Roy Dupuis on his role as Canada’s emotional prime minister in Rumours

Who would have thought the funniest film of the year would be a surreal survivalist nightmare featuring the G7 leaders, bog people and a giant brain in the woods? Rumours, the latest collaboration between Guy Maddin and Evan & Galen Johnson, is just that: an absurdist comedy about the limits of bureaucracy amidst an ongoing and unnamed crisis. Featuring a cast of actors including Cate Blanchett, Charles Dance, Takehiro Jira, Denis Ménochet and Nikki Amuka-Bird, Rumours may very well be the most accessible film from these avant-garde Winnipeggers. 

With a variety of twists and turns, the world leaders are first assembled to draft a statement on the ongoing crisis. The politicians split up into groups to brainstorm the best way to put things together. Soon realizing they’ve been abandoned by staff and without cell-phone reception, the group wanders into the woods in search of help. There, they encounter strange but often familiar characters, ominous bog people who’ve risen from the dead, and a giant, pulsing brain. 

Canada, the unwanted or at least underappreciated stepchild of this group, manages to emerge as an unlikely hero. Roy Dupuis plays Maxime, Canada’s charming prime minister. While his emotions often get the better of him under crisis (or after a few sips of wine), he steps up as a strong and capable leader, often literally carrying the rest of the world on his back.

No stranger to the work of Guy Maddin, Roy Dupuis previously worked with him (along with co-directors the Johnson brothers) on Séances, an installation piece that was shot between Montreal’s PHI Centre and locations in Bulgaria. Made with handmade sets, the live work of spontaneous fiction was eventually adapted into a film of the same name. Dupuis also appears in the other film made simultaneously as part of the project, called The Forbidden Room. I sat down with Dupuis to discuss the film before its screenings at the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma.

Justine Smith: Maddin and the Johnson brothers are big jokesters and clearly take a lot of pleasure in riffing and bantering during interviews. How much of the film comes directly from the script and how much is built through improvisation?

Roy Dupuis: It’s really well-written, almost like a theatre play. Like with theatre writers, you don’t change a word. If you don’t understand what you’re saying, you have to figure out why he chose those words. It’s close to what’s written and everything comes from there. 

JS: In one interview, Evan Johnson said that he wrote your character, the Canadian prime minister, as a kind of action-hero. Is that something you built into your characterization?

Roy Dupuis: He’s like an anti-hero, or a teenager’s hero. He’s very emotional. They never told me that, I guess because they didn’t want me to play it that way. I wouldn’t have played it in that way anyway, because he’s way too emotional to be a hero figure. A hero is really the opposite of what Maxime is. What they told me was that he’s like a teenager. Evan told me he had a friend when he was younger, and every time he would drink, he would run away crying, like my character does at the beginning of the movie. That was part of it, this teenager dealing with his emotions and a crisis — but he’s also a bit of a hero figure in the movie. He gets the closest to helping save the G7. He does heroic things but in an anti-heroic way. 

JS: I’m curious, for you, what does the big brain in the woods symbolize?

Roy Dupuis: For me, it’s very clear. You know, it’s the first idea they had. It started with the brain. They said they wanted it big. I don’t know how it appears, but they said it’s one of the first things they came up with and nobody questioned it. They just said, “there’s going to be a big brain.” One of the avenues of this movie, and there are many, is the way it talks about the era we live in right now, where the world is changing quickly and where there is a possibility that we become useless because of, I say, “the big brain.” For me, that’s the evolution of artificial intelligence. We’re almost creating intelligent designs, right? 

That’s pretty much what’s happening in the movie: the further they go, the less they recognize the reality there. That’s pretty much where we are right now. Nobody can tell a young person to go to school and that they should study, because we don’t know if that job will still exist when they come out. So, what is a leader today other than someone bullshitting? Who really knows where we are going? That’s how I see the big brain.

JS: I’m more and more attracted to films or artworks that feel very human; maybe they are artisanal, or have “mistakes.” The imperfect is more and more exciting because the only thing Artificial Intelligence is very good at is creating a very plastic version of beauty.

Roy Dupuis: Around 10 years ago I said, errors will become priceless. They will become precious because they’ll disappear more and more. Did I answer your question?

JS: Yes, but I think if I asked everyone on the cast, they’d all have different answers.

Roy Dupuis: Like I said, there are so many avenues (to interpret the film). All the political mechanics, I’m not really used to that, or really interested. It’s mostly the human part of the movie that speaks to me the most. That’s what really surprises me, the way (the characters) talk to each other, like they know each other so well. They talk about really ordinary stuff, like their wives, and it brings them back to being humans. That’s what I played — I played a human. I didn’t play a prime minister, except at the beginning, where for pictures the body language is more that of a prime minister, more important, but after that it faded away because it’s all survival.

JS: Part of the film is about these bog people, who are a little bit silly and a little bit scary. They come back from the dead to attack the G7. It feels to me like they’re a reminder that we will all die eventually, that even our leaders are people, too. 

Roy Dupuis: There’s a theory that exists, and they say it a bit in the movie, that the bog people were very important people that fucked up, because they had their dicks hanging around their necks. They were punished for not representing the people in the right way.

JS: You’ve worked on many different types of films over the years. Do you find it particularly challenging to channel this kind of absurdist framework in your performance?

Roy Dupuis: It’s all in the text. I was just trying to be as true to the emotion and reality of what is happening every time. It’s fun because it gives you a place to go as far as you can, all the time. It’s the kind of storytelling that’s a gift for an actor. The last bit of the film, I don’t think I’ve ever been there as an actor before.

JS: What was it about Rumours that made you want to do the film?

Roy Dupuis: Well, first of all, it’s Guy Maddin. I worked with him on the Forbidden Room and he gave me the three best shooting days of my life. That show was pure magic. We shot it here in a small studio with mountains made of papier maché and I was faking to walk. The trees were moving around me because we didn’t have any space. He was behind the camera. It was completely different from what we had here. I think the idea (for Rumours) was genius. I knew him, and I knew his cinema. It’s the kind of thing I like to watch. Guy Maddin is an artist in the most noble sense of the word. 

JS: While some cinephiles and people who watch a lot of Canadian films may be familiar with his work, for a general audience, Rumours might very well be their introduction to Guy Maddin and Evan & Galen Johnson. What would you say to people discovering his work for the first time? 

Roy Dupuis: It’s their most accessible movie. There are three of them working now. Evan was really present, he wrote this and is directing mostly with Guy. Galen is a bit more behind-the-scenes, a sound guy — but he’s got his own genius. They’re all very cool and very funny and work very well together. We didn’t have the feeling that we were working with three directors. It was the same head. It’s smart and artistic and very funny.

JS: Returning briefly to The Forbidden Room. That experience was so insular and unique; how do you go from that to something a little more conventional like Rumours?

Roy Dupuis: This shoot is a little closer to what I’m used to. We shot 20 nights. It has a story with a beginning, middle and an end. It was a big set, it was a lot. We had a lot of fun. Stefan (Ciupek), the DOP, was fun to work with. There was smoke everywhere. There’s fog from almost the very beginning of the movie, it would go on for kilometres. Shooting 20 nights creates this kind of bubble that makes you a bit more audacious, as if you’re in on a secret. You’re being filmed, yes, but it’s almost like magic. I think it’s important that Guy doesn’t really direct a lot. He doesn’t have to. We have almost two weeks of working at a table, asking questions; after that, he just believes in us. 

JS: Maddin has said that Blanchett would often just direct herself. But part of directing is also creating the right environment, the right energy on set.

Roy Dupuis: Creating the mood of the scene is a big part of acting. The directors help create the mood to drive things, to support the scene. ■

Rumours is now playing in Montreal theatres. Read our review of Rumours from TIFF.

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