One of the most idiosyncratic and hypnotic entries in this year’s Best International Feature Film race is “Universal Language,” Matthew Rankin’s vision of a frozen world that feels like a strange cross between Winnipeg and Tehran. The film, Canada’s entry in the Best International Feature Film category, spins several stories into a stylish reverie that includes children on a quest to recover money they find frozen in the ice and a boy who goes to school dressed as Groucho Marx.
I understand that many of the strange things we see in this film are actually from your personal experience.
Yeah. It comes from many places, but I would say the seed of the whole thing was the story my grandmother told me about when she was a child. During the Depression, she and her brother found a $2 bill frozen in the ice on the sidewalk in Winnipeg. And then they went on this citywide odyssey to find an axe and got cheated out of it by some desperate hobo. And that led them to some reflection about, oh, maybe this guy needed it more than us. I was always enchanted by this story, and it reminded me very much of these Iranian films from the 1980s, where children are facing adult dilemmas.
But the Iranian influence goes beyond that — much of the film is in Farsi and seems to take place in Iran or a version of Iran.
I love cinematic language. That’s what drives me. And I have a vast appetite. I’ve worked in documentary and fiction and animation and all manner of image systems. And I’ve always loved Iranian cinema. I went to Iran with this naïve dream of studying. I didn’t get very far with that, but I met a lot of great people and have had this sort of strange dialogue with Iran and specifically Iranian cinema since then. So I had this fantasy about telling my grandmother’s story through the prism of this cinematic language.
And then at a certain point I met Pirouz Nemati and Ila Firouzabadi, who worked on the script with me, and we thought, Let’s do it for real. Let’s get a Farsi-speaking cast and make it in Farsi. That delighted me. The idea of connecting these two spaces that are very distant from each other and bringing them into this proximity, that’s something that appeals to me on a human level.
And the kid who dresses like Groucho Marx is essentially a version of you at that age?
[Laughs] Yes. I was a very annoying, strange child. And I was obsessed with the Marx Brothers. I love the Marx Brothers, even today. I watched “Duck Soup” recently. I hadn’t seen it in probably 30 years, but I remembered every single line. So yeah, I love Groucho Marx and I became fixated on dressing like him. My parents even got me a real cigar. It was weird that they encouraged this, but at school I had a lot of trouble. They dispatched a whole fleet of child psychologists who beat this out of me. But yeah, the Groucho cameo in the movie comes from my boyhood.
The look of the film and the architecture in the film feel like their own singular creations. How did you hit upon the look?
I grew up in Winnipeg. There’s a large proliferation of a sort of building I’ve never seen in any other city, these very nondescript beige structures that all have these grandiose names. They’re usually apartment buildings or apartment complexes, but they have very grand names like the Lady Adele Apartments and the Lord Stanley and things like that. The spaces do not deliver on this landed-gentry vibe that they’re trying to be identified with, and I’ve always been enchanted by that. My father lived in one of those.
And interestingly, when I went to Tehran, I was struck by this strange sort of architectural echo. There were many beige, brutalist structures in Tehran that reminded me of Winnipeg.
It feels as if you have a very exacting vision of what you want, but do you leave room for accidents and things when you’re shooting?
Yeah. I do storyboards and stuff, but what I think is fun about filmmaking is the collaboration, not just with the actors but with the crew. The most spectacular example of this was Bahram Nabatian, who plays the turkey monger. He showed up on set the day we were filming and said, “I had this idea that I could sing for you.” My only thought was to change the lighting scheme so he was singing at night, and beyond that he took over. He told me when he was gonna start and he called “cut!” when he was done. And we just let the camera roll.
It was so beautiful. At the end of the shooting day, we had no clue where it was gonna go in the movie, if at all. But now it feels like the emotional synthesis of the whole film. I can’t imagine the movie without it.
What were the biggest challenges of the shoot for you?
Well, working with turkeys is a real challenge. [Laughs] The first day with the turkeys was the last shot of the movie, where they waddled by, and they did that perfectly. We had planned hours for this, but they did it on Take 1. OK, let’s try Take 2. They did it again, perfect. We waited half an hour for the light to get a little more beautiful, perfect again. So I thought, these turkeys can do anything.
But then several days later we were shooting in the snow dump, there they collect all the snow from the entire city of Montreal and dump it. It’s gigantic, about 200 feet tall. We wanted to shoot one little moment with a turkey there, and the turkey waddled around and then bolted. We watched in disbelief as he scuttled up the side of this snow dump. No human could get to the top of this thing. He just went right up there and looked at us. The night was over, we couldn’t do anything, and the next morning he was arrested by the Montreal Police Department.
The turkey?
Yeah. But anyway, I think he gives a very good, meaningful, soulful performance nonetheless. Even if he doesn’t always take direction.
I assume that when you’re making a movie like this, you aren’t exactly thinking about the Oscar race.
I come from the subhuman, sub-earthly realm of experimental filmmaking down in the trenches of Winnipeg. I don’t have any expectations of that kind of thing. Any high hopes I might have had as a child have long since been beaten out of me. And I’m not a competitive person at all, so it’s kind of discombobulating to be evaluated on such a high scale.
But it’s very beautiful for our team and particularly for the young actors who are in the film, so that’s kind of heartwarming and fun. I don’t know, we’ll schlep this dog-and-pony show as far as we can take it and see what happens.
A version of this story first appeared in the SAG Preview/Documentaries/International issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
