Winnipeg filmmaker Guy Maddin dips a toe into mainstream fare with Rumours

Guy Maddin has built a career helming bewildering, dreamlike, avant-garde films, but the Winnipeg auteur's new dark political comedy Rumours may be his most accessible work yet.

Ahead of its North American debut at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 6, the 68-year-old quips the stylistic departure could open Rumours to awards season consideration.

"The idea is to get 12 or 13 Oscars — or at least the noms — so that would have meant a slight tweak of the dial from my previous work. But luckily, this is a script that demanded such dial-turning anyway," Maddin says on a recent video call from his Winnipeg apartment with co-directors and co-writers Evan and Galen Johnson.

"Do they do with the Oscars what they do with the Stanley Cup here in Canada? You go to your hometown and you drink out of them?"

"Is this how Oscars campaigning works? Is that what we're doing?" jests Evan.

Helping their cause is the fact it's produced by indie horror darling Ari Aster of Midsommar and Hereditary fame and stars two Academy Award winners in Cate Blanchett and Alicia Vikander, making it the most star-studded cast Maddin's ever assembled.

The comedy centres on the seven leaders of the world's wealthiest democracies during the annual G7 summit, hosted by Blanchett's German chancellor Hilda Ortmann. Responsible for crafting a provisional statement on a global crisis, the politicians — including Vikander's secretary-general of the European Commission and Roy Dupuis's Canadian prime minister — find their efforts thwarted by various obstacles, from a zombie apocalypse to a giant brain.

The filmmakers say the story stemmed from another screenplay they spent two years struggling to write that became "more and more bloated."

"Our anxieties about writing together came out in this group of seven people who were trying to write something together. That became the feeling driving [the film] — this frustration with trying to make something on a deadline," Galen says.

"Trying to make something that matters, that helps fix the world, but not being up to the task — it became very easy to identify with," Evan says.

Rumours still has the deliriously bizarre qualities that run through much of Maddin's oeuvre, including 2003's Depression-era musical fantasy The Saddest Music in the World and 2007's surreal pseudo-documentary My Winnipeg, but unlike many of his previous films, there's a linear narrative and no nods to early cinema.

"[The film] needed to be set in the present. It needed to be shot in colour. The G7 is as real as you and I, and so it needed to be shot in focus to suggest that they're really there and aren't the figment of some glaucoma sufferer's imaginative ravings," Maddin says.

"Also, I felt the dialogue Evan wrote was so beautiful, and we really needed dynamite performers — people who will be competing against each other come Oscar time. So colour me conventional, but no one will be saying that next spring."

Even if Maddin's comments are tongue-in-cheek, Winnipeg's film scene is drawing special attention this year.

In a first for the director, Rumours had its world premiere at Cannes this spring alongside fellow Manitoban filmmaker Matthew Rankin's Universal Language, which is also screening at TIFF and was named Canada's official entry for best international feature film consideration at the Oscars this week.

TIFF films with Manitoba ties also include Johnny Ma's The Mother and the Bear, which explores tension between a South Korean mother and daughter in suburban Winnipeg, as well as Ryan Cooper's and Eva Thomas's Aberdeen, about an Indigenous climate change refugee who moves to Winnipeg after being forced from her home due to flooding.

Maddin and Rankin will take part in a moderated conversation for industry delegates on Sept. 10 to discuss their hometown's distinct cinematic voice.

"There's a way that Winnipeg seems like it's out-of-the-way. One thing I like about it is it feels far away from all the things that are happening," Evan says.

"You don't get anyone meddling. You're just left all alone, and there's a freedom in that," Galen says.

'Becoming an incredibly diverse city'

Maddin says when he began making films in Winnipeg in the "pre-internet era," there were no distractions from the outside world.

"I never had many friends to distract me, so you just work on the movies. A lot of that feeling has survived the internet, even. I believe that there's still an isolationist temperament in our community," he says.

"I suspect that will disappear. We're not wilfully isolating ourselves. It's not like we don't want cross-pollination with other cultures or anything like that — far from it. And we are becoming an incredibly diverse city compared to just 25 years ago, so things are changing quickly. Matthew's film would be an example of that."

Universal Language sees Rankin play himself in a reimagined Canada where Winnipeg, Quebec and Tehran coalesce, and Farsi and French are the two official languages.

What would an Oscar win do for the Winnipeg film scene?

"I wouldn't want to be under that kind of microscope, so we're anti-Oscar campaigning now," Evan says with a laugh.

Maddin says he hasn't thought that far ahead. Still, he'd be lying if he said he hasn't already planned out his red carpet 'fit.

"I'll be wearing Wayne Gretzky. I bought this tux from an old, discontinued line from back when Wayne Gretzky had a clothing line at Eaton's," he says.

"It's got a certain mothball aroma that you won't be able to detect on television."