Here are some interviews ahead of the release of RUMOURS in cinemas in US/Canada and DISCLAIMER* Chapters III & IV on Apple TV+ this Friday, 18 October.

RUMOURS is doing the film festival rounds outside the US:
Vienna International Film Festival screenings on 20 and 25 October. Tickets can be booked here.
Inverness Film Festival screening on 4 November. Tickets here.
Leeds International Film Festival screenings on 3, 5, and 7 November. Tickets here.
Stockholm Film Festival screenings on 9, 12, and 16 November. Tickets here.
Cork International Film Festival screening on 17 November. Tickets here.

Rumours Interviews

Guy Maddin didn’t know he was even on Cate Blanchett‘s radar until he saw her pick his film “My Winnipeg” out of the Criterion Closet back in 2022.

“It was a manipulative move. It was a cry for help!” Blanchett joked to IndieWire (and her peers) on the rooftop of the JW Marriott on the Cannes Croisette back in May when their debut collaboration, “Rumours,” first premiered. She was joined on that day by Maddin and his co-directors, Evan and Galen Johnson, who’ve been chugging away with the singularly absurdist Canadian auteur on short films since 2015 and the feature “The Forbidden Room” in 2016.

“It was a marshland meeting ritual cry from the other side of the internet. Anyway, we realized that she’d be great,” Maddin joked of their first conversations with Blanchett, and in the spirit of the movie, which was shot in a forest some 40 minutes by car outside Budapest. Here, the location becomes increasingly fog-laden and soggy as this sci-fi comedy wends toward apocalyptic, psychosexual mayhem.

“Otherwise, we wouldn’t have aimed that high,” Galen said.

“Yeah, we would’ve aimed lower,” Evan said.

But the filmmakers were properly introduced to Blanchett through “Midsommar” and “Hereditary” director Ari Aster. “We’ve been working with Ari Aster and developing a few projects. This is one of them,” said Maddin. (Aster is an executive producer on “Rumours.”) “He approached me — this is really strange. I am really grateful to Ari, but he’s, like, half my age. He reached out to me one day to say that when he was a little kid, I was his favorite filmmaker. I was honored and a bit shocked at the time, and time-shocked. We started working together, and we sent him the script of ‘Rumours’ and he loved it, and at one point, Cate’s name came up because Ari had basically her email address or something.”

“I have an agent!” Blanchett interjected.

“We just assume if we give something to the agent, the agent goes, ‘Nope, not doing that one,’” longtime indie filmmaker and prize-of-Winnipeg Maddin said. “The first time I went to Hollywood, in the ‘90s, someone said, ‘Who do you see in the lead? And I went, ‘Sort of a young Buster Keaton?’ I just went home and went to bed for a long time. We reached out to Cate, and I knew she knew who I was because I saw her in the Criterion Closet pick one of my movies, and mention my name and one of my films.”

Three directors seem like a lot for one film that isn’t an omnibus, especially with an ensemble that includes, as the crackpot world leaders, Alicia Vikander, Charles Dance, Roy Dupuis, Denis Ménochet, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Rolando Ravello, and Takehiro Hira. But Blanchett said the triangulated directing style made an on-location production across 18 nights — after a jaunty lead-up, “Rumours” unfolds entirely at night as the G7 summiters are terrorized by masturbating zombies emerging from beneath the soil — somehow easier.

“At one point, we sort of said, ‘How does it work?’ But like most of the questions that [filmmakers] ask you, we didn’t get definitive answers,” Blanchett said. “We get a big cloud of answers. But the great thing about the way the three of you works is that you all, each day, there are so many concerns you have as a director and competing responsibilities and foci you have to have. It’s often hard for a single director to even be on top of all that unless they have an army of people to delegate and drive you nuts. It doesn’t always work the other way either, or they don’t have an interest in performance or the technical stuff, so I’ve got to look after that, which is fine. There are many different ways to approach moviemaking.”

It also helped that Maddin and the Johnsons stayed in the same apartment throughout shooting. “Terrible idea, by the way. We’d get along quite well, but we shouldn’t have been working all day 24/7,” Evan said. Blanchett admitted, “I did find that odd. I didn’t know you well enough to caution you against it.”

“Well, we couldn’t afford to do otherwise,” said Maddin, whose “Rumours” counted Aster’s Square Peg plus Buffalo Gal Pictures and Maze Pictures among its backers. “It wasn’t a total disaster. [It would] give us time to, when you get up in the morning to go pee, and the other two guys are up already, next thing you know, you’re discussing the day’s shoot, and you’re hoping for another 20 minutes in bed or something.” According to Maddin, they were shooting “from 5 p.m. to 5 a.m., in dark, damp, chilly woods with a lot of fog.”

Seeing this particular suite of internationally renowned actors betraying and wooing and sleeping with each other onscreen as the G7 summit spins out of control is as weirdly joyous for the audience as it was for the actors. “I’m always a little worried when someone says that, making a movie, when you see the finished movie that it looked like people had a good time making it. It should look like it was a terrible time,” said Galen.

“Often, I am really concerned if I have a good time,” Blanchett said. “The worst thing is when the actors are having more fun than the audience. What you see is it’s playful. The thing’s alive. You can reanimate something in the editing room, but somewhere in the process, if it hasn’t been alive, in the moment, it’s been dead too long.”

In “Rumours,” Blanchett’s Hilda and Roy Dupuis, as a man-bunned Canadian prime minister, find themselves interacting with a teasing AI chatbot that’s also trying to catch their colleagues in committing an internet child sex crime. Even by Cannes 2024, the conversation around AI had become so deafening that the filmmakers didn’t want to explain their cheeky cinematic device in full. The sexually entrapping chatbot eventually leads the G7-ers back to the vast, Gothic estate where their summit began.

“That was a purely pragmatic decision,” Evan said. “We wanted to send them back to where they came from. We wanted there to be no progress, and we needed a way to do it. I don’t know if we came up with the idea at once, but it feels like something that specific — ‘sexual entrapment chatbot’ — I think we may have all done that at once!”

“It’s been one of my worst fears, and you have to confront your fears sometimes,” Maddin joked of the chatbot.

Evan said “I am not an enthusiastic for making comments on AI,” while Maddin added that the conversation is “taking care of itself.” Blanchett, an actor as much up against the existential threat AI poses to performers as anyone, said, “The level of conversation around AI sounds to me like someone drowning… There’s some company in Germany somewhere that owns a certain proportion of the human genome. Where was the referendum on that one? That piece of legislation can go through? I can’t believe that AI is not being discussed in a collective Parliament. It’s like, I need to be able to vote on this shit.”

Full interview on Indiewire

[Rumours] the biting commentary on the emptiness of political statements and the performances politicians put on starts off as a straight political satire focusing on the G7 world leaders, but then slips into a world of slow-yet-terrifying zombies; a mysterious, giant brain found in the middle of a forest with unexplained origins; and an AI chatbot bent on sexual entrapment.

It goes from provocative to absurd within a few short scenes, with the G7 leaders no longer the subject of criticism, but the butt of the joke.

And that’s kind of the whole point, according to its star and executive producer, Cate Blanchett.

“We’re all in such a state of heightened anxiety and fear with what’s going on with climate, what’s going on with the global political situation. We feel like we’re on the precipice of a world war and there’s a lot of people in positions of power who seem to be relishing that moment,” Blanchett told The Associated Press.

“I think the audience will come to it with a need for some kind of catharsis. And because the film is ridiculous and terrifying … I think they’ll be able to laugh at the absurdity of the situation we found ourselves in. I think it’s a very generous film in that way,” she said.

The three directors, Guy Maddin and brothers Evan and Galen Johnson, said they wanted the film to feel like it had a “generic wash of political disrespect” and to include some resonant critiques, but they didn’t want viewers to feel like they were leaving a lecture hall as they walked out of the theater.

“I’m preachy enough when I talk to people. I don’t want to make a movie that’s preachy, you know? I just favor movies that aren’t that. That just hit me with a little mystery of … ‘What are you doing or seeing? What am I experiencing?’” Evan Johnson, who wrote the script, as well as co-directed, said.

As for the more absurd plotlines, Maddin said he and his collaborators share “a compulsion to come up with an original recipe.”

And original it certainly is. In its straightforward opening act, leaders from the Group of 7 meet for their annual summit and try to draft a provisional statement for an unnamed crisis. Then, as the evening goes on and they struggle to string together a couple, meaningful sentences, they find themselves abandoned and subject to attack from “bog people,” or well-preserved mummified bodies from thousands of years ago. Hijinks — and hilarity — ensue from there.

The title of the movie, Blanchett said, is meant to invoke the revered Fleetwood Mac album of the same name, which was made at a time when the bandmembers were reportedly “all sleeping together and bickering and breaking up,” she said.

“What was surprising about it is you think, ‘OK, this is a film about the G7,’ but it’s like a sort of a daytime soap opera with these sort of trysts and liaisons and petty squabbles,” Blanchett said. “It was such an unusual way to look at the mess we’re all in and the leadership that’s led us here.”

Full interview on AP

Even from her native Australia, Cate Blanchett has long felt a connection to Winnipeg filmmaker Guy Maddin’s quirky, singular films.

The Oscar-winning actress admires the way the Manitoban auteur’s work — from 2007’s docu-fantasy “My Winnipeg” to 2017’s Alfred Hitchcock love letter “The Green Fog” — possesses “a strange universality” despite its idiosyncrasies.

“He can make a film that’s so specifically about Winnipeg and his childhood, and yet I watch it gasping and weeping and not fully comprehending what I’m seeing while on the other side of the world,” Blanchett said during an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival.

“I think that’s astonishing. He’s been working in this very particular underground way for so long, and if you look at the work of a lot of filmmakers who may not necessarily say they’re influenced by Guy, you can see his influence.”

So when their mutual friend Ari Aster, the indie horror master behind “Hereditary” and “Midsommar,” asked Blanchett if she’d like to star in Maddin’s new black comedy “Rumours,” which he produced, she couldn’t pass it up. The film hits theatres Friday.

“It was really wonderful having Cate on board because all of a sudden, casting got a lot easier,” Maddin recalled on a virtual call from Winnipeg.

“Agents didn’t just blow our emails off.”

“Rumours,” which Maddin helmed with collaborators Evan and Galen Johnson, follows seven leaders of the world’s wealthiest democracies as they gather for the annual G7 summit, hosted by Blanchett’s German Chancellor Hilda Ortmann. Tasked with drafting a provisional statement addressing a global crisis, the politicians encounter unexpected hurdles including a bog zombie apocalypse, messy dalliances, and a mysterious giant brain. The film also stars Alicia Vikander as the secretary-general of the European Commission and Roy Dupuis as the Canadian prime minister.

Maddin says every time he and the Johnsons found themselves veering too much into obvious social commentary, they would insert “a writerly U-turn” into the script.

“We just didn’t want to make a Monday crossword puzzle that could be quickly solved and discarded,” he said.

“We wanted to make an object that’s beautiful and has nice sounds and is easy on the eyes and is a bit puzzling, but somehow feels true or familiar in ways you’d never put it yourself as a viewer.”

Nevertheless, Blanchett says the film has an unmistakable message in the way it holds a mirror up to the “absolute absurdity of what we’ve been left with in terms of global leadership.”

“There are so many crises besetting us — the intersection of climate and human displacement and global warfare; the threat of nuclear weapons; the collapse of Western democracies. I mean, you name it. They’re all interlinked,” she said.

“And every year the G7 gathers. And every year we get the same speech. Every year we watch them do these surreal and slightly artificial cultural events. I mean, it felt like we were making a documentary.”

Full interview on Toronto Star

“I wasn’t even sure she really existed.”

Guy Maddin talks about what it was like to work with Cate Blanchett on his film RUMOURS, which opens at TIFF Lightbox on October 18. ?https://t.co/1ie8IkyLtx pic.twitter.com/uZNB9HK9Xg

— TIFF (@TIFF_NET) October 16, 2024

It’s getting hot in here ?? so get your tickets now ?? to the #CertifiedFresh ? RUMOURS starring Cate Blanchett and Alicia Vikander! Witness the sizzling spectacle coming only to theaters this Friday. #RumoursMovie
Get Tickets: https://t.co/IYl2oGpIfy pic.twitter.com/Cgp960jpjo

— Bleecker Street (@bleeckerstfilms) October 16, 2024

Disclaimer* Interviews

Beware of spoilers!

Full interview with Amanpour can be watched here.

The soundtrack to the series everyone’s talking about.

Listen to the first few tracks from #DISCLAIMER*, composed by @finneas: https://t.co/BAYYqiE9OU

Stream the series on @AppleTV. pic.twitter.com/ZzfYenbJh7

— Apple Music Classical (@AppleClassical) October 16, 2024