between myself and a project.
Evan Johnson: In some ways we ought to root for our world leaders. Not on a personal level, but just: it would be nice. You almost forget because you hate them so much, right? It would be nice if they could do what they’re supposed to do and succeed.
Guy Maddin: We’re suckers.
Evan Johnson: Definitely we’re suckers if we trust them, but still on some level you want them to do a good job.
Guy Maddin: Maybe someone should just fuck off the way they say that Roosevelt did some good things.
Evan Johnson: Part of making the characters rootable was that we had charismatic actors.
In absurdist film and in satire, how do you decide how far to take it? Is there a line?
Guy Maddin: There’s a line, but there isn’t a way of articulating what the line is. It’s just felt.
Evan Johnson: When we made The Forbidden Room together, the line was even further. We would accept more.
Guy Maddin: It was just beyond the cliff.
Evan Johnson: We wanted to keep it almost grounded in the reality of the G7 Summit, which was its own stupid reality. But then there’s certain things we can’t resist, like a giant brain. That’s almost cheating when it’s suggested, because it’s an image that we all just are in love with immediately and we don’t have the discipline to say no.
Guy Maddin: It puzzles viewers. We’re certainly not unpuzzled by it, ourselves, but we like the way it looked, and it seems to make musical sense.
Galen Johnson: It could be a metaphor for any number of things,
Guy Maddin: Or for nothing at all.
Photo by Sean DiSerio, courtesy of the 62nd New York Film Festival.
I love the music throughout, especially the soap-opera tune that swells any time there’s a moment of drama. How’d you decide on that?
Galen Johnson: We fell in love with it when we were making The Green Fog. We watched a lot of ’70s and ’80s TV soap operas and cop shows and we just fell in love with incidental music in those things. That’s an inspiration that’s never left us, and since there are soap opera elements in Rumours, it just made the most sense to put some of this stuff to work. It was just really funny to us. It was just another layer of humor.
Guy Maddin: It’s inexpensive. It’s meant for the use of just licensing for a movie inexpensively.
Evan Johnson: And the titles of the tracks were always great. They’ll be called “Regrets” or “Moonlit Night.” It was perfect.
Galen Johnson: And it’s always that they describe the mood of the song, You almost don’t even need to listen to it before you put it in.
Guy Maddin: “Coney Island Romance,” and things like that.
I wanted to ask about the relationship between the U.S. President and the Italian Prime Minister. It felt almost sweet. How’d you decide on that pairing?
Evan Johnson: It was starting with a trope. We want a variety of things and styles and genres and relationships and cliches in this movie to cram them all together, because that’s how we always make things. It was like a boy and his dog trope. We even almost had Charles Dance, who plays the President, when he decides he wants to be left alone, we almost had him throw rocks at him to get the dog away. Just to extend the trope further, the man abandoning the dog he loves. There’s zero international-relations allegory in that America-Italy relationship. It’s pointlessly humanizing.
Guy Maddin: It’s a movie that doesn’t seem to be too concerned about humanizing, so I like it.
Evan Johnson: While one cliché annoys us, 100 clichés move us, because you sense that they’re celebrating a reunion. It’s an unforgettable quote, even though I’ve forgotten the exact wording.
Rumours is now in wide release.
The post “100 Clichés Move Us”: Rumours Directors Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson & Galen Johnson on Finding Humor in a World in Crisis first appeared on The Film Stage.
