A Conversation with Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson & Galen Johnson (RUMOURS)

Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson, a trio of Canadian filmmakers known for their distinctive and experimental approach to cinema, have once again pushed the boundaries of storytelling with their latest project, Rumours. Maddin, a veteran director whose career spans decades, has long been celebrated for his surrealist style and homages to silent-era aesthetics. The Johnson brothers, who began collaborating with Maddin in the  early 2010s, have brought their own unique vision to their joint works. Their partnership has produced acclaimed films that challenge conventional narratives and visual styles.Their 2015 film The Forbidden Room, is one of my favorites of its decade.  Rumours, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, marks a new chapter in their collaborative journey, featuring an international cast including Cate Blanchett, Roy Dupuis, Charles Dance, Denis Ménochet, and Alicia Vikander. The film is hilarious, absurd and deeply cinematic. I urge everyone to see it in a theater while you can! The following conversation was edited for length and clarity.

Hammer to Nail: Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I love this movie so much. The Forbidden Room is truly one of my favorite movies of the 2010s. One of my favorite things to show an unsuspecting friend.

Evan Johnson: I feel sorry for them.

Galen Johnson: Former friends now I take it?

Guy Maddin: You must not have any friends!

HTN: You have all worked together for quite some time now to some amazing results. How did this relationship start and has your guys’ process been similar across all your projects?

GM: Evan was a student of mine when I taught Intro to Film Studies when he was 18. He was my best student ever. We became acquaintances, and he would help me out every now and then. He was a research assistant for me on what became The Forbidden Room. Soon his assistance was more like a full time collaborator. He was coming up with conceptual ideas. His brother came on, and that was it, we have been working together ever since. That was 2011, so around 13 years!

EJ: It switches and changes depending on the mood.

GM: It switches on the set. The writing process has been pretty much the same. We have a very healthy vigorous debate where we agree there will be no hard feelings if someone’s idea is rejected. We give our respective ideas a defense and then you come up with a third or fourth better idea. There is never any compromising involved. It is very invigorating to me, you cannot collaborate with anybody. We have similar taste in books, movies and music but its not identical. It is more complimentary. As Canadians we are not used to confrontation but we do it! We put our nationality aside and we have what amounts to drunken bar room haymaker throwing arguments, except, none of us drinks and we don’t punch.

HTN: The film has a wonderful cast, how did they come to join the film? Particularly would love to know how the very British Charles Dance came to be the President of the United States

EJ: We wrote the part for a British actor on purpose. That was one of the first ideas we had. Without any discussion about why it made sense to us, we thought it would be funny and maybe enriching if the president of the United States had a British accent and was actually a British person. Some things make you laugh and we had to fight for that at every stage. People would say, “That is funny, but it is going to be confusing for everybody.” Which it is haha.

GM: I think in one version of the script he talked about his childhood in South Carolina.

EJ: Charles of course can do an American accent perfectly and was willing to, but we would not let him. It would not have been as funny. So many great British actors come to America and steal the jobs of hardworking American actors and play presidents. Gary Oldman did it in Oppenheimer.

GM: Roy Dupui was most important to us. We needed him as our Canadian prime minister and we wrote the part for him. For a while, it seemed like maybe he would not be available and we were depressed. We were considering folding up shop, but luckily, he became available after all. Ari Aster who I befriended helped us get the attention of Cate Blanchette. Once she came aboard, casting gathered momentum. We pretty soon had all of our first choices for all of the parts.

HTN: The first sequence I would love to discuss is all the world leaders talking about their regrets. All of these are fascinating responses where did they come from?

GM: I am a very regretful person. I may have started writing that in a different version of this film. The G7 were part of subplots of other script I had written. This is a regret themed movie from start to finish. We thought the idea of a regret based theme for the summit would be good. It seemed like these leaders have a lot to regret. The fact is, the things they are regretting are not heinous at all.

EJ: It cuts to the idea that they would all answer the question with very localized and personal regrets. Nothing on a larger scale or resonance. It cuts to the heart of what the movie is about. The weird disjunction between how personal these politicians are but also how outsized their roles are as these giant symbols of power.

GJ: We thought it would be funny to have a theme like it was the Met Gala or something haha.

HTN: I love the scene where Denis Menochet goes off looking for the papers, we switch to black and white, the music swells, I know this is meant to be funny but it also works as  hypnotizing and creepy. What were you going for in this moment and if you could talk about the physicality he brought to the set?

EJ: It is in black and white because it is being narrated by a Frenchman. It is something a pretentious French guy would do: have a black and white flashback. Denis, everything about him is amazing. He is so intense. The way he fears with his whole body. It was nice to have a scene where we focus on one of these characters when the majority of the time there are all 7 people on screen. It was nice to carefully craft something with one person instead of 7. It can be very difficult to block and direct 7 people all day. We relished the opportunity.

GM: You can block 6 people but that 7th always gets in the way.

GJ: The fewer people you have on screen the easier it is to make things scary. That scene is the only time where the movie comes close to scary.

EJ: We got a response when the movie first played at Cannes, a reviewer wrote that she liked it but it was very scary. I found it hilarious that anyone found it scary.

HTN: “Their ancient seed has extinguished the flame” I burst out laughing when I heard this.

EJ: It is such a good delivery.

GM: it is a line that is impossible to deliver. Roy delivered it straight from the borscht belt. It was beautiful.

HTN: Talk about why Mummies, and what the hell is going on in this sequence?

 GM: Yeah, they are masturbating.

EJ: Why Mummies and why are they masturbating? Well first they are technically bog people or bog mummies. This is a phenomenon across the world but particularly in Germany. These are iron age people, that for one reason or another wind up in a bog, and then it preserves their surface but dissolves their bones. They end up with very detailed eyelashes, and hair but they are floppy cause they have no bones.

GM: I would like to think in the iron age we were less hung up about masturbating. There was less shame.

EJ: We needed them to do something and they could not be physically menacing like zombies. We thought a lot about politics and how pleasure fits in there. Politics is considered a high minded morale pursuit. A pursuit that is all about grabbing power and the fight between different powers. There is an undersong quality to it though which is that it gives people pleasure to engage in it similar to a sport, or sex or masturbating. It is a self-indulgent pleasure often so that is there somewhere. We needed them in a circle jiggling so it came naturally for them to be masturbating.

GJ: they were played by contemporary dancers. Sometimes their movement would be too contemporary dancey and we would say, “No, can you just jerk off?”

GM: Without the bones they were flopping all over the place but it was just too artful. Our producer wanted the trees and the fire to resemble the gazebo but we had to dial that back. We did not want them to be a mirror image of the G7.

HTN: I loved them so much.  Every time they came on the screen I was happy.

 GM: They are loveable!

HTN: The pedophile entrapment chatbot being controlled by Zlatko Buric. These are the types of ideas used to advance a plot that only you guys could come up with. How did this idea come to be that this is how we would get our characters back to the chateau?

EJ: I honestly do not know.

GM: Before we came up with that idea I think we considered the script finished.

EJ: As you said it gets them back to the Chateau. It is an obvious late second act twist. It’s us thinking, “How can we keep this going another 20 minutes.” It came out of a conversation we were having. The threat in the film had been historical up until this point. It was these ancient bog mummies. We wanted a pressure coming from the future to balance the movie out a little bit. It seems logical enough, this was written a few years ago. It seemed like a reasonable way the world would end, a pedophile entrapment chat bot would become sentient and take over the world.

HTN: ”So we must flirt with the child to convince the bot that we are sexual predators and thus alert the authorities to our whereabouts but not enough that in case it is a real child we irreparably traumatize it?” That is just incredible.  This final speech by Maxxime….was this always the ending? What was the thinking behind it?

 EJ: We did not have an ending at first.

GM: Initially they drove off in a van like the end of a Mission Impossible film.

EJ: Galen suggested a big speech at the end and typical of me I was like, “No that is not a good idea.” Months later I was like, “Hey guys! What about a big speech at the end?” and Galen was like, “Oh wow! Good idea Evan!”

GM: one of my favorite movies ever is J’accuse by Able Gance, which ends with a 30 minute speech. That reanimates the dead from World War I. The 1938 version, the talky.

EJ: Great way to end a movie! That was all.

 

– Jack Schenker (@YUNGOCUPOTIS)