“Do I think Cate Blanchett is the most spectacular creature that ever walked the planet?” the hard-to-impress Russell Crowe once wondered aloud: “Yes, I do.”
You can see where he’s coming from. If it were anyone besides Blanchett, one might say the past two years were a hot streak. Since early 2023 the Australian actor has received her eighth Academy Award nomination (she’s won twice), produced and starred in Warwick Thornton’s The New Boy, confounded viewers in Alfonso Cuarón’s Apple TV+ drama Disclaimer, and reunited with the beloved cult director Eli Roth for the video game adaptation Borderlands.
But in the context of Blanchett’s CV it’s just business as usual: this year she has already wrapped on Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag and on Jim Jarmusch’s Father, Mother, Sister, Brother (which was partly shot in Ireland), and she is now in rehearsals for Anton Chekov’s play The Seagull, in which she will star at the Barbican Theatre in London.
Somehow she has also found the time for Guy Maddin’s Rumours, a raucous, phantasmagorical comedy about the G7 that is a lock for the maddest movie of the year.
Maddin has form for mad. The Canadian director has long experimented in form and content. He ages his footage. He works with archival material. Small wonder that Blanchett and her costar Denis Ménochet are in giddy form when I meet them in advance of the film’s Irish release.
“Obviously I knew Guy Maddin’s work,” Blanchett says. “The Forbidden Room had an eerie quality that I couldn’t shake for days. I think My Winnipeg is a seminal work because of how personal and melancholy and wistful and absurd it is. But it also speaks to the way Guy can make something that is so specific, almost like a piece of folk art. You’d think it would have no relevance to anybody else, but somehow it reaches out into the world.”
The Group of Seven, the forum that allows the leaders of some of the world’s leading economies to discuss global economic policies, political issues and other international crises, is not an obvious starting point for a film featuring a giant luminescent brain.
Working with his fellow writers and directors Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson, Maddin brings together seven heads of state with the equally ineffectual president and secretary of the European Commission (played by Zlatko Buric, from Triangle of Sadness, and the Oscar-winner Alicia Vikander) in the middle of an unspecified global catastrophe.
“We are here to produce a provisional draft of a statement regarding the present crisis,” Nikki Amuka-Bird’s no-nonsense British PM insists. Even this meagre task proves Sisyphean among a group that squabbles, randomly hooks up and speaks in middle-managerial gobbledegook.
Attendees include Charles Dance’s doddery, British-accented US president, Blanchett’s scheming German chancellor, nodding-along leaders from Japan (Shogun’s Takehiro Hida) and Italy (Rolando Rovello) and a brooding Canadian PM (Roy Dupuis). The last of those continues to pine, from under his grey man bun, for his British counterpart. He has previously had romantic dalliances with both her and the European Commission secretary. His pouting puppy love is as mature as the gathering gets.
A world away from the slings and arrows of Todd Haynes’s Carol, in which Blanchett played half of a troubled lesbian couple, and the TV series Mrs America, which saw her portray the US conservative icon Phyllis Schlafly, it’s the most fun the star has had onscreen since Thor: Ragnarok, from 2017.
“Without Cate our movie would never have been made,” Ménochet says. “It’s a testament to how curious and brave and inventive she is as an artist.”
“That’s what I told him to say,” Blanchett jokes.
Things start to look ominous for the ruling class when the waiting staff – with a nod to The Exterminating Angel, Luis Buñuel’s surrealist classic – fail to refill their wine glasses during a dinner at a stately pile in rural Germany.
There follows a B-movie swerve as the recently discovered remains of a mummified bog body spawn an army of masturbating, Tollund Man-style zombies.
“Protesters?” an alarmed Germany cries as the panicked premiers run into the woods, where, predictably, they get hopelessly lost. It’s geopolitics pitched somewhere between Scooby-Doo and George Romero.
“It’s very difficult to pin down what Guy Maddin and the Johnson brothers do,” Blanchett says. “Their approach to genre and character and storytelling is so deliciously different to anything else out there. It looks like a B movie and then it looks cinematic. You think you are watching a zombie film, but then it could be a documentary on UN security. It’s funny and weird. But it also speaks to our genuine fears about the state of the world.”
Helen Mirren, another Oscar winner, once observed that the trick to drunk acting is to try to look sober. In Rumours the deadpan ensemble must rise above the collective buffoonery of their characters.
“They are stupid people for stupid times,” Blanchett says, laughing. “Maybe we were typecast! I’d seen The Green Fog, which the Johnson brothers had made with Guy. So I had a sense of what the tone and the visuals might be like. They’re always constructing and deconstructing the films that they make. And so they’re intensely emotional and personal but also often just deliberate and stupid. Which seemed an appropriate tone when you’re dealing with the G7 and political leadership.”
Not too far into the bonkers proceedings, Germany and France start bickering furiously. “Do you think it might be illuminating to consider this situation as an allegory?” France asks before fretting about his Mittel-European counterpart: “Germany caught up in the dramatics ... We’ve seen this before.”
Soon after, France – harking back to his allegorical consideration – loses the use of his legs. Ménochet, the imposing star of Custody and Peter von Kant, is subsequently forced to spend most of the film in a wheelbarrow while the chignoned Canadian PM unexpectedly performs heroics (and seduces Blanchett’s chancellor) to the strains of Enya.
“I now teach a class in wheelbarrow acting,” the French actor jokes. “It’s very difficult. It’s not for everyone. They had to build some devices to help carry those around.”
“It was a little bit like a long sleepover,” Blanchett adds. “I was expecting to make this film in Guy’s garage. But no. We spent a lot of time doing night shoots. There was no going back to your trailer. We just spent all our time together. After a couple of weeks we started moving like we were one strange organism.
“It was physical. Denis spent a lot of time in a wheelbarrow and then a lot of time on the ground in wet foliage. I think he had it the roughest. Maybe that’s appropriate for France. And then they end up being carried in a wheelbarrow by Canada. I think our Canadian director was very pleased with that metaphor.”
Watching the bumbling politicians on screen, one can’t help but ponder real-world antecedents. That’s especially true of Blanchett’s character, who seems awfully like a dim-witted version of Angela Merkel.
“I think there are still so few female leaders out there,” the actor says. “That’s why they face such scrutiny. There aren’t a lot of examples. You have Mary Robinson, of course. Most people think that I’ve based this on Angela Merkel – who was such an incredible leader when you think about it. She had to keep the entire European Union together.
“Other people think it’s a cross between Jacinda Ardern and Ursula von der Leyen. But, no, it wasn’t based on anyone in particular. I did think about female politicians and the scrutiny they come under. The way they dress gets assessed in a very particular way. I thought about that a lot, about the colours and shapes they choose, with Bina Daigeler, the costume designer.”
Amusingly, the film is named after, of all things, the 1977 album by Fleetwood Mac, a fraught recording powered along by drug use, musical and lyrical differences, and romantic break-ups, including Christine and John McVie’s divorce, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks’s split, and Mick Fleetwood’s marital troubles.
“It took me a while,” Blanchett says. “It was my husband that said it must be named for the Fleetwood Mac album. And so I asked them and they said, ‘Well, yeah, we were kind of obsessed with that album, but we didn’t bother to tell anybody.’ They’re not interested in giving an audience too much information. I think that’s what makes their films great.”
In the months before Blanchett’s Oscar-winning performance as Katharine Hepburn in Martin Scorsese’s film The Aviator – the only Academy Award-winning portrayal of another Academy Award winner – she watched Scorsese’s 35mm prints of Hepburn’s films, taking notes on poise, mannerisms and accent. She also adopted Hepburn’s daily ice-bath regimen.
While preparing for Tár, Todd Field’s 2022 film about a flawed classical conductor, Blanchett took piano lessons, learned German, pored over recordings of masterclasses by the Soviet conductor Ilya Musin, and conducted the Dresden Philharmonic as they rehearsed Mahler’s Fifth. Her homework for Rumours involved careful consideration of the weird “disembodied gestures” of the G7 leaders.
“Guy sent me some footage of his dog and then the G7, in that order,” she says. “We watched a lot of these strange awkward B-rolls from the G7. You see them walking along. You see the hand gestures. You can tell they’ve been coached about which gestures are inclusive and which gestures are aggressive.
“Even though they all come from different cultures and speak different languages, they all share this same awkward body language. If you’ve seen speeches from the G7, there’s a series of received gestures that really don’t resemble anything vaguely natural. They do photographic listening. It’s all performative.
“That was a great starting place for me. As strange as this movie is, at times it’s like a documentary.”
When I met Blanchett amid the Oscar buzz before her win for Blue Jasmine, in 2014, she spoke about the blurred lines between tragedy and comedy, referencing her turn as Blanche DuBois, Tennessee Williams’s best-known boozy heroine, in Liv Ullmann’s Broadway revival of A Streetcar Named Desire.
“Ben Stiller came to see Streetcar in New York, and he was so surprised afterwards,” she said. “He said he had never realised how funny it is. And I said, ‘I know! It’s completely absurd!’ But I think even when you’re playing something like Hedda Gabler, when you’re on an immensely tragic arc, you have to find the ridiculous.”
With Rumours the reverse is true: it’s a journey into preposterousness to uncover uncomfortable truths. Writing in Upturn, her 2020 essay collection, Blanchett hoped that the pandemic had shone a light on social and political failings – “the catastrophic misdirection of the past 30 years of economic and social planning (the guiding non-principle being that there is no such thing as society). No, short of nostalgia and regret, Covid-19 has ravaged the whole idea of small government, and highlighted the importance of social and economic justice.”
“Rumours is not trying to be an important film with a message,” she says. “But it is like a confession of today’s reality, because we are in an absurd situation. I think one feels most mad in the present day when you try to make sense of what is happening in the world. It is completely bewildering the situations that we as a species have found ourselves in. That we have willingly put ourselves. Or that we have been put in by our leaders. I think if you try to make too much sense of this movie you will feel like you’re losing your mind. That’s just like real life.”
Rumours is in cinemas from Friday, December 6th
