Guy Maddin has been one of the most exciting and innovative filmmakers for decades, but as actor Roy Dupuis, star of Maddin’s latest film Rumours (now in theatres) highlights, this is the Canadian filmmaker’s most “accessible” film yet. Co-directed with frequent collaborators Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson, also starring Cate Blanchett and Alicia Vikander, Rumours follows world leaders to a G7 Summit, where they’re tasked with crafting a joint statement on an undefined global crisis.
Leaders of the G7 nations gather in Germany, hosted by German Chancellor Hilda Orlmann (Blanchett). As we quickly discover in the film, Hilda is attracted to the brooding and emotional Canadian Prime Minister, Maxime Laplace (Dupuis). They’re joined by British Prime Minister Cardosa Dewindt (Nikki Amuka-Bird), French Preisdent Sylvain Broulez (Denis Ménochet), Japanese Prime Minister Tatsuro Iwasaki (Takehiro Hira), Italian Prime Minister Antonio Lamorle (Rolando Ravello), and the U.S. President Edison Wolcott (Charles Dance).
The summit begins with a photo op for the world leaders with a “bog person,” a mummified corpse of a man murdered and castrated. Then they proceed to convene at a gazebo in the German forest to have dinner and start their work. Of course, nothing about this statement they’re writing is concrete, they’re just collaborating on which vague phrases and buzz words to pull out of their world leader toolbox.
But soon the G7 leaders realize they’re alone and everyone back at the main estate has disappeared, leaving them to journey through the forest for survival, surprisingly stumbling upon a giant glowing brain.
In terms of crafting this story around a G7 summit, the inspiration came out of a number of ideas the directing trio had, in addition to feeling a sense of some “exhaustion” in their ideation process.
“We get excited by ideas and our first instinct isn’t to turn an idea away because there’s no room for it, we just keep adding things in,” Maddin told Yahoo Canada during the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). “So we started to get scripts that were very long and our G7 story existed as a small sub plot in one of them.”
“And finally, we just got so sick of these scripts getting … thousands of pages thick, we just threw everything out, except for the G7 part, and started from new, from scratch, with the idea of making something shootable. Seven characters, basically one location, something that seemed practical, but we had kind of a tone in mind, and we just went from there. So it came from a kind of exhaustion.”
“Having been exhausted by the process of writing scripts and frustrated by the process of writing scripts, we could really identify with these G7 leaders who are having trouble writing their statement,” Galen added. “You start thinking you’re going to be really critical and harsh on these leaders, but then you realize you’re just like writing versions of yourself.”
‘We didn’t like the idea of making a satire’
The tone of Rumours is particularly interesting and there are satirical and horror elements in the film, and moments that feel like you’re watching a soap opera. All combined, it makes the movie feel particularly unique.
“I think playing with tone is something we all like and it’s been something that’s puzzled a lot of our viewers over the years,” Maddin said. “I think people wonder if the tone that we present on screen is intentional.”
“We all admire movies and novels, or concept prog rock albums even, that, I don’t know, they just take you on a tonal shift and something that can even present the viewer with tonal opposites in short order, and it’s something we play with.”
“We liked the idea of making a movie about the G7 but we didn’t like the idea of making a satire, which kind of puts you in a tricky spot, because by definition, a movie about the G7 is going to be interpreted as a satire,” Galen added. “So every chance we got we would swerve to soap opera, B horror movie, or something, just to keep ourselves convinced that we weren’t making a satire.”
Maddin added that the one rule they had for Rumours is if any of them felt the film was leaning towards a possible allegorical interpretation, they would take a “U-turn.”
‘Roy is maybe a dream that Justin would have had of himself’
For Dupuis, it’s impossible to avoid possible comparisons between his fiction Canadian Prime Minister and the current Canadian Prime Minister, but it’s not a specific interpretation of Justin Trudeau.
“I didn’t build my character on Justin Trudeau, the director sent us some archives … of different G7s, just so that can inspire us for our body language mostly, how they shake hands, how they stand, how they take pictures, how they smile to each other,” Dupuis said. “Because it was important that the beginning of the movie was close to reality, so that later on you can really take off.”
“So I didn’t think of Justin Trudeau or any specific Prime Minister, but yes, I used a certain posture, I would say, of Justin, or his father, or even … different prime ministers.”
Maddin, Evan and Galen Johnson knew right from the beginning of the process that they wanted Dupuis for the role, even though the actor initially rejected the opportunity.
“At first when I read the story, I called [Guy Maddin] back and I said, ‘No, I’m not going to do it,’ because I’ve been doing this TV series about family violence for a while, and I’ve been dealing with a lot of emotions and playing emotions. I was just tired of playing emotion, and my character is emotional from the beginning to the end in Guy’s movie,” Dupuis said.
“So we hung up and the character just started to haunt me. Actually, I had to dream about three, four days after that, I dreamt of the bog people. … So I called him back and I said, ‘Well, if it’s not too late, I think I’m already working on it.'”
Echoing Dupuis, the film’s directors stressed that the character wasn’t intended to be a version of Trudeau, but maybe a version of “dream” version of the Prime Minister, or a dream he would have of himself.
“We based the Canadian Prime Minister just on our dream version of, what would it look like if the Canadian Prime Minister was Roy Dupuis, or was some tortured-poet Roy Dupuis,” Evan said.
“There was no particular attempt to capture anything about Justin Trudeau, except, like the other characters in the film, very peripheral elements. You want flavours of things that world leaders may have done, or might have done, or something like that. I know that Trudeaus had marital problems emerge after we wrote our movie and Maxime has some marital problems in our movie, but the flavours were in the air, you sort of can sniff those out.”
“Roy is maybe a dream that Justin would have had of himself, like a really happy dream to wake up and feel good about himself all day, or something like that,” Maddin added. “That’s as close to Justin as it gets.”