It’s the G7, that busybody economic and political forum of world leaders, as you’ve never seen it before. The Canadian prime minister (Roy Dupuis) has a manbun and an apparent erotic history with his British counterpart (Nikki Amuka-Bird) and the German chancellor (Cate Blanchett). The American president (Charles Dance) is English. The French president (Denis Ménochet) is wounded in a mysterious attack and must be carted around by the other members in a wheelbarrow. And over the course of the night as they desultorily try to hammer out a statement about an unnamed crisis, they encounter monstrous things in the woods. Not quite the usual summit.
But then, Rumours is not quite the usual film, but the latest work from Winnipeg cult director Guy Maddin and his collaborators and best friends Evan and Galen Johnson. Midsommar director Ari Aster is an executive producer (as is Blanchett). It is an unusual film, even for its makers, the first time they have made a feature entirely on location and outside of Canada—Rumours was shot primarily in Hungary—and Blanchett is the biggest name Maddin’s worked with. Even Stefan Ciupek’s sleek cinematography is a departure for filmmakers whose work is more often experimental and infused with the influence of the silent films Maddin loves.
“It was a whole new thing, long overdue, though, in which I challenged myself,” Maddin says in a Zoom call shared with the Johnson brothers. “These guys know I’m lying if I say it felt great all the time. There were times when I wanted to go home and go to bed, and there were times I just wanted to go to a set and hold a Super-8 camera and direct people I dragged off the sidewalks.”
In a way, Rumours is the trio getting their sea legs back. There have been a few shorts but this is their first feature since 2017’s SFFILM Festival-commissioned The Green Fog. But Maddin observes that film, a recreation of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo composed of scenes from other San Francisco-shot movies and TV shows, was constructed like a documentary. The last time any of them had called “action” or “cut” on a set was in 2013 when they shot the dreamscape of The Forbidden Room.
In order to get to this point, they first needed a story. Evan Johnson wrote Rumours’ screenplay from a story worked out by all three. They had multiple ideas, but the G7 kept turning up in a variety of ways, a minor punchline in one story, as the backdrop in another.
“Each time we attempted to write this new script, it became a phone book in a hurry but the G7 became our famous part of it,” Maddin says. “We finally just vowed fraternal blood oaths to throw out all that other stuff and keep the G7. It seemed to come out of its own swamp.”
“I don’t know where the idea came from, but it was a collective very bad feeling,” Evan Johnson says. “We’re not temperamentally the type to fix major problems or do anything but laugh when things get bad. That can be a lazy or cowardly way around problems, but we did have a goal, I think, or a new articulation of the doom we’re all facing. That’s why we didn’t approach it quite just as a political satire. The perspective of the movie is very sequestered from the wider world and real problems.”
Plus, Galen Johnson points out that centering the film on the G7 imposed a kind of discipline on the three collaborators with just seven characters and a limited location.
“That gave us a small globe in which to try different things,” he says.
Other factors affected the production. Dupuis’ manbun, for example, was dictated by the actor’s schedule. They wrote the part of the Canadian Prime Minister for the Dupuis, one of the stars of The Forbidden Room. Cutting his hair for Rumours was not an option since he needed to keep the length for his next job. Thus, the manbun he rocks before he lets his hair down in Rumours—so unexpected in a political leader—was born.
“His hair didn’t influence how we directed him or anything, or how Roy performed, but it influences an audience,” Evan Johnson says. “Everything’s different once you see his manbun. It changes your perception of him.”
Besides, adds Maddin, “I think the world’s ready for a leader with a manbun.”
The hair only adds to the prime minister’s sex appeal, which helps sell the idea of attraction between him and the ladies of the G7. No wonder they get so distracted from the task at hand. All seven world leaders keep wandering away from the reason they find themselves sitting in a remote gazebo somewhere in Germany. The statement they intend to fashion keeps getting pushed aside by other concerns, some trivial, some not, and some otherworldly.
“The G7 is always dealing with multiple crises at one time, so we gave them a polycrisis,” says Galen Johnson. “I mean, we just came up with concerns that were very localized and not big world concerns for them to focus on. But it’s similar to the G7 ,you know, when they get together, they have an agenda, and some of it’s climate change, some of it’s the war in Ukraine, some of its this, some of its that, and some of them are sort of related, or they might be related, you don’t know how, but there’s always multiple crises going on. “
Whatever it is they face in these woods, these political titans face alone. They’ve been abandoned by their staff and handlers. The ferry that is supposed to carry them back from their island retreat is gone. It is a scenario that calls back real world isolation from not so long ago. Did the pandemic lockdown influence the storytelling?
“It’s interesting that you’re the first person to mention COVID, and I think there is something of the vibe of that loneliness,” Maddin says, although he avers, “I’ve always been more comfortable making a movie about a small world where there seem to be guidelines and rules.”
Adds Galen Johnson, “Isolation is cheaper.”
Now that Rumours is out in the world, the trio is turning its attention to future projects. They don’t want another decade-plus lag between features. Galen Johnson says they have written other projects, some before Rumours.
“They’re just waiting around for us to get out act together,” he says.
“The idea is to keep making things before I’m dead,” says Maddin. “So yeah, let’s get something going soon.”
RUMOURS opens at Bay Area theaters on October 18.
