Words by JANE CROWTHER
Cate Blanchett and Charles Dance lead an ensemble cast as the fictional German Chancellor and POTUS in Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson and Guy Maddin’s political satire, Rumours. They tell Hollywood Authentic about night shoots, AI fears, outlawing pineapples and tall poppy syndrome.
What happens when the seven leaders of the richest democracies in the world walk into the woods together…? Sounds like the start of a joke, and in the hands of trifecta writer-directors Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson it is. An absurdist satire that follows the fortunes of the world leaders at a G7 summit when their staff suddenly disappear leaving them defenseless and vulnerable, Rumours takes in masturbating bogmen, AI ChatBots, a giant brain the size of a car and woodland trysts as the group tries to reach civilization. It was a Cannes Festival hit earlier this summer and Hollywood Authentic sat down to chat with the actors at the heart of the film: meet German Chancellor Hilda Ortmann (Cate Blanchett), American president Edison Wolcott (Charles Dance), British PM Cardosa Dewindt (Nikki Amuka-Bird), Canadian Prime Minister Maxime Laplace (Roy Dupuis), PM of Italy Sylvain Broulez (Denis Ménochet) and Italy’s leader Antonio Lamorte (Rolando Ravello)…
What was it like shooting for 23 nights in the woods?
Cate Blanchett: Honestly, when Guy approached me about this, I thought we’d be shooting in Winnipeg and I’d be in his lounge room, or in some sort of mocked-up soundstage. And all of a sudden, we were in a forest in Budapest doing five weeks of nights. It wasn’t what I expected. I’d never done that many night shoots back to back. But there’s something kind of magical about it because you are on a time that only we understand. You wake up at 2 in the afternoon.
Nikki Amuka-Bird: We definitely understand what it’s like to overcome your fatigue, and the characters are kind of delirious. We were getting more and more delirious as it goes on. It was very useful in that way.
Delirious is how you might describe the movie itself…
Charles Dance: It’s not a Marvel picture. Guy Maddin really is an arthouse director but this is not purely an arthouse film.
Nikki Amuka-Bird: I find it quite hard to express, in a linear way, what the story is about. I start with the G7, and then say: from there, it goes on to become this enormous, surreal, endless nightmare. What’s so great with Guy and the boys is that they’re not afraid to play with genre. It’s a bit horror, it’s a bit satire, it’s a bit zombie movie. It defies expectations.
It’s apocalyptic – do you think that’s the movie we need right now when we’re talking world politics?
Denis Ménochet: Not really. There’s a lot of good things in the world still. There are good people I know, and good things. I don’t want to think like that because otherwise you don’t enjoy yourself. No?
Nikki Amuka-Bird: I’m embarrassed to say that I’m an eternal optimist. Yeah, there’s a lot to be afraid of at the moment. It seems like an omni-crisis. But I do have this kind of faith in humanity at the end of the day to somehow turn itself around. I think that’s what we’re looking at in the movie. What if you’re only left with that fear and confusion? How does that evolve, and where does that end up?
Cate Blanchett: Yeah, and what happens when all of the signifiers of your life, and your position, and your relationships drop away? And then suddenly you’re in a gazebo, and you don’t know how long you’ve been there. It’s a bit like A Midsummer Night’s Dream. They’ve suddenly all gone. It just suddenly changes, and you’re in this altered state. Look, I think somehow, now, the setting and the atmosphere and the tone and the image that they finally look out on seems much more possible than it did 15 years ago. It’s important to look at those things head on. But sometimes if you talk about them in a head-on way, you lose an audience. How do you use the collective anxiety and despair that any thinking person – apart from Denis – is feeling? But also invite an audience to laugh at it, and feel like they could go out slightly refreshed and more purposeful? And if it makes them talk about those things, I think it’s fantastic. It did feel more and more like a documentary.
Are you an eternal optimist like Nikki is?
Cate Blanchett: I think I’m probably an optimistic pessimist. You know, plan for the worst, hope for the best. I don’t like making fun of the state of the world. I love the world. I don’t think what we’re doing to the planet is at all amusing. I don’t think systemic, fiscal inequality is at all amusing. But you can satirise it, and invite people to see it and talk about it. That’s what I love about cinema. It asks you to engage in the world of someone else’s invention, and to imagine a way into different storylines. It’s expansive as an audience member, and I certainly find that as an actor.
Charles Dance: I despair with politics, really. The worst thing that happened, of course, was that [Britain] decided to leave the European Union. It was one of the most depressing days in the history of my country. But I didn’t look at this script politically, actually, at all. For me I thought this was a cross between Luis Buñuel and an episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. And I’m a fan of both of those things. It’s why I wanted to do it.
Rolando Ravello: For me, I think that an actor or a director or a screenwriter has the possibility to come up with a way of thinking for people. For me, it’s an occasion to speak with other people – only speak without judgement. To only speak to reflect. This is important for me.
Cate Blanchett: I feel like this is as much a comedy or a satire or a tragedy as it is an episode of Scooby Doo. I’ve never seen the current state of affairs played out with that particular tone. It’s a zombie movie and it’s a Mexican soap opera. And that’s what I was so interested and curious to see what an audience would make of it, because we were discovering the tone as we made it. Guy [Maddin] has always had a unique perspective that’s really playful and wicked and naughty, but also soulful and yearning and so full of self-reflection. It’s almost like a parallel reality that is able to speak, in a way, more truthfully to the environment that we sit in because he’s been so outside of mainstream cinema. If you haven’t seen The Green Fog, I highly recommend it. It’s astonishing.
Roy Dupuis: I had worked with Guy before, and he gave me the two most extraordinary shooting days of my career. It was like being a kid, and doing some sketches in my basement. This shoot was completely different. It was a big production, and very well-written. But there’s one aspect of the movie that kind of gets my interest. It’s the fact the world is changing very quickly, because of – mostly – AI. We hear a lot about it. I’ve been aware of that for the last 10 years, and that’s one aspect that I found interesting.
Does AI worry you?
Cate Blanchett: I don’t think we’re going to ever replicate the truly human, because we’re mortal, and that’s what gives us all our activators and all of our understanding and struggle with the world in which we live. That’s why all those middle-aged billionaires are trying to go to Mars, because they’re not confronting the fact that they too shall die, and AI doesn’t have that knowledge. It could replicate a synthetic understanding of that, but it doesn’t have it. I think it’s a huge threat. I was really grateful to the actors’ strike for many reasons, but for bringing that AI conversation into the mainstream. This touches on it, but it’s not a film about AI. But people might step out of the cinema talking about it.
Charles Dance: There were so many extraordinary advances in the last hundred years, far more than there’s been in the last thousand years. Suddenly, we as a species, we’ve yet to learn the law of cause and effect. We think, ‘Yes, we can do this. We can do this. We can do this’. Every now and again, somebody says, ‘Yeah, but what if we do?’ You know? I think that question that needs to be asked very, very loudly with AI, because it’s incredibly powerful.
Roy Dupuis: I personally think it’s going replace a lot of jobs, but making movies with real people is going to become precious, also. But I think it will happen. It’s really hard to stop.
Charles Dance: Years ago, I voiced a character in a cartoon. There was a comic in England called the Eagle, and one of the strips in it was a space thing. I went in to voice one of these characters. As I was going in, Albert Finney – bless him – was coming out. He saw me, and he said, ‘The writing’s on the wall, kid’.
What was it like working with three directors?
Denis Ménochet: It was like a little lab behind the video village. When you asked a question, they would talk about it a little, and then come back to you. It was really amazing with three directors. And Guy Maddin’s sense of humour and dryness is amazing.
Charles Dance: There’s different kinds of directors who try to put performances in, and there’s directors who try to bring performances out. I prefer to work with the latter, but it depends on how good they are. The film industry is not populated completely with wonderful directors. There are some who don’t know their arse from a hole in the ground, in the same way there are actors who really don’t know what they’re doing. But these three managed to create an environment in which we were encouraged to contribute, which is a very healthy way of working.
Nikki Amuka-Bird: It felt like you could speak to any one of them – you could ask any one of them any question, any time, and they’ve got an answer for you, and they know how to connect with each other. So it was really easy.
How did you find your characters, did you base them on anyone?
Cate Blanchett: There’s so few examples of female leadership but there’s certain signifiers for what represents a powerful woman in politics. There’s an iconography to it, and the gestures, and the way the men use it, and the way women have to use those male gestures. You can just see them being coached. They’re so separated from themselves, and the more they live a public life and speak in public, their voice changes. So there was a construct and an artificiality to them as human beings, in a way that I felt that the further they went along, the more human they became. I think we as citizens of our various countries are culpable for creating leaders as part of our societal ID.
Charles Dance: We purposely didn’t push it in any direction. I guess if somebody sees a parallel in that with me and Joe Biden, then fine. OK. But that wasn’t in my head at the time.
Roy Dupuis: I looked at the archive videos that Guy and Galen and Evan sent us, just to see the body language.
What laws would you pass if you took on the role for real?
Cate Blanchett: No pineapple. There’d be no pineapple in Germany. I would outlaw pineapple. I don’t know!
What do you think world leaders will think if they see the film?
Cate Blanchett: I think any leader worth their weight in salt has a sense of humour about themselves. When you lose your sense of humour about yourself and your position…
Did playing these roles make you think about the corruption of power?
Denis Ménochet: It’s very isolating to have too much power, because then you change, and then you have no discernment, and everyone will say yes to you. I think it’s a lonely thing to have power. That’s how I feel.
Cate Blanchett: I think with power, we build people up. We build people up to tear them down. We’ve done that for millennia. I think it’s not only that you might change, but people might change in the way they deal with you.
How do you deal with being built up?
Cate Blanchett: My very first time in Cannes, I was in a very small Australian film in the marketplace, and I literally had bruises on my ribs from being elbowed out of the way to get to whatever movie star was there. And then I was back two years later with a film, being walked down with basically gladiatorial horses, and watching these other people being elbowed. It was so surreal.
Does that experience keep you humble?Cate Blanchett: It tells you how the whole thing is a hall of mirrors. It’s so weird. We are really a weird species. And I think that’s what Guy and Evan and Galen are leaning to – it’s the human insanity.
Rumours is in cinemas now
