Rumours (Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson, 2024).
Rumours (2024), codirected by Guy Maddin and brothers Evan and Galen Johnson, follows the world leaders at a G7 summit as they draft a provisional statement concerning an unspecified global crisis. The film finds Maddin operating in a different vein of artifice than the chaotic pastiches of early filmic techniques that characterize much of his previous work. In Rumours, high-key lighting blasts an antiseptic aura, and the babbly performances are urbane to the point of uncanniness (Charles Dance plays the US president with an unexplained British accent). However, the heads of state soon wander into more familiar Maddin territory. Stumbling through the woods, they encounter surreal and fleshy aberrations: self-pleasuring bog mummies, a gargantuan brain, et cetera. In a classic The Exterminating Angel (1962) conundrum, the figureheads drift through an inescapable liminal space, forced to abandon their mannered etiquettes and self-interrogate. Picture Raúl Ruiz’s The Territory (1981), if transposed into the sphere of international politics.
Led by A-list actors (including Cate Blanchett and Alicia Vikander), Rumours veers into a more familiar narrative and aesthetic structure. Maddin abandons his playfully archaic film grammar for a restrained, actor-oriented visual economy assembled through coverage. It’s a fascinating reinvention for a filmmaker who emerged from the Winnipeg Film Group scene in the 1980s, shooting DIY pictures with paltry budgets that were anchored by iconoclastic exuberance. Rumours is his largest playground to date, an opportunity for a long-revered outsider to scale up. The result is a film with new priorities: a humbler work with less assaultive film grammar, keen to spotlight Maddin’s collaborators, letting dramaturgy determine the course of his distinctive images.
I first met Maddin four years ago when he was my professor at the University of Toronto. As a pedagogue, he was lively and personal, generous and nurturing, shameless and self-deprecating. This September, we convened at the Toronto International Film Festival to discuss Rumours, the joys and complications of creating more accessible films, his complex relationship with spontaneous filmmaking, and his compulsion to film brains. In our conversation, Maddin often reflected on own mortality, looking back at his 40 years of work and trying to decide what to explore in his remaining films.
Rumours (Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: Rumours is your first feature in several years.
GUY MADDIN: The last feature we shot—where I called “action” and things like that—was The Forbidden Room in 2015. Then there was the repurposed footage movie The Green Fog in 2017. It’s been a while. The years just accumulate if you’re not really driven. Next thing you know, it’s been almost a decade between shoots.
NOTEBOOK: Was that hiatus in feature filmmaking willful or from material circumstances?
MADDIN: A combination of things. I let distractions in my life take me from the process. I went through a divorce, had to go teach—luckily, I landed with both feet—at Harvard. I had to teach to make ends meet, but that really destroys your filmmaking momentum. Even teaching at the University of Toronto, as much as I enjoyed it, meant I was away from my collaborators. Then, I accepted a bunch of short film commissions to make money while waiting for our feature scripts to get a grip. Making short films doesn’t take as much time as a feature, but it doesn’t just take a weekend. Finally, I quit teaching, which meant no salary, and committed myself to film. I had to ask myself, “Am I an aging teacher or an aging filmmaker?” I realized I want to make more films with whatever time I have left on this planet. But I went on an aimless stroll through the desert for almost a decade.
NOTEBOOK: You’ve been making movies for almost 40 years. When you approach a new film, do you feel anxieties entering the production? Or is filmmaking just a second language now?
MADDIN: On Rumours, I really tried to push myself further. Looking back on my career, I detected periods where I wasn’t being very courageous, where I was falling back on familiar vocabularies. I was still reaching to develop myself with the stories, but my film vocabulary wasn’t evolving fast enough. Rumours’s script was perfect to push me into new visual territories. It’s the kind of script requiring a really solid cast. It was a quadratic equation where we needed a higher budget, we needed more stars, we needed to reach more people. That’s a challenge. My big heroes are people like Buñuel and Hitchcock; they never included or excluded a shot against their wills in their entire careers and still managed to have success on their terms. I thought, “I’ll try to do this. I’ll try to make a film I’m proud of and have it reach more people.” I’ve never really worried about crowd size. It’s always nice if there’s more people, but it’s more important that the films please me. Which is strange since most of the time they don’t. But I keep trying!
NOTEBOOK: I’ve known you to be an extremely self-critical person.
MADDIN: As you should be! I’ve just met enough filmmakers that aren’t. Though maybe they’re just self-critical privately. But I make a public, embarrassing scene of my self-criticism.
NOTEBOOK: Do you feel pride about Rumours?
MADDIN: I feel a lot of pride about Rumours. I feel it pulls off a lot of things a conventional, mainstream Hollywood movie can’t. And yet it stands a chance of being watched. It’s exactly the movie we wanted to make. I’m not saying we had Kubrickian control at every step. But it had the rhythms, logic, and performances we foresaw. The only surprises were pleasant ones.
Rumours (Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: Over the course of your career, you’ve gradually amassed more and more codirectors. How many do you think you’ll have when you die?
MADDIN: [Laughs.] I could use a baker’s dozen! Not including me, that’d be twelve codirectors.
NOTEBOOK: What’s the appeal of a codirector? How did working with the Johnsons change your approach to filmmaking?
MADDIN: They just really brought me back to life. I first started working with Evan when I hired him as a research assistant on The Forbidden Room. I wanted some company. Some stages of filmmaking, like writing or editing, can be very lonely. He’d been a student that I really liked—like you. Every now and then you get a student who really knows stuff and impresses you. He was one of those students. We stayed in touch after he graduated. When I hired him as an assistant, the first job I gave him was to assemble a barbeque. I hate putting things together. So, he just put together a Canadian Tire barbecue for me.
NOTEBOOK: As a prop for the movie…?
MADDIN: No, for my house! [Laughs.] I was busy at TIFF or something, and I wanted to barbecue when I got back. I’d forgotten what minimum wage was. I think I offered him like half minimum wage or something horrible like that. It was a really degrading thing, but he’s got a great work ethic. He was researching lost films the whole time. We were working on The Forbidden Room and Seances [2016], and he started pitching ideas for lost films and coming up with conceptual ideas for the whole project. By the time we finished writing it, he was a full-on writing collaborator with some of the best ideas between the two of us! When we were making the film, his brother Galen came on as a production designer, sound designer, and graphic artist. Pretty soon, we realized we were wearing every hat: cinematography, production design, sound design, music. We realized we were all filmmakers, and I guess filmmakers are usually called directors. People think of directors as the person who calls “action” and “cut,” though we don’t even do that. The first AD does that. He gets mad at us because we won’t say “action” or “cut.”
On Rumours, we were shooting huge forest scenes. I’d never lit anything much more than a close-up before. Or maybe a close-up veering off into a medium shot or a full-shot at most. But this needed a lot of long shots to make the forest interesting and visible. So we hired Stefan Ciupek, who worked on Lars von Trier’s forest movie…
NOTEBOOK: Antichrist [2009]?
MADDIN: Yeah. So, he was a second-unit DP for forest stuff.
NOTEBOOK: You got a forest expert.
MADDIN: Yes, we were in good hands.
Rumours (Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson, 2023).
NOTEBOOK: You’re a filmmaker very oriented towards history, albeit very anachronistically. Were there challenges adjusting to a film this contemporary and, for lack of a better word, topical?
MADDIN: Yeah! I felt a need to make a break. The Forbidden Room was a logical terminus with this obsession with emulsions, ancient vocabularies, and things like that. Although we would like to shoot on film again! We were doing a G7 thing [in Rumours]. It had to be grounded in reality at first. That way everything strange and dreamy would have a comparison. Although it’s never really grounded in reality; as soon as you hear the G7 leaders talking it’s a little strange. I’ve always been struck by the television coverage of G7 summits. You never hear them speak. The mics are off; you just see them doing choreographed pantomimes. It was fun to fill in what they say.
We weren’t interested in allegory. We pledged in the writer’s room that whenever the movie wandered accidentally into an allegory, we’d take a sharp, hairpin U-turn out of there to avoid easy allegorical applications to the film. For topicality, there’s certain things like how characters wear hair and clothing that may seem timely, but I wanted the movie to have a perpetual of-the-moment feel. I think these people are essentially doing what leaders have always done at these things. Leaders get up to pretty bad mischief on their own. But at these summits, they’re ridiculous.
NOTEBOOK: The movie begins feeling sterile, bombarded with bright light. But as the characters wander into a surreal landscape, it’s kind of like they arrive into a Guy Maddin movie. Your style’s almost punitive.
MADDIN: [Laughs.] Yes, I was waiting for them! I planted myself deep in the forest and took over at that point.
Rumours (Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: You’ve made movies like Cowards Bend the Knee [2003], which was shot for around $15,000, with improvised camerawork, and sets from a different production. Do you prefer working more spontaneously with less oversight? Or do you like more structured shoots like Rumours?
MADDIN: I found myself on Rumours profoundly nostalgic for the old way of making films. I think if the scripts are right, there’s a way to return to that freedom of grabbing a camera and some favorite friends and just making a movie. But I’m also so glad I got into this more conventional structure and learned a lot, even at this late stage. A filmmaker gets to be young until they die of old age. I’m still learning. Maybe I can occupy both realms somehow, maybe that won’t be held against me. For the longest time, by being willing to make a movie for any amount of money, I started getting less money because people thought, “Guy doesn’t need any budget!” I really clawed and scratched for the money to make this. Some of my most exquisite work memories as an adult were making those films where everything was incredibly organic. But having emerged from Rumours, I’m having comradely, colloquial, and warm memories of the battles we went through. Those shoots weren’t always pleasant at the time, but everything’s viewed most pleasantly in the past.
NOTEBOOK: You mentioned how you needed to evolve your formal language and focus less on archaic forms. What specific techniques or technologies did you want to try on Rumours?
MADDIN: It wasn’t all visual. I wanted Rumours to look good and everything, but we struggled to find a very obvious formal approach. I envy Bresson or Wes Anderson, filmmakers you recognize instantly. Rumours didn’t seem to lend itself to a conspicuous formal approach. It was a matter of setting it in a plausible world and giving the actors a chance to play with the dialogue and bring it to life. I felt if they did that, the movie would achieve itself and become its sui generis strange thing. We also wanted to see if we could find real locations that looked like sets. The [script’s] heightened and mannered language affects the locations a bit and makes them seem heightened and mannered themselves. But it didn’t really require anything beyond changing the color temperature on the key light. For the love scene between the Canadian Prime Minister and German Chancellor, we switched to a slightly soap-operatic lighting. That helped.
NOTEBOOK: My favorite shot in the movie is that tableau of the Canadian Prime Minister pulling off his condom and tossing it away with such regal poise.
MADDIN: [Laughs.] Because I’ve worked with Super 8, 16mm, murky emulsions, and scratchy warpings, I wasn’t sure it’d read as a condom. But filming in 4K, you can recognize that condom at 100 meters!
Rumours (Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: I can think of at least three of your movies with prominent brains: Rumours, The Forbidden Room, and My Dad is 100 Years Old [2005].
MADDIN: Oh, [My Dad is 100 Years Old] does! You’re the first person that’s mentioned this.
NOTEBOOK: There’s also the title Brand upon the Brain! [2006]. What draws you to the image of the brain?
MADDIN: [Laughs.] I’ve always had a soft spot for weird, vintage pulp fiction in magazines from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Brains turn up in those things all the time. Someone will be pointing to a giant brain or there’s a brain in a jar. The old Frankenstein “Good Brain”/“Bad Brain” separate jars. I was always delighted by them. Brains are objects from which the entire animal kingdom sprouted. In this one, the characters are trying to think of how to write a provisional statement, and they’re world leaders. A giant brain covered in moss and dirt struck me as a strong visual image that might not need any verbal explanation. Maybe Buñuel would’ve excluded the giant brain. In Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie [1972], he just has those people wandering around and talking. He wouldn’t even have needed bog mummies. But I’ve never claimed to be Buñuel. He’s a god to me, though. I’m glad we dropped it, but in one version of the script, the Canadian Prime Minister discovers the giant brain, takes a picture of it, then pulls out his handgun and shoots it once. The gag was that a Canadian Prime Minister keeps a handgun. But it doesn’t make the brain twitch or anything. You don’t know if it’s even a significant injury to such a large brain. But we ditched it; I don’t like firearms around a set. It makes me nervous.
NOTEBOOK: Especially in light of recent events.
MADDIN: Yeah, enough already. I’ve had a few close calls myself with firearms. On Careful, a gun was meant to be shot in the air, not at anybody, but the gun was faulty and a bullet went shooting out sideways and ricocheted off all the steel girders in the studio. Miraculously, it missed the hundred people scattered around. So, I’m not a fan. There was that guy Jon-Erik Hexum, a star of a TV series who jokingly committed suicide with the blanks in his gun. There’s also something rinky-dink about firearm experts showing up on a set in Manitoba. We’re not a gun culture. It’s often some retired cop who comes out with too much self-aggrandizing display, reassuring everyone it’s safe, and then a bullet goes zinging around anyways. No, thank you!
NOTEBOOK: In Rumours, the US president is a babbling, asleep-at-the-wheel figurehead. The Canadian prime minister is a self-proclaiming feminist and a hunk in the midst of relationship conflicts. How much did parallels with these characters’ real life equivalents influence the characterization?
MADDIN: All the fawning around Justin [Trudeau] when he was first elected might’ve played into it. But we just wanted Roy Dupuis anyway. We enjoyed working with him so much on Forbidden Room; we wrote this part for him. Initially, he turned it down and we thought, “I guess that’s it for the project.” Biden hadn’t gone through his critical presidential aging yet. He was old, but parody dates in a hurry. If the movie gets seen ten years from now, I don’t want someone to go, “That’s a parody of the president from back then!” I wanted it to be more timeless. I was more interested in him being elderly and British. It’s right there on the script. I hadn’t thought of Charles Dance on the page, but we knew we wanted the most British person. When Cate [Blanchett] came aboard, Charles knew he always wanted to work with her, so he said yes. It was much easier to cast the movie once Cate came aboard. [Charles] even thanked me. He said, “I’ve got to thank you because this is a chance I’ve wanted for a long time.” When an actor thanks you for casting them, it feels good. I’m not used to that! I’m used to begging people to be in the movie!
NOTEBOOK: Was Dance your ideal of the most British man?
MADDIN: Yeah, he was our first choice. His gait and bearing is actually very presidential, even though he’s British. He’s easily the most presidential British person possible.
Rumours (Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson, 2023).
NOTEBOOK: Obviously the film’s a lampoon of demagoguery. But I was surprised by the degree of pathos in it. Did you find fictionalizing world leaders and working with them as characters allowed you to be more compassionate?
MADDIN: Yeah, Evan talks about that. He wrote the actual script; Galen, Evan, and I wrote the story together. We have nothing but contempt for these world leaders. But once you start working on the page with the dialogue, then with the actors themselves on set, you end up just liking them. Since none of the characters have any specific ideologies that would help you love or hate them, and because they haven’t committed any war crimes that are mentioned in the movie, you end up liking them. It’s the same way people who write soap opera characters probably like everybody [they write]. They like the wishy-washy person, they like the cuck, they like the villainess. The more you get to know your characters, the more you get to respect them for who they are.
NOTEBOOK: This is your most actor-oriented movie. A lot of it is dialogue-heavy portraiture. How did your approach to working with actors change with this one?
MADDIN: We deferred to what they’re comfortable with and used to. We had three rehearsal days, but there were fittings in there, so it was more like one day spread across three. That was a chance for them to get acquainted. They felt free to just read the lines rather than act them during these rehearsals. I was a little scared this was about as good it’d get. But once you’ve visited the set on the day of shooting and blocked the actors, it gets better. Because there’s seven main characters who are almost always together, we had to shoot it with a lot of coverage. We had two cameras going, so we’d pick two actors and just shoot them. Sometimes a character doesn’t have one word in the scene, but they get a couple takes, seven minutes long or so, of just them listening or looking. A good actor knows how to listen and look on-screen. Rolando Ravello and Takehiro Hira were particularly good at listening and doing little things while other people with rich voices were talking. When you’re cutting the movie together, you have the full experience in close-up from everybody. You can surprise yourself as an editor with where you choose to point the viewer’s eye.
I didn’t used to make movies this way. Cowards Bend the Knee was shot caméra-stylo-style, with just one camera that I followed. I’d work my way through the scene with the camera, just panning from one hand to another, swish panning to a face. Actors had to be in character all the time, but it didn’t result in footage I had the luxury of cutting to a single person at any point in a scene. I basically had a one-of-a-kind take. I enjoyed way more options in editing here.
NOTEBOOK: You’ve talked about feeling a need to evolve your formal vocabulary. You’ve also talked about feeling nostalgia making films like Cowards Bend the Knee. What do you feel oriented towards next?
MADDIN: I’d like to keep working in this Hollywood vein. Then I can always fall back to a digital camera essay film. The kind of films I tried to teach you guys to make in class. That’s more of a fallback, but it doesn’t mean I value it any less. If I’m remembered for anything at the end of my life, it might be the little low-budget things. But I really enjoyed the results of Rumours; I’m really proud of it. And I hope it’s successful enough to allow me to keep going in that direction. That direction is a big uphill climb in terms of budget and stars. But it’s interesting territory for me. For so many decades, I was just a comfy outsider. Now I’m not entirely outside.
NOTEBOOK: Now you’re a Hollywood big shot!
MADDIN: I am a Hollywood big shot. You’re lucky you’re speaking to me! [Laughs.]