1 week Ago By Tatiana Siegel
She might be the greatest dramatic actress of her generation, but Cate Blanchett hasn’t scared away every comedic director. After all, “Rumours” helmers Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson sent her the script for their audacious satire. “I think in a strange way, everything is funny,” Blanchett said during an interview at the Variety Toronto Film Festival Studio.
“We are all absurd in some way, and we all think we’re the heroes and the tragedians of our own stories. Yeah. Sometimes you make decisions about what you can be involved in based on a lot of things that don’t have to necessarily do with choice.
Sometimes it’s to do with whether it fits in with your kids’ holidays.” “That’s how we got you?” Evan Johnson asked. “Yes, I wanted to be in the forest at night for eight weeks in Budapest, and my kids were really happy about that!” she added.
All kidding aside, Blanchett was familiar with the Canadian trio’s respective work known for poking fun at otherwise weighty subjects. For the two-time Oscar winner (for Martin Scorsese’s “The Aviator” and Woody Allen’s “Blue Jasmine”), “Rumours” offered a chance to play an Anglea Merkel-esque world leader alongside Roy Dupuis as a Justin Trudeau stand-in in a seeming homage to “Dr. Strangelove.
” “This was a laugh out loud script, but it was also confounding and bewildering and deeply distressing,” she said of the black comedy. “I knew Roy’s work and the ensemble was so eclectic and weird and wonderful. It was just an impossible thing to turn down.
” Still, it’s all about the executive. “You can read the funniest script in the world, but then it’s who’s looking down the lens and who’s editing it, because a lot of that stuff is in the way it’s put together and these guys put their films together in such a particular way. And I think that’s why people ask a lot of questions about the tone of ‘Rumours’ because it sort of is its own tone.
And I think we so easily try and say, ‘That’s a comedy. That’s a drama. That’s a satire.
’ And I feel like this is a mashup of all of these things.” The film, which follows a group of G7 leaders who stumble through an unnamed crisis, made its world at TIFF on Sept. 6.
While neither Blanchett nor Dupuis consulted with Merkel or Trudeau, they did watch plenty of footage of G7 summits. “It was pretty much for the body language to see how they shake hands, how they smile, how they deal with each other,” he said. “I find it was important for the beginning of the movie.
So it looks like really it’s credible so that when the movie takes off, then it makes a bigger leap.” For Blanchett, that G7 stock footage was as rib-tickling as most comedies out there. Likewise, Madden found humor in “the ritualistic choreography of it,” while Blanchett dubbed it “bad theater.
” “The way that they speak. You can see the coaching of how one has to behave, the codification of how a world leader behaves in public. And the triple-, double-speak that these strategic plans that come out of the G7 every year, you think, ‘What does this mean?'” Blanchett asked.
“And I think somewhere in the actual tone of the G7 lies the absurd tone of this film. So all that footage, it was literally like, ‘Can we make something as funny as this ?'” While the group could have been talking about world leaders, they also could have been discussing reality stars and the motif of the camera always watching. “What was interesting from the footage is how monitored they all are,” Blanchett noted.
“I mean, we think we’re scrutinized by the media, but they’re constantly followed around by cameras. So they’re very aware that their body language and who they’re speaking to is going to be read as being something. It’s going to be a photograph taken.
They’re constantly aware of their external image. And what happens in this movie is they become unmoored from that. And who are they without the observers? Who are they without mobile phone reception? Who are they without their aides? And I think that’s really fascinating and ridiculous.
” The Variety Toronto Film Festival Studio is sponsored by J.Crew and SharkNinja..
