Guy Maddin, Evan and Galen Johnson’s RUMOURS will be released in select cinemas in Australia on 5 December. The film is still showing in cinemas across the US and Canada. It will screen at Belfast International Film Festival on 5 November. Tickets can be booked here.

The penultimate chapter of Alfonso Cuarón’s DISCLAIMER* will be released this Thursday, 31 October on Apple TV+.

EVOLVER, the VR project that Cate Blanchett narrated is part of the Cultural Programme at the Humanities Division of University of Oxford. The event takes place from 25 October to 14 November. More info on how to get tickets here.

Check out new interviews as well as RUMOURS’ international trailer.

In absurdist comedy “Rumours,” heads of state attending the G-7 retreat to a gazebo on a vast Germanestate to write a toothless “provisional statement.” But they soon find themselves lost in a fog (actual and existential) and embarkon a very funny odyssey. Highlights of the bonkers film include masturbating prehistoric bog people; a U.S. president played by Charles Dance (who for some reason has kept his English accent); and a giant glowing brain the size of a Mini Cooper.

“I’m so traumatized by what I saw that I can’t bear to describe it,” says “Rumours” star Cate Blanchett, laughing during a recent interview in Toronto. She plays a German chancellor with a blonde bob who she insists is not Angela Merkel but may be vaguely inspired by her. “It wasn’t so much the sight of the masturbatory bog people that was traumatic. It was the slap-slap sounds that they make that I still cannot unhear.”

Who, exactly, were these bog people? And what purpose did they serve? Maddin’s strange film will leave you with many questions. In interviews this year at the Cannes Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival, The Washington Post spoke with Blanchett, Maddin, the Johnson brothers and others about the year’s most ridiculous geopolitical satire. They cleared a few things up.

What misbegotten bog birthed this crazy premise?
The movie’s giant brain is apt because, according to Maddin and the Johnsons, they work as one. No one knows who first threw out the idea of spoofing the G-7 — the diplomatic body including the United States, Germany, Canada, France, Great Britain, Italy, Japan and, informally, the European Union. But according to Galen Johnson, ribbing a pretentious global summit started out as a subplot in a different script stuffed with bad ideas. It was scrapped: “That tells you how bloated the script was; it had a G-7 subplot. And we were like, ‘That’s great. That’s seven people, like ‘Seven Samurai.’”

As Maddin puts it: “The G-7 idea kept on crumpling itself and crawling out of the wastebasket and insisting on being made into a film.”

Because the three partners were struggling to write a screenplay, they decided to make the movie about the G-7?s leaders struggling to write their provisional statement. “Write what you know,” Galen says.

So what’s the setup?
As the leaders toss around ideas, a thick fog rolls in — and a surreal journey that reduces them to a state of panic and survival begins. The Canadian prime minister (Roy Dupuis as a Trudeau-like fox with a man bun), for example, has been sleeping with not just the leaders of the U.K. and Germany, but also the E.U. representative (Alicia Vikander) — and devolves into a teenage-like fit of hormonal despair. As Nikki Amuka-Bird, who plays the British prime minister, said at Cannes, “You’re taking people who would normally be dealing with a political crisis, economic crisis, and they’re dealing with a very real human crisis of like, How do I get through this night alive?, as situations become more and more absurd.”

The crises they encounter are, by intention, trivial — in contrast to the world burning around them. “We wanted very localized crises to keep them away from the real problems of the world,” Galen says. “So they’re off doing this B-movie soap opera s— when they’re supposed to be tackling big themes — sort of like us and our movie.”

Maddin puts the movie in the vein of “Dazed and Confused” or “American Graffiti,” an odyssey over the course of a single night. Blanchett calls it “a grad farewell via Buñuel,” referring to the surrealist filmmaker.

Sounds silly. So what’s this movie saying?
“Rumours” is about the ineffectuality of political performance. Part of the inspiration for the film came from Maddin watching videos, shot from afar, of world leaders and their spouses greeting each other. You can’t hear their actual words, but they’re laughing uproariously. Even if their countries are squabbling, they are genial.

How in the world did they land Cate Blanchett?
It turns out she’s a big fan of Maddin. “‘The Green Fog,’ I absolutely adore,” she says of Maddin’s 2017 collaboration with the Johnson brothers in which they used found footage of old movies and TV shows set in San Francisco to re-create the plot of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo.” And she calls Maddin’s 2007 experimental film “My Winnipeg,” in which he hired actors to re-create scenes from his childhood with his own mother, “one of my all-time favorite films.”

As for “Rumours,” she loved the script and quickly set up a phone call with Maddin. She says she was also intrigued by the idea of being directed by a threesome (double entendre intended!). “I’d already made a decision,” she said at Cannes. “It’s a little bit like a first date; you kind of know whether you can creatively sleep together or not.”

Is Blanchett’s German chancellor really Angela Merkel?
Well, how many other female German chancellors can you name with a pleasant no-prisoners attitude and a blonde bob? Blanchett demurs, though: “There are very few examples of female leadership, aren’t there? So of course [she’s who] one thinks of when you’re playing a German chancellor.”

The actress already had a German accent down pat. And she says she only watched one clip of Merkel, from President Barack Obama’s last G-7 summit. “She was seeing him off at the car. And for somebody who was so inscrutable and had made such an incredible impact … there was just a moment where you went, ‘She’s completely lost,’” says Blanchett. “Now, one of her biggest allies had gone. And so I watched that particular moment. But it wasn’t based on her, no. No.”

Also relevant: Blanchett has been a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) since 2016, so she has been to many diplomatic events, including Davos, “that have that vibe where they are trying to solve the world’s problems at a cocktail party,” Galen says.

For Blanchett, the comedy came from tilting the axis on these very famous and privileged leaders. “I’ve been involved in a couple of these political conferences where you know that the outcomes have already been decided before the discussion has happened, because they’re going to have to have to turn it out to the press,” she says. “So [it’s a treat] to see these world leaders unmoored and without all of the trappings of [their office].”

“They’re without their public identity,” Maddin says. As those archetypes evaporate, some go mad. Others give into their desires. The braggart French president (Denis Ménochet, a hulk of a man) inexplicably loses the use of his legs and has to be carried by his spaghetti-limbed colleagues. “You see their id. Fear sets in and lust takes over,” Maddin continues. “I just like the idea that our [Canadian] prime minister would threaten suicide and be a manipulative, almost teenager kind of figure.”

What struck Blanchett was the melancholy, which mirrored what she thought she noticed about Merkel saying goodbye to Obama. It’s the last summit for many of them, and the theme of the summit is regret. “So suddenly they start to think of the end of things,” she says. “And us, as a planet, we’re all trying not to think about the end of things and mortality.”

Okay, please explain these bog people.
In the film, the G-7 talks are taking place next to the site of an archaeological dig that has uncovered a group of 2,000-year-old male bog people. Naturally, they arise from their graves. They’re all played by female dancers from Budapest, wrapped like mummies — “with strap-ons,” Blanchett points out.

To Maddin, the bog mummies are symbolic mirrors of the G-7 leaders. The prehistoric men were once community leaders who had been executed for not producing crops. “It just seemed like a nice, brutal, Iron Age equivalent of what should happen in modern times.”

At times, Maddin wondered if including self-pleasuring bog people was over the top. “Normally, I go by the expression, ‘Too much is not quite enough,’” he says. “But I thought better to err on the side of tasteful here. And I think we’ve made the most tasteful full-frontal mummified masturbatory sequence in film history.”

During my new interview with Cate Blanchett, I made sure to take a moment to express the appreciation that many of us in the LGBTQ+ community have for her performance in 2015’s “Carol” film and its positive narrative about love.

MORE from #CateBlanchett: https://t.co/ztLOUv5V39 pic.twitter.com/WxIbGIMbCE

— Jeff Conway (@jeffconway) October 22, 2024