Interview with Matthew Rankin

Matthew Rankin’s genre-defying, absurdist comedy, Universal Language co-written by Pirouz Nemati and Ila Firouzabadi, is set in a dream-like Winnipeg that feels as much like Tehran as it does Canada. In this surreal triptych, kids discover a banknote frozen in ice and embark on a wintry quest. Elsewhere, a disillusioned tour guide leads befuddled visitors through peculiar cityscapes, and Rankin himself portrays a government worker returning to care for his ageing mother …

Last week Seven spoke to Matthew from his home in Montreal.

Matthew, the film vacillates between French and Farsi, how’s your Farsi?

I do speak it. I understand it better. I mean, in sort of unscripted, spontaneous, improvised situations, I certainly understand more than I’m able to speak. I can read it, I can write it, I can have basic conversations in Farsi. I can’t have an interesting, intense, abstract conversation on poetry and philosophy in Farsi, but I have more than a rudimentary knowledge of the language and I’ve been trying for many years to return to Iran, to really, really, really get good at it and immerse myself.

I have a knowledge and strong familiarity with Farsi, but I’m not a fluent speaker. Most of my Iranian friends are very, very good at English and it just slows everything down when I speak in Farsi, so we sort of end up defaulting into English.

I had a similar problem when I was learning French, which now is my main language. I typically speak French every day, but when I was learning it, most of the French speakers I knew around me also spoke English, and I would just, sort of, kill the buzz if I tried to speak in French, because I just slow everything down, but, but then eventually I went into an immersion situation, and I got to be very good at French, and it’s my dream to do this with Farsi as well.

I’ve tried to return to Iran several times to do that, but always something has stopped me. So I’ve just been learning independently, with my friends, who are always giving me new words.

Are there a lot of Iranian people in Canada?

Yes, there are some important Iranian communities, particularly in Toronto, Vancouver and also in Montreal, but my own connection began when I went to Iran as a young man – when I decided that I wanted to be a filmmaker. I really loved Iranian cinema, and I had this ambition to study filmmaking in Iran with Mohsen Makhmalbaf.

He’s one of my favourite Iranian directors, he started a film school, and I learned about this. And so I went to Iran with the idea that it might be possible for me to be his student. I was sort of naive at the time, but I was very, very young, but and I went to Iran and the internet was not then what it is now, certainly even more so in Iran. And when I arrived in Tehran, I learned rather quickly that the Makhmalbaf school had closed and he had left the country. So my dream died very, very swiftly, but I ended up spending many months in Iran and I met a lot of really great people who are still very much in my life, and it sort of led my life on a different course …

My life has had this dialog with Iranian cinema and that effort to study filmmaking in Iran put me on this path to ultimately collaborate with Pirouz Nemati and Ila Firouzabadi – they were my closest collaborators on Universal Language, and in a way, I sort of feel like that this movie is the film school I didn’t go to.

I feel like every time we make a movie, we’re kind of learning how to see in a new way. You know how to make the movie you’ve made already, but a movie you haven’t made yet, you have to learn how to make it. So there’s a lot of listening and a lot of learning each time.

This time, yes, it was a challenge. There was, of course, two languages in the film and neither of which are my mother language.

Where was it shot and did you scout the locations yourself?

It was filmed overwhelmingly in Winnipeg, and in Montreal, sort of both of those, but also there was some sound recording in Iran. Our sound recordist did some of the voice of my mother in the film for the actor, we don’t see her, and she is my friend’s grandma. She lives in Tehran. I did it [the scouting] myself.

Some of those locations were in the script – there were places that I was sort of obsessed with – and then other ones we went looking for. You know, the image in my brain was one thing, and then we went out into the world and looked for that. And in looking for that, we found other things. It was a really fun part of the process, which I did sometimes just alone, but sometimes with the director of photography, Isabel Stachenko, and sometimes with the production designer.

Tell me about the turkeys.

The turkeys do bring a note of optimism to the film, it’s true. And it is a movie that has a few different moods. And I never really wanted it to be didactic. I didn’t want anyone to ever feel like, ‘okay, the movie is telling me that this is what I feel, what I can think’. But it is moving between notions of solitude and community, great community and great solitude, great distance and great proximity.

I don’t know how it is in Australia, but in Canada, my observation is that since the pandemic, things have gotten really bad. Like, it was at the beginning of the pandemic, there were sort of idealistic notions of what the world would be like after the pandemic. And people were thinking ‘it’s this period of confinement. It’s really terrible, but after this, it’s going to be so amazing. We’re going to slow down, we’re going to take care of each other. When we come out of this, the community is going to be so beautiful. There’s going to be solidarity between us …’ and I actually think the opposite has happened.

I think that liberal individualism has kind of moved to its logical extreme, which, to my eyes, is absolute solitude. People just lost their minds, alone in their room on the internet, and solidarity has collapsed, and a lot of well-intentioned people are observing this, and are preoccupied by it, and that was something that really drove Pirouz, Ila and myself.

As we were working on this film, we were trying to create a film that would create a proximity where we might imagine distance, which would create a community where we might imagine border walls, you know. The turkeys kind of carry that idea.

Where did you find your cast?

I’ve know Pirouz for many years. He’s one of my closest friends. Ila also, who wrote the script with us, was also the casting director, but most of the cast came from people that we knew. We wrote each part for people that we knew very well. Most of the people are my friends and then the kids, we found them in a local Farsi language school, yep, it’s kind of a school.

All the kids were in the classroom, like ‘Groucho’, for example, yeah, but Rojina Esmaeili who plays Negin and Saba Vahedyousefi as Nazgol – we really liked those two a lot. They both have a very developed sense of irony, which is unusual for 10-year-olds.

Is the story autobiographical? Is this your life?

Yeah, it all comes from my family. There’s basically three stories in the film, the story of the two sisters that comes from my grandmother’s childhood, and then the story that Pirouz incarnates, the tour guide, that’s sort of inspired from my father’s life, and then the third story is from when Pirouz and I started working on it a long time ago, we figured that whatever would be going on in my life at the moment in which the movie was going to be filmed, that’s my story, and then we’d figure out how to kind of connect them.

You’ve won so many awards. That must be gratifying, I suppose – but, are you having enough fun?

Well, you can always have more fun, I suppose. But I love to work – the most fun for me is to work.

When the film goes off into the world, for me, that’s a whole different animal, but what I love is filmmaking – that is the most fun for me. And so I’m very thankful that I get to keep doing that.

And insofar as the film wins awards – that’s really nice. And, you know I can pin those to my chest like some war veteran shaking this margarine tub full of coins asking for money from people and stuff.

And that’s helpful …

You can read a review of Universal Language here – the film screens at the Palace Cinema, Byron Bay, on Saturday at 3pm. Tickets: bbff.com.au.