The first thing you’ll probably notice about the new Guy Maddin film is that it doesn’t look much like a Guy Maddin film. For more than three decades, Maddin’s signature has been his delirious adoption of early cinema aesthetics allied to a surreal sense of humour, but Rumours – which Maddin co-directed with regular collaborators Evan and Galen Johnson – looks shockingly like an ordinary movie. This is no ordinary film, however, and beyond the deceptively placid surface there is all manner of weirdness to contend with. Set at the annual G7 summit, where the world’s most powerful people meet to discuss the pressing issues of the day, the film casts these world leaders adrift in a genuine crisis that their diplomatic skills have left them woefully unprepared for. As they attempt to draft a joint statement on this unspecified apocalyptic scenario, these increasingly ragged politicians spend much of Rumours wandering aimlessly in the fogbound forest, encountering bizarre situations that could only have come from the minds of Maddin and the Johnsons. Rumours is consistently surprising and hilarious, and it will hopefully draw a whole new audience to this unique filmmaker's work. I met Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson at this year's London Film Festival to discuss it.
I just saw the poster outside and I like that you've got "The official motion picture of the G7" as the tagline on there.
Guy Yeah, we just made this claim. We were surprised that our distributor let us say that.
I was wondering if you’d have to get clearances for something like that.
Evan No, there's a joke at the beginning of the movie that we consulted with the leaders in the making of it, and I think we got a note from one distribution person who suggested that you can't say that. But we said it!
Guy I say, G7 lawyer up!
I've been a fan of your work for a very long time, but I never imagined I'd see one of your films getting a wide release with a Universal logo at the start. It feels kind of crazy.
Guy It does, I have to admit I'm in total agreement with you there. But it's a very pleasant feeling. It feels like a strange dream.
You guys have been working together for around a decade now.
Guy A little more, yeah.
Has the process changed at all?
Evan I think the process always starts the same way and the reason the outcome looks different this time is simply because of the subject matter that we chose. Guy is someone who has an established style – although it has changed over the years, it should be said, it was different in the aughts than it was in the early 90s in certain rhythmic and textural ways – but he's always up for wanting to try new things. It's almost shocking to me, it's kind of inspiring.
Guy Yeah, there's no way to justify using archaic, early part-talkie film vocabulary units in something set in the present. I did a bit of that in My Winnipeg where I was mixing memory with present day and fear of the future and stuff, so I had an excuse. I also wanted the challenge of going...the word 'normie' isn't right, but just something that would have fewer alienating effects.
Galen Or alienating effects located in different places.
Guy Oh yeah, it's still plenty alienating.
I mean, it has been described as your most accessible film, but it's still a film that has masturbating zombies, so I guess accessibility is graded on a different scale.
Guy Well that's where the door opens wide. That's the audience to go for. Come on in everyone, plenty of room in here!
So how does the scripting process work? Evan, you've got the sole screenplay credit, but obviously you guys collaborate to develop the story, so what's the process for putting this together?
Evan Everything comes out of the fact that we spend a lot of time together watching movies and just working on stuff. There's stuff that doesn't get off the ground, scripts that bloom and then collapse, and we throw them away. The G7 idea was a subplot in another script we had, and when we decided we were actually going to write this movie we had already talked about the G7 a lot, we'd even written some scenes. I have the sole screenwriting credit because I wrote most of it, but things that these guys wrote and said in previous versions definitely snuck in here and there. We talked about the plot trajectory, we knew where it was going to go, we talked about the characters. I'm the one who wrote the dialogue, because it's really hard to write dialogue in a group, I think.
Guy Yeah, he wrote the dialogue, and I think the credit exactly reflects what happened. We discussed the story, he went away, and he came back with pages of the script.
Evan Especially with seven characters, you need to get the momentum going, because you can turn your brain off a little bit.
Guy You went into a trance, it seemed like.
Evan Well, the dialogue came up very quick, like pages and pages and pages and pages per day.
Guy In real time!
Evan Because they were talking to themselves. Once you get the characters and their names – we were actually talking in another interview about how important names are, like, if you misname a character, I think you're doomed, it sucks. But if you get the right names, you're just ready to go, and we felt we knew these people because of their names. Like, we had the nationalities as well, which also helps, and character is more than just nationality and name, but you have to start somewhere and you learn. It was really nice to just learn from the characters where we are going rather than telling them where to go. That's sort of how it was written. That's why it has an ambling quality, right? I don't think there was another way for us to do it.
Guy So the names came first, with the exception of our Canadian Prime Minister, as I recall now. I can't remember what his name used to be, but we already had a starting point because the part was written with the actor Roy Dupuis in mind, and we knew who he was. I think we were told by some clearance lawyer or something that his last name had to change, but his first name, I think, stayed the same. I can't remember what it was, but they did a search and found out there were five really litigious people in the world with exactly the same name, so we had to change it. I was annoyed, but I now can't remember what that name was.
I guess when you're making a film about the G7, there's the temptation for the audience to look at it and try to identify the metaphors and the allegories. You make a joke about that with the French President trying to come up with his own allegories for what's going on, but was that something you were conscious of and perhaps trying to steer away from?
Galen Yes, absolutely trying to steer away from it.
Evan Steer away from it, and yet it's sort of like the steering away is the subject, like a failure to cohere in meaning or something is what the movie is about. That seems a bit cheap, like you can always say, “the theme of the movie is bad movies.”
Galen But it's right there in the title, Rumours. It's like, nothing is confirmed.
Evan Yeah, exactly. We wanted the neoliberal hollowing out that is G7 summits, the empty spectacle and how to make an engaging movie about that, but it means you kind of have to avoid meaning when you can in creative ways. Or you can goad people, like, tempt people into thinking, is this a symbol? No, it isn't. And sometimes it is! That's the other thing. There are obvious things in there that are metaphors. There are big, clunky, obvious metaphors symbols in the movie, and yet at times we try to deny that that's true.
Guy Yeah, at times the movie takes on a colouring book-like simplicity.
That's how you get the big audience.
Guy It's called pandering. Feed them a bit more colouring book.
You’ve talked about moving away from the silent era or early talkie style and you've gone for more of a B-movie vibe here. You can also definitely feel the influence of Buñuel in this picture. Were you looking at any particular films or directors for inspirations as you were making this?
Galen I think for the opening stretch we just wanted to base it in reality, so we were sort of inspired by the YouTube videos of G7 summits that we saw. A colour palette that was very flag-like, sort of bright and primary, and then once night falls, the fog does the heavy lifting of the atmosphere. I guess that's what suggests B-movies like John Carpenter or something like that.
Evan I guess it's quite soft. There's a lot of soft glow in the movie, soft focus. A little bit of soap opera. There’s a kind of purplish haze, some sickly colours, unnatural colours, I guess, which aren't very Buñuel. I mean when Bunuel shoots in colour, it's quite... It's pretty drab. It's stark.
The Buñuel influence feels more present in the theme of the film. These absurd characters trapped and wandering in circles.
Evan Yeah, and he's a favorite director of ours. I've said it before, but I'm always nervous to even mention his name because I don't want to presume that we're in his company, but he's definitely an inspiring figure. The Exterminating Angel in particular, the circular wandering of that movie indoors, and then obviously Discreet Charm has some great outdoor wandering as well. He's a filmmaker who is an expert in frustration, and I think frustration was on our minds, as it always is making movies. It's so frustrating.
One of the other big differences for you guys in this is that most of your previous films are made on these very artificial sets, whereas here you're on location, you're out in the woods. How did you adjust to that? It’s quite a different way of making movies.
Guy Yeah, I didn't adjust well at first. These location scouts are like forever and you don't even see your location because you’re scouting during the day, but we shoot at night with fog, so it looks completely different. It's tricky, but it's so expensive to build a forest in a studio that doesn't look super chintzy.
Evan We got lucky with some of our forest locations that look like sets, like there's one where you bathe it in purple light and then it doesn't really look like a real forest, it looks like a soap opera set.
Guy Yeah, that's where we were most comfortable.
Galen Strangely, even though the forests are huge and incredibly detailed, because they're real, it didn't even look like an expensive set.
Evan You're cheap in nature, that's the goal. Yeah, Guy didn't enjoy the scouting process.
Guy I don't like scouting. But I was sceptical that at night any of this stuff would make any difference, like, picking one patch here and then another patch 40 miles away.
Galen Well, I think it would make a difference, you just don't know what the difference would be.
Guy Plus my thighs were sweating. I was allergic to something.
Evan But a couple of the forest locations were perfect. We loved them.
Guy No, no. I stand corrected. Scouting made a big difference. When you fill everything with fog it makes no difference, but we always wait for the fog to blow away or have no fog at all.
Evan If we had the money and the logistics were simpler, we would have shot it all in a set, probably. Some other script maybe.
How do you work with actors? You’ve got an ensemble of very different actors here and in terms of having three directors on set, how do you communicate what you want with them?
Guy It ended up being easier in this case. One person would talk to the actors most of the time, and that was Evan in this case, for whatever reason, maybe his temperament and the way he got along with the actors. I was worried that with three directors there the actors might be like spoiled children and play one director against the other, but that was never a problem. These people were really wonderful and they consulted with each other a lot.
Evan I think you talked to the actors as much as I did, you just didn't talk about the movie or the previous take. It wasn't like specific to the scene or anything.
Guy Yeah, I made a point of getting to know them, it would get them in the spirit. But where most of our directing together happened was when we were at the monitors together watching a take and talking about whether we liked it or not. Then maybe I would go out and talk to the DOP about the look of something, but I think in the director on actor thing it was mostly Evan. Galen and I were concerned with the many other things to be concerned about.
Galen And also sometimes you guys would just give me a mission. You'd say, “I don't know if I like that. So go tell Charles [Dance] this.”
Guy Yeah, because we were terrified of Charles.
I want to ask you about some of the actors in particular. You said you wrote the role of the Canadian Prime Minister for Roy Dupuis. I know him from The Forbidden Room but I don't really know him from much else. I believe he's a much bigger star in Canada.
Guy In French Canada.
Galen He's medium-big in English Canada too but in French Canada he's enormous, like Brad Pitt.
Guy He's literally had to move out to the country to be less harassed, or just not harassed at all.
And this idea of portraying him as a heroic ladies man, this kind of alpha-male lothario, is that an expression of Canadian pride?
Guy It was in casting him. He just showed up with a man bun!
Evan We wrote for him and we know him a little, but we didn't know him super well. We just wrote what we thought Roy would be like as a Prime Minister.
Guy And he could run for Prime Minister and sweep Quebec.
Evan It's another character where you give him the name and the haircut and he writes himself and you follow him wherever he goes. It's always funny. We're Canadians and we're used to needing a Canadian star for our government financing, and Roy is our favourite Canadian star. We knew we wanted him to be a kind of leader and the idea that Canada would be leading was funny because we're like the 7th most important G7 country. Although interestingly – or possibly not interestingly – Canada was invited to the G7 under Pierre Trudeau, because Pierre Trudeau was the most bilingual world leader in French and English and they wanted someone who could help lead the group, so Canada was added.
Guy And he was actually charismatic.
Evan He was a forceful world leader so he was sort of the alpha of the group. He had more experience than the others. Was it Gerald Ford? I think it was Gerald Ford at the time.
Guy He was busy tripping up stairs all the time.
Evan So there's some historical truth to the idea, but for us it was a joke about Canada.
As ridiculous as the film is I got the sense that you've done a fair bit of research on G7 history. There's a lot of references to historical speeches in the film and G7 trivia. It seems like you’re authorities on the subject now.
Evan Yeah, we wanted the movie to be full of G7 inside jokes, G7-specific language.
Galen Not politics, but just the surface of the G7.
Evan It's not deeply thought-out politics, just surface-level G7 stuff, because that seems to be what the G7 is about. It’s very surface-level, almost like beauty pageants. But yeah, there's a lot of surface-level research rather than deep thinking about policy or anything, because I don't think there's much deep thinking about policy that goes on with these summits.
That's the thing that makes me wonder why there hasn't been a film on this subject before, because it is so much about the image and the pageantry. I remember there was an article a few years ago talking about how all these conservative politicians did a kind of power stance with their legs apart. It looked so comical and you wonder, do they not realise how it comes across?
Guy No, but it's intentional, it's performative. These leaders didn't grow up with these power stances, they go to power stance school like they went to charm school, baby-kissing school, flesh-pressing school. Yesterday I was doing an interview with Cate, who actually has a lot of experience hobnobbing with world leaders and politicians at the UN summits and things like that, and she's obviously an observer of people, and she's just convinced that these people learn these performative tricks the moment they decide to enter politics. I wonder if there are just people you can hire.
Evan They hire body language experts, don't they?
Guy I'm sure. “Don't make your face too big.” That's like when Justin Trudeau adopted the Korean stance, the wide stance, to make himself shorter so he could be the same height. It's an act of courtesy to your Korean host to make yourself the same height as them so sometimes that means spreading your legs about six feet apart.
Galen Yeah, it caused a kerfuffle back home in the Canadian media. What the heck is he doing? He's actually just being deferential to his hosts.
Guy So the performative has different vernaculars in different countries.
Another actor I loved in the film was Denis Ménochet. He’s always great but we’re so used to seeing him play these intimidating, taciturn kind of characters, and it’s so much fun to see an actor like him cut loose in a way I haven't really seen before. How did you arrive at the choice to cast him in this role?
Galen With him, we thought he was brilliant and he came highly recommended and we were like, this guy can do this. He can just do it. We'll hope it works. And we were not disappointed at all. That guy is a genius.
Guy Ari Aster recommended him and we quickly got enthusiastic about it, and then he went beyond anything we expected, not just on screen but in prep. His character is revealed as being obsessed with building Western Europe's largest sundial, and Denis, in prep for the role, wrote a really beautiful essay on sundials, in character.
Galen Not to include in the movie, just to get into the character. It was really something.
Evan He's a very fun actor to work with. He's very different. Charles always refers to himself as an actor for hire, no fuss, he'll just say the lines and he nails them. If you want him to say the line a little faster, you say, “a little faster, Charles,” and he says, “Right-o,” and does it. But Denis is not like that. If you want Denis to say a line faster and you ask him to say the line faster, he says, “What? Like…what? What?!” and then the next take is ruined because he's looking at you like, “Fast?!” You have to speak to him, not quite in character, but you do have to be like, “Can you believe he said that, Denis? He said that to you. Are you going to take that?” and then he gets riled up. He's always unpredictable and very intuitive.
The film suddenly feels very current with the idea of an AI chatbot being so central to the climax.
Galen No, it was not really as hot a couple of years ago when we wrote this. This was pre-Chat GPT blowing up that we wrote this, and then that blew up and we're like…oh God. It seems like we're bandwagon jumping now.
Evan It came just quite naturally. I think we needed like a late second act turn to send some of them back to the house, the chateau. You need that setback. I think it came out of like a writing session where we were like, what if they get a text that says help? Well, who would send the text? And then the chatbot came out of that. It was just a practical. Of course, now it definitely seems like a sexual entrapment chatbot is the kind of thing that might end the world, and it's a nice stupid way for humanity to end. We thought it was fitting. But no, I think in fact we're always a little nervous when there’s something of the moment, we’re like, oh no, that means in six months it's going to be dated badly. But hopefully not.
And finally, Guy, I know you've been working on 4K restorations for some of your earlier films. I think you've done Tales from the Gimli Hospital and Archangel.
Guy And Careful, my third feature, is going to be restored.
What's it like going back to these films that you made decades ago and working on them again?
Guy I thought it would be worse because I really don't like watching my old movies much. They're just huge inventories of regrets and mistakes and things like that, and then the end credits are like reading cenotaphs of dead and lost friends and failed relationships, they're all accusing me of a life misled. But actually going in and getting a chance to bring out details that I had long ago forgotten, or had disappointed me by not being visible, just with colour correction and things like that, it's been richly rewarding. It’s a little bit terrifying sometimes because a lot of the work is done before I come in, and so there'll be a young colourist who'll have worked on the movie for two weeks, but someone who has never seen a film before. “So I dialled out all that grain…”
Galen The idea of restoring a Guy Maddin a movie is kind of funny.
Guy I know, I remember thinking they were restoration proof, and now here I am!
Evan Didn't someone take out the audio ambient piece?
Guy Yeah, which I went to a lot of trouble to put in! That was on Archangel, all the optical crackle was removed, and on Gimli Hospital all the film grain was removed. So it actually took a lot out of me, I was getting really exasperated.
When I spoke to you before, you said that you'd always tended to go back and re-edit your films to make them shorter. Your ideal director's cuts would always be shorter.
Guy Always, no, that is true.
Did you have the urge to go back and tinker with these?
Guy I tightened those restorations up a little bit.
Evan Gimli Hospital's a little shorter. Is Archangel a little shorter?
Guy Yep, shorter by few minutes. I didn't remove any scenes or anything, just tightened the pace.
Galen So many dozens of fades to black...
Guy I was obsessed with just the narcotic pleasure I got from a very long, slow fade to…not to black, but to a milky grey, and then with the audio equivalent of milky grey playing. I tightened some of those up, because three seconds of those at a time does just as well as twenty seconds, so I was able to shorten them.
There’s only so much milky grey that people can take, I guess.
Guy Yeah, I took six minutes out of it, and it still reads like there's too much milky grey.
Rumours is released in UK cinemas on December 6th