Guy Maddin didn’t know he was even on Cate Blanchett‘s radar until he saw her pick his film “My Winnipeg” out of the Criterion Closet back in 2022.
“It was a manipulative move. It was a cry for help!” Blanchett joked to IndieWire (and her peers) on the rooftop of the JW Marriott on the Cannes Croisette back in May when their debut collaboration, “Rumours,” first premiered. She was joined on that day by Maddin and his co-directors, Evan and Galen Johnson, who’ve been chugging away with the singularly absurdist Canadian auteur on short films since 2015 and the feature “The Forbidden Room” in 2016. Their latest, “Rumours,” is a satirical slice of weirdness about seven nimwit world leaders who gather at a fictional G7 conference to draft a vaguely reassuring statement about an unnamed international crisis. Blanchett plays Hilda Orlmann, the Chancellor of Germany, channeling Angela Merkel in a blond bob and European faux-steeliness.
“It was a marshland meeting ritual cry from the other side of the internet. Anyway, we realized that she’d be great,” Maddin joked of their first conversations with Blanchett, and in the spirit of the movie, which was shot in a forest some 40 minutes by car outside Budapest. Here, the location becomes increasingly fog-laden and soggy as this sci-fi comedy wends toward apocalyptic, psychosexual mayhem.
“Otherwise, we wouldn’t have aimed that high,” Galen said.
“Yeah, we would’ve aimed lower,” Evan said.
But the filmmakers were properly introduced to Blanchett through “Midsommar” and “Hereditary” director Ari Aster. “We’ve been working with Ari Aster and developing a few projects. This is one of them,” said Maddin. (Aster is an executive producer on “Rumours.”) “He approached me — this is really strange. I am really grateful to Ari, but he’s, like, half my age. He reached out to me one day to say that when he was a little kid, I was his favorite filmmaker. I was honored and a bit shocked at the time, and time-shocked. We started working together, and we sent him the script of ‘Rumours’ and he loved it, and at one point, Cate’s name came up because Ari had basically her email address or something.”
“I have an agent!” Blanchett interjected.
“We just assume if we give something to the agent, the agent goes, ‘Nope, not doing that one,’” longtime indie filmmaker and prize-of-Winnipeg Maddin said. “The first time I went to Hollywood, in the ‘90s, someone said, ‘Who do you see in the lead? And I went, ‘Sort of a young Buster Keaton?’ I just went home and went to bed for a long time. We reached out to Cate, and I knew she knew who I was because I saw her in the Criterion Closet pick one of my movies, and mention my name and one of my films.”
Three directors seem like a lot for one film that isn’t an omnibus, especially with an ensemble that includes, as the crackpot world leaders, Alicia Vikander, Charles Dance, Roy Dupuis, Denis Ménochet, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Rolando Ravello, and Takehiro Hira. But Blanchett said the triangulated directing style made an on-location production across 18 nights — after a jaunty lead-up, “Rumours” unfolds entirely at night as the G7 summiters are terrorized by masturbating zombies emerging from beneath the soil — somehow easier.
“At one point, we sort of said, ‘How does it work?’ But like most of the questions that [filmmakers] ask you, we didn’t get definitive answers,” Blanchett said. “We get a big cloud of answers. But the great thing about the way the three of you works is that you all, each day, there are so many concerns you have as a director and competing responsibilities and foci you have to have. It’s often hard for a single director to even be on top of all that unless they have an army of people to delegate and drive you nuts. It doesn’t always work the other way either, or they don’t have an interest in performance or the technical stuff, so I’ve got to look after that, which is fine. There are many different ways to approach moviemaking.”
It also helped that Maddin and the Johnsons stayed in the same apartment throughout shooting. “Terrible idea, by the way. We’d get along quite well, but we shouldn’t have been working all day 24/7,” Evan said. Blanchett admitted, “I did find that odd. I didn’t know you well enough to caution you against it.”
“Well, we couldn’t afford to do otherwise,” said Maddin, whose “Rumours” counted Aster’s Square Peg plus Buffalo Gal Pictures and Maze Pictures among its backers. “It wasn’t a total disaster. [It would] give us time to, when you get up in the morning to go pee, and the other two guys are up already, next thing you know, you’re discussing the day’s shoot, and you’re hoping for another 20 minutes in bed or something.” According to Maddin, they were shooting “from 5 p.m. to 5 a.m., in dark, damp, chilly woods with a lot of fog.”
Seeing this particular suite of internationally renowned actors betraying and wooing and sleeping with each other onscreen as the G7 summit spins out of control is as weirdly joyous for the audience as it was for the actors. “I’m always a little worried when someone says that, making a movie, when you see the finished movie that it looked like people had a good time making it. It should look like it was a terrible time,” said Galen.
“Often, I am really concerned if I have a good time,” Blanchett said. “The worst thing is when the actors are having more fun than the audience. What you see is it’s playful. The thing’s alive. You can reanimate something in the editing room, but somewhere in the process, if it hasn’t been alive, in the moment, it’s been dead too long.”
Adding to the Maddin-esqueness of it all is a giant, Volkswagen-sized brain Alicia Vikander’s character, the Secretary-General of the European Commission, finds in the woods and forms a crush on. The brain is eventually engulfed in flames, and as the filmmakers explained, there was no second brain made or chance to redo it.
“The brain is made of Styrofoam base and a layer of squishy latex and a bunch of flammable material,” said Maddin, and he said it smelled “really bad” after the flames, reminding him of a fire that happened earlier that day two floors below on the JW Marriott, whose remnants were still wafting in the air during our interview.
“That fire we had earlier, something caught on fire two stories down and a really bad smell came up two stories down and was replaced by the Mediterranean breeze. The fires smell terrible and sad and chemically, and that’s what this brain smelled like,” Maddin said.
In “Rumours,” Blanchett’s Hilda and Roy Dupuis, as a man-bunned Canadian prime minister, find themselves interacting with a teasing AI chatbot that’s also trying to catch their colleagues in committing an internet child sex crime. Even by Cannes 2024, the conversation around AI had become so deafening that the filmmakers didn’t want to explain their cheeky cinematic device in full. The sexually entrapping chatbot eventually leads the G7-ers back to the vast, Gothic estate where their summit began.
“That was a purely pragmatic decision,” Evan said. “We wanted to send them back to where they came from. We wanted there to be no progress, and we needed a way to do it. I don’t know if we came up with the idea at once, but it feels like something that specific — ‘sexual entrapment chatbot’ — I think we may have all done that at once!”
“It’s been one of my worst fears, and you have to confront your fears sometimes,” Maddin joked of the chatbot.
Evan said “I am not an enthusiastic for making comments on AI,” while Maddin added that the conversation is “taking care of itself.” Blanchett, an actor as much up against the existential threat AI poses to performers as anyone, said, “The level of conversation around AI sounds to me like someone drowning… There’s some company in Germany somewhere that owns a certain proportion of the human genome. Where was the referendum on that one? That piece of legislation can go through? I can’t believe that AI is not being discussed in a collective Parliament. It’s like, I need to be able to vote on this shit.”
“Rumours” opens in theaters from Bleecker Street on October 18.
