What would happen if the leaders of the Western world were united by zombie-like figures hunting them down in the woods? It's an unexpected vision realized by directors Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson in their new movie, Rumours. But the absurdity doesn't stop there! Throw Charles Dance, Alicia Vikander, and one Cate Blanchett into the mix and you have a production.
Screening at London Film Festival, FILMHOUNDS sat down with the trio to put some method to the madness… including an explanation for that brain.
The G7 is an intriguing choice in terms of global political get-togethers. Do you yourselves take an avid interest in politics and why the G7 summit?
Evan Johnson: I don't know if I take an avid interest. Maybe in recent years because of this movie or the lead-up to it, I've taken an interest in the empty pageantry of politics. I like reading the Wikipedia entries of heads of state, learning about their personalities, stupid things that they've done in the past. So thinking of them as cartoons, like characters, I like I've enjoyed dehumanising them. I mean, they're sort of, they dehumanise themselves and they…
Guy Maddin: They debase themselves and humanise themselves.
EJ: Yeah because they're media constructions and all of that. So I've enjoyed all that. My actual engagement with politics, like probably a lot of people, is a lot more depressing and frustrating. It's like moral quandaries and just despair at the state of the suffering in the world and stuff like that. And that isn't something we were looking into deeply.
GM: No, this wasn't a project to address that.
EJ: The G7 summits have been on our radar for a bit as a possible subject because they just come up in the news. We find them very entertaining. They started working their way into other scripts we'd been writing as subplots, and then we would throw those scripts out, start another script, and the g7 would be back. So at some point, we decided, let's just deal with this already.
GM: They're just a great, freestanding, hilarious entity. I've never made movies with messages in them, and I don't like message movies really, even if I agree with a message. When we decided to discuss making the movie about the G7 we sort of without even saying anything, we knew we were staying away from delivering a message. We were staying away from things of the moment. We wanted something more timelessly timely.
Galen Johnson: We just like the restrictions that G7 imposed, that seven characters, plus maybe some EU people, but limited location, limited time frame. We can get a bit wild and extravagant and decadent with our ideas sometimes. So having some focus and discipline really helped.
You've got a really strong cast of actors in Rumours including some big names such as Cate Blanchett and Charles Dance. How did you go about assembling this?
GM: Our friendship with American wunderkind director Ari Aster helped because he knew [Cate Blanchett] a bit. He was the middleman in an exchange of phone numbers. We talked and she got to know us all later, but she agreed to come on board rather quickly. When you've got Cate Blanchett, all of a sudden casting the film becomes a lot easier.
Did you always have Cate Blanchett in mind for the role?
GJ: I don't think we had the confidence to even think she would. And then we saw her in that criterion closet, picking My Winnipeg, and we were like “Oh okay.”
EJ: And then you go back to the script, and you think, okay, we look through and make sure this is a part for Cate. You change things a little bit.
GJ: But she can sort of do everything. She's not really someone you typecast because she can just do whatever you want her to do. She's versatile.
GM: She's an unbelievably great comedian. Most people associate her with drama but you do not need to tell her how to make a sentence funny. She figures out a way and it's very contagious on set. All the actors are great and really know how to bring an already strange and beautiful sentence to life and get it aloft.
We just spoke a little about the comedy elements of Rumours but this film brings together a real blend of genres and tones.Had you always set out to play with those different genres and how did you go about managing those tone shifts?
GM: I've never really wanted to go see a juggler or anything like that but it does feel like we're naturally inclined to juggle, and we're not happy until we have a few balls in the air or something like that.
GJ: We just want to keep the viewer always sort of not knowing what's gonna happen next. We try and keep the characters the same but the situations they go through are very different.
GM: I'm sure there's other movies like that. I'm not very good at thinking of examples, but I do know that novelists are able to do that stuff more freely without perhaps a studio telling them to stick to one tone.
GJ: Yeah, it's easier to market something with one tone.
EJ: May it was a post-rationalisation when I realised that we had a series of different genres and tones colliding. But I was like, at the G7 summit, you have seven different people coming from seven different cultures cramming together. They each bring their own genre with them.
GM: And each actor has their own personal approach to work. As Charles Dance says “I'm an actor for hire. I'll do whatever you tell me to do”. Denis Ménochet needs to write an essay on sundials to get involved with his character. Cate Blanchett is unbelievably meticulous. Rolando Ravello seems to just operate instinctively. So you know, it was really wonderful.
I was definitely kept on my toes and a lot of things took me by surprise. One of them being the big brain. I have to ask about it. I have my own interpretations of what it represents but I would love to hear from you about what it symbolises or if you think there's something the audience might miss.
GJ: It symbolises latex and styrofoam!
EJ: There's two things that I'm willing to say about the big brain. One is that it's just an image we like, just a great image. We thought it was too big. That's something right there. We questioned if we should put the big brain in the movie but we were never like “What does it mean?” because that's not the way we discuss things.
GM: No, the brain was on the trapdoor a couple of times. You know, maybe we should drop the big brain.
GJ: But we didn't have a trapdoor big enough!
GM: Yeah we opened the trapdoor but it still sat there!
EJ: I've always said this about brains, I like them as an image. We've had brains in movies we've made together before, and [Guy] has had brains before. There's just something weird about the fact that it's a useless wet hunk of organ meat. It's a grey lump and yet it's the source of all human-made beauty and meaning in the world, and is the solution to all our problems. If we're gonna find the solution to all our problems, they're in this useless, wet lump. That, as an image, is symbolic of maybe some of the ideas of the movie. Can you tell us what you think of the brain?
IYW: I guess I really saw it as a representation of intelligent conversation within politics. And, you know, when you burn it, it's the burning of that conversation.
EJ: Yeah that's good.
GJ: Yeah I'm gonna allow it.
GM: The tribunal allows it!
Another element of the film I want to know more about is the bog bodies. They're fascinating, unusual and maybe a bit shocking because of some of their behaviour. Why bog bodies and why do they behave that way in the film?
EJ: It's just an image of something. Pleasure! Feeling pleasure, I guess. They're an audience. For politics, they do these spectacles, such as the G7, which is a spectacle for a political audience. In the same way, we make a movie for an audience. There's more complicated reasons for why we ended up with this image of the bog bodies doing that but the simple answer is that it's just an image of an audience pleased.
GM: The whole idea of politics is that it's a pleasurable phenomenon. At least it's meant to be. It's almost soap operatic. You get to choose sides, determine villains, root for certain people against others. And it's pure pleasure, except for the bombs landing on people's faces.
EJ: I mean they all pull evil stuff but the spectacle element for sure.
GM: Yeah the spectacle part of it is pure pleasure. People standing behind bunting and banners on balconies and obelisks. You know, it's all pleasure and spectacle.
The score really stands out in this film, I loved it. How central is music to your filmmaking process and with this score in particular, were you very hands on when it came to directing what you wanted from the composer?
GM: It's so important to us.
GJ: The tone we wanted was never going to be possible to achieve without the distance between the melodrama of the score and the stupidity of what's going on. That space is where the humour is. If you find humour in the movie, that's where it is. We worked with the composer a lot but we also chose our needle drops very carefully and thought about them for a long time. We searched for the right stuff.
GM: The effects are just enormous. The wrong piece of music just changes the edit. It almost seems to be changing the elements of the frame. What's in there changes the tone and that's everything. It's a bit of a struggle at times to get the right stuff. Sometimes you fall in love with the temp music that you know you can't afford.
GJ: Next thing you know you're writing a letter to Enya telling her to take like $10,000 off this.
GM: Yeah, we knew we were in trouble when we fell in love with the Enya cue, but luckily, it's in the movie.
So you wrote to Enya in order to get that piece?
EJ: Yeah we wrote a letter to Enya. I don't know if it was the letter or if she may have reduced the price anyway, but the letter, she reduced it after we sent that.
GM: She's a mensch!
If the real-life G7 leaders were to watch Rumours, what would you hope to come of it?
EJ: It'd be a shame if they enjoyed themselves.
GM: Swallow the potassium cyanide?
GJ: I hope they'd at least give us a good pull quote!
GM: Yeah I hope they'd give us something practical like that. A collective G7 blurb.
EJ: “A hoot!”
GM: Yeah I don't actually wish them all to die but a real performative empty blurb would be great.
EJ: Yeah one that makes it sound like they haven't actually seen it.
GJ: “Yeah nice one, Jack!”
Rumours releases in UK cinemas on December 6th.
