Reverse Shot A different angle on moving images—past, present, and future

Brainy Season:
An Interview with Rumours directors Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson
by Chris Shields

Guy Maddin is one of cinema's most idiosyncratic visionaries, and his singular vision remains intact in his recent collaborations with Evan and Galen Johnson, including The Forbidden Room (2015), a melodrama staged on a submarine that takes its aesthetic and formal cues from silent cinema, and The Green Fog (2017), a strange filmic meditation on San Francisco and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Their latest, Rumours, is a surreal disaster film that is equal parts Luis Buñuel and Irwin Allen. The members of the G7 summit have convened at a palatial estate to craft their statement to the world, but during their isolation strange things begin to happen, leaving them truly on their own amidst mounting danger that takes the form of reanimated bog bodies and a giant brain in the forest.

Rumors represents a major formal departure for Maddin and the Johnsons, who trade their decaying, manic images for something more coolly sustained and unsettling, creating an insular nocturnal mindscape where the banal and fantastic seamlessly mingle. The ambitious, absurdist ensemble piece is brought to comic and tragic life by an impressive cast, including Cate Blanchett, Charles Dance, and Canadian star Roy Dupuis as the German Prime Minister, the American President, and the Canadian Prime Minister respectively. With Rumours, the filmmakers have consciously moved toward a more commercial mode while maintaining an uncompromising literate approach to cinema and culture. The film is, in Maddin’s own words, “pretty stubbornly what it is, whatever the hell it is,” and by this we can speculate he is referring to its flirtation with genre film alongside its bizarre mixture of ideas, images, and tones.

Maddin and the Johnsons were in Los Angeles for American Cinematheque’s Beyond Fest west coast premiere of Rumors and a mini retrospective of Maddin’s work. They graciously took time to meet me at an appropriately irreverent yet casual location: the mildly run-down mid-century L.A. diner House of Pies.

Reverse Shot: First of all, since we're at House of Pies, what’s your favorite pie, anybody?

Galen Johnson: I’m an apple pie guy.

Evan Johnson: Really?

GJ: It's the platonic ideal of pies.

EJ: I don't like apple pie.

Guy Maddin: Do you ever put a slice of cheese on apple pie?

RS: That's really good. My favorite is lemon meringue. The cream pies are great here. Like
Bavarian chocolate.

EJ: Oh, I’ll get that.

RS: And obviously the cream pies are more comical.

EJ: Well, that’s a hilarious pie.

RS: Enough pie talk. Evan and Galen, how does collaboration during the writing process work? Are you thinking about themes that you've seen in Guy's earlier work?

EJ: We have an awareness that we're working with someone who has a very well-established practice and a not-so-small set of concerns, and we want him interested.

GM: Is there a mother in it?! (all laugh)

EJ: Yes, exactly. So, if we have an idea, we try to fashion it in a way that fits in with his previous concerns. We've been doing it for years now, and we've spent a lot of time together. We read the same books and we're inspired by the same things. So, it's sort of grown—

GJ: Grown a collective brain somewhat.

GM: What I love about Evan and Galen is that they bring their own obsessions. A friendship has to have something in it for both friends. You have to surprise each other.

EJ: Galen and I are fans of Guy’s “pre-us work” obviously, or we wouldn’t be working with him. So, we were self-conscious about not pushing Guy away from what he's done before. But it's usually Guy who has a very admirable and amazing streak of wanting to try new things.

RS: I see that, particularly with Rumours. It does feel like a bit of a departure.

GM: I hope so.

RS: Your previous films, together and solo, usually have a cinematic referent. There’s usually a riff going on, whether it's on Soviet cinema or an old dark house movie. Was there a cinematic referent influencing Rumours?

EJ: The elephant in the room for me was always The Exterminating Angel, and the reason it's an elephant I don't like mentioning is because it’s my favorite movie.

GM: And there's a smaller elephant, the work of the writer Donald Antrim. I've always been a bookish filmmaker and by bookish I don't mean I'm making Merchant Ivory adaptations, but I mean I've always wanted to achieve on the screen that tingle at the base of the skull that Nabokov described good writing would produce in him. I always wanted to somehow produce literary effects, those literary narcotic tingles that only writers can achieve. But I wanted to get them on the screen. I guess I'm a frustrated writer. So, there's this Donald Antrim guy that we'd all read recently, the novel The Hundred Brothers. And it’s just a purely literary thing. You couldn't adapt it into a movie and have it be any good, but there's just such a strong premise. The narrator is one of a hundred brothers and Antrim sustains the conceit for 200 magical pages, gets airborne and stays airborne the whole time.

EJ: Antrim’s novels are like involuted books. They're ingrown. Which is what we want to do. You take a world, in our case, the world of the G7, and act as if there's nothing else. No other way to talk, there's no other thing to be interested in. There's almost no politics in it. There's just G7 protocols and G7 history.

GM: Antrim does that.

EJ: Definitely in The Hundred Brothers, it is just so obsessively about only brothers. That's it. Brothers. That's all you have. And I like those insular words. And Guy’s always been a filmmaker of insular worlds.

GM: The films I've enjoyed working on have had their own worlds. Careful was a fake mountain slope that was prone to avalanches. In Archangel there’s a city in which no one has a memory, that sort of thing. I just need a broad stroke like that, a rule, and then I'm off.

RS: Cinematically speaking, I see the Buñuel influence but also touches of Irwin Allen. There is a disaster element to it, and that's something I was interested in because of your film The Green Fog.

EJ: There’s some Irwin Allen in there.

RS: Yes, footage from The Towering Inferno. There’s a structural affinity with those films and Rumours, The Forbidden Room, and The Green Fog. There's a trajectory toward disaster. Can you talk about that as a structure?

GM: I remember reading in Billy Wilder's autobiography in the late nineties that the ideal movie should just climax and then end instantly. And now he himself didn't do that very often. Maybe with Ace in the Hole, Kirk Douglas says his last line and does a face plant into the camera and that's it.

GJ: Rumours is sort of a face plant.

GM: Exactly. So, we wanted our Billy Wilder ending. I've enjoyed films that end very subtly. And that's really satisfying when that's pulled off. But I need things to be big. I love Chekhov but give me Cecil B. DeMille.

EJ: I think there's something in the process of making a film that feels like heading towards disaster. It's always up in the air. Our film was in danger of collapsing financially while making it. We didn't know that while we were writing the script, but we always know about that looming disaster, which is a structure in itself.

RS: The central character in Rumours is the Canadian Prime Minister. Canadian identity is such a big part of the films. It also seems like a source of amusement for all of you.

EJ: I mean, if you're making movies in the shadow of America you're pretty self-conscious. You’re the little country next to the big behemoth. Many of my favorite movies are American—it's a pretty great movie country along with France, Russia, Italy, and Japan. That kind of self-consciousness and, as you said, self-amusement, is often the starting point.

GJ: If you make a movie that takes place in small-town America, it's sort of about the human condition. But if you make a movie in small-town Canada, it's about the Canadian condition, which is a really little thing. No one cares about that. So, America has this mythic scale that Canada doesn't quite have.

GM: I've always thought of Canadians as looking in the wrong end of the binoculars. America knows how to make things bigger than life and Canadians are like, “Oh, better not make it that big.”

RS: I was curious about the idea of the Canadian protagonist as almost overly sexually attractive. Sexually attractive to the point where it becomes a burden.

GM: Oh, Roy Dupuis, of course. He's unbearably sexy.

EJ: The burden of being too sexy isn’t something I’ve personally experienced, but, I mean, it's there because we wrote that part for Roy. And that's sort of the story of Roy Dupuis, isn't it? The burden of being too attractive.

GJ: He was so sexy he had to move out into the forest from Montreal.

EJ: No, it's true. He became so famous in Quebec so young with shows like Being at Home with Claude that he couldn't go in the street without being swarmed. I think it was scary and intimidating. So, he did move out to the country.

EJ: I remember talking with Galen early in the edit and being like, if people don't find it funny when Roy stares off into space and is sad they're not going to like the movie. It’s a tonal turning point for the whole thing. I guess it's a built-in joke for us to make Canada the leader of the world.

GM: The most alpha and the most fragile.

EJ: Also, the G7 became the G7 when they asked Pierre Trudeau, Justin Trudeau's father, to join, and they asked him to join because he had more experience than all the world leaders.

GM: He was the most charismatic world leader.

EJ: So appropriate how the G7 started was with a sexy Canadian leader who took charge of it, which is kind of a strange historical anomaly.

RS: The G7 is a unique thing to structure your film around. You’re doing the film now when it seems to be waning in importance and there seems to be a lack of faith in these liberal democracies.

EJ: It seems like the G7 pageantry has gotten more intense since they started publicizing it in the nineties or something. It gets more coverage now.

GM: I'm surprised they haven't introduced horses. Like ceremonies or something like that. Musical rides.

EJ: They put more effort into the stage managing and publicizing it now than they ever have. And that's obviously a compensation for the fact that its legitimacy is crumbling in the eyes of the people. So, the more they struggle to do that, the more hollowed out they become. I guess there’s something to mine there because our vision of the G7 is very hollowed out. They are not doing anything. They're not speaking about anything of substance.

RS: Can you talk about the bog bodies?

GJ: I saw a YouTube video a few years ago of some archeologist moving a bog body onto a gurney. The texture of it took me by surprise. I had seen the bog bodies and they always looked sort of hard and leathery, but this thing looked like it was made of Jell-O, and it was just so disgusting. It sort of excited us, but we didn't know what to do with it. And I think bog people found their way into some previous scripts but finally made their way into this movie.

GM: We were toying with not having them.

GJ: Like does The Exterminating Angel need bog people or…

GM: Giant brains. But we talked about how explicit to make the threat, and I know we've vacillated. I was the person most in favor of the [bog bodies], because I've always been scolded by people giving me career advice that I should make a genre film. Because for the first two decades of my career, people would say, you're making films that are impossible to classify. And I'd go, thank you! Then they’d say, well that's really impossible to distribute. And I'd go, okay, so it's an insult. But I actually like genre.

GJ: One of the speculations about bog people is that they are leaders who have been sacrificed because of a poor harvest or something. So, there's sort of a parallel going on, there's a rhyme.

EJ: The G7, they're also flaccid. They're an image of powerlessness in themselves.

GM: Boneless leaders sacrificed by the unhappy populace they were supposed to serve.

GJ: That sort of justified the inclusion and made it not feel like just, oh, let's put this in here for the distributors.

RS: The genre aspect doesn’t feel too heavy, but it’s there.

GM: We never really leaned into the task of scaring anyone.

GJ: We’re not horror movie guys.

GM: Yeah. We kept things at an Ed Wood level.

GJ: We were talking about making an Ed Wood–influenced Kafka adaptation because Kaka died on the day Ed Wood was born.

GM: Well, same year. And Kafka did die before Ed Wood was born. So, there's a chance that Ed Wood is the reincarnation of Franz Kafka. But that's pure speculation. However, a better mind game that Galen came up with was what if Ed Wood had adapted Kafka? Like “The Metamorphosis.” Can you imagine man or bug man? Wow. Criswell narrates it. But actually, a programmer did say Rumours was the closest thing to an Ed Wood movie that he would ever play.

RS: Last question: what is the place of sleep in your films. There's a kind of somnambulism that carries through to Rumours.

GM: It started just with my taste in reading. I didn't really start reading until I was out of college, maybe 24 years old, but the people I was reading got me airborne in the way dreams do. I love Nabokov, Kafka, and Bruno Schulz. Even though their writing is so precise and disciplined, there was something just dreamlike in it. And my early movie manias were Buñuel and Vigo, and David Lynch’s Eraserhead. Eventually, I found out at 10:00 one night that I was going to be a father. And then at 5:00 a.m. my dad died. And so, for the next year or two, I'd get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. And that would be the only time reality would sink in. I’d go, I’m a father, my dad is dead. And then I’d go back to bed, and then the other 23 hours and 59 minutes of the day would be the dream where I was kind of just floating through life. And when it came time to make movies, I just felt I wanted to recreate that feeling, the amnesia, the waking amnesia that enabled me to get through life because I needed to forget. Maybe I’m being too serious now, but I think just the failure to remember that he was dead got me through the period.

So, I just thought, if I make films, I want to make films about that state where you’re not sure if you’re awake or not. Usually there’s more honesty in a dream than there is in what you think you know about yourself.