On relating to the world imaginatively

I want to start with something a bit big: why are you a filmmaker? Why not another type of art?

My friend, Trevor Anderson, has an interesting theory. He thinks directors either emerge out of acting and performance but are afraid of the camera, or they emerge out of image making but are afraid of actors. I emerged out of the latter. I drew a lot when I was a kid. My parents figured out quickly that if they left me alone with a pen and a stack of paper, I’d raise myself. I drew constantly and eventually I wanted the drawings to move, so I entered cinema initially through animation, experimental filmmaking then documentary and fiction. Even today, I often like to draw scenes instead of writing them; some of my scripts have no written version, they are just drawings. To me, drawing is closer to cinema than scripted words.

So it stemmed from a visual language, but also a desire to relate to the world. Processing the chaos of the world feels necessary. Most people with a creative impulse share the idea that the world left alone isn’t enough; we need to relate to it imaginatively and I do that through cinematic language. I don’t process the world through words; I’m not a not a very good talker or writer. What activates my subconscious is images, so my practice involves a lot of drawing. My drawing hand will discover something. There’s something my hand knows that my thinking brain does not. I also like to wake up and start immediately. My best ideas come when I’m still partially asleep.

It reminds me of those split brain experiments where each hand shows that it has its own goals and intentions.

It’s as though we have parallel satellite brains that we can activate for creative good.

Do you have any must-have items for pre-production? What are your needs for success in your workspace?

Can I show you?

Oh, yes. I love show and tell.

[Matthew shows a small pile of beige sketchbooks with colorful spines]

I’m a very analog person. If I were more of a professional I would do this all digitally, but I love books. I always start by picking up a couple of these sketchbooks that open flat. Here’s a storyboard for a new thing. Kunst und papier binder board sketchbook. Swiss made and so good for pencils! But that’s just for drawings. I write any and all words down in this size of Moleskine.

[Matthew holds up an 8.5x11-sized, black Moleskine with lined paper that fills the screen]

I like a large canvas.

Sometimes I think about what my archive would look like if I suddenly died, and I feel like yours would be very nice! But moving on, I loved Universal Language so much. It’s rich and dynamic and imaginative. I kept thinking how I wished more films did this. Could you talk a bit about what you want your films to do? What do you hope audiences walk away with?

I really can’t think about audiences because you just never know how the world will respond. I’ve made films that I was disappointed with and yet they connected with audiences. I’ve also made things where I achieved what I set out to do but nobody had any interest in it. And, in the case of at least one film, I was disappointed with the results and also nobody liked it. You just never know.

I’m a big believer that we have to make new images and look at the world from unfamiliar angles. It’s important right now more than ever because we’re oversaturated with images. We see the same images all the time because filmmakers repeat formulas that have worked in the past. I understand why that happens. Cinema can be a commodity ruled by the cold logic of markets. It’s also a vulnerable thing to make art—filmmakers can get complacent—but leaning on the same tricks and tropes that have brought them love before can be a real trap. Myself, I need to do what thrills my soul, and I try to be honest about that.

I’m hearing that you had no hopes for how people would feel, but what did they end up feeling after the screenings of Universal Language? What resonated?

The gentleness of the film really stood out. We’re living in a post-pandemic era shaped by extreme individualism. The solitude of the pandemic has lingered on and it’s become pathological. It’s hurting people more than they realize, and the injury is metastasizing. More walls are going up; more oppositions are being imagined. People are seeking out tensions and insisting on distance when it’s easy to imagine proximity; insisting on solitude where it’s easy to imagine community.

That was troubling to [co-writers] Pirouz Nemati, Ila Firouzabadi, and me. Part of the film was creating a world that reflects the one we live in as friends. In our friendship, it’s extremely easy for us to live in a space that is somewhere between Winnipeg and Tehran and feel fluid and at home in that space. I think those in-between spaces are actually where most of us live, and yet the world has become very insistent on fitting into absolute oppositional binaries.

Our movie resists these oppositional paradigms. Rather than being structured around conflict and adversarial tension, the story is mainly a sequence of tableaux of people being nice to each other. Audiences have found catharsis in that. I think a lot of us have grown tired of binaries and are longing to step outside and reach out.

The movie is such a sensory force. You’ve got a beautiful script, this complex quilted narrative, thoughtful cinematography, and curated sound design. There are clearly a lot of hands in your films, so what’s your secret to good collaboration?

Making a film is a spiritual undertaking. It’s like we’re assembling a brain. There are people who think film can be a tool for their narcissism but no film can ever be made by one person. The director is there as a point of synthesis. You have to cast your crew very well. You have to think about how different energies might relate. I think carefully about how people’s energies might complement or contrast each other, and it’s rewarding when you get it right. I like to surround myself with people who believe in the process and who have something personal to say through the prism of the movie we are making together. It has to be personal for everybody.

I know a film is really working when it transforms into something much bigger than what was alone in my head. Going back to the brain analogy, it’s like each one of us becomes a synapse. When that brain is well calibrated, it’s producing its own thoughts and other things latch on. The brain becomes more intelligent as a unit because it represents everybody. We are all serving the brain and the brain is making the film.

Did everyone on the team contribute something that you weren’t expecting?

Yes! But within a well-defined framework. The film does have a very specific tone and visual identity. I drew up a rigorous storyboard to figure out the visual grammar of the film and get everybody—both cast and crew—firing on the same frequency. Once you get everybody on the same page, you can really get dreamy. Other ideas start attaching themselves and it becomes more of what it’s supposed to be. If you compare the storyboard to the final film, it’s practically identical except for shots we added in spontaneous moments of divine inspiration. The storyboard gave us a foundation, a tuning fork that we could bounce things off of, and it allowed us to follow ideas that suddenly captured our imagination.

Near the end of the film, for example, there’s a scene with an elderly turkey monger, played by Bahram Nabatian, who sings. That wasn’t in our script or in the storyboard; it was an idea that Nabatian proposed. On the day we were shooting he said, “I think I should sing for the turkeys.” And right away that just sounded so correct to me. So I said, “Of course you’ll sing for the turkeys.” Right away Isabelle Stachtchenko and I knew where to put the camera and that we should dim the lights. I thought if he was going to sing for the turkeys, it had to be nighttime. Nabatian didn’t tell us what he was going to sing or for how long. We started rolling and he sang three poems—one from Hafez and two from Saadi—for an entire roll of film. That’s 10 minutes. He called cut himself. I can’t imagine the film without that scene now. It became a moment of great synthesis when Xi Feng and I positioned it in our edit. The composers Amir Amiri and Christophe Lamarche-Ledoux composed an elaborate musical cue that eventuates with Nabatian’s voice.

This moment with Nabatian represents every synapse in that brain taking in new information and processing it.

Maybe this is quasi-related. I’ve been trying to think about identifiable features of current Canadian cinema, and a tendency towards dry surrealism—like magic realism but more jaded. In your movies there’s a lot of it, and I’m thinking particularly of a scene in Universal Language where a person in an ornate tree costume almost topples into the two children on the street and grumbles, “my misfortune is unrelenting.” Can you talk about these moments and what’s appealing about them?

The movie is playing with different spheres of cinematic language. The plot with the kids—the two sisters—is very much in the vein of Kānūn-style Iranian poetic realism. The next sphere would be Winnipeg absurdity, which is very much in a surrealist tradition. And then the third sphere is what I like to call “cinema gris,” an inconsolably melancholic movement in Québécois cinema. Our idea was to merge all three.

The story is also drawing from very personal material which, though it might seem surreal, is a sincere representation of my own memories and feelings. I grew up in Winnipeg and a lot of my childhood memories are there. There was a lady in my neighborhood when I was about seven who dressed in Christmas ornaments all year round. She wasn’t dressed as a tree, just Christmas-themed. She would wear either a star or angel on her head. Sometimes she would wear actual cedar boughs and a stole made out of glittering tinsel or a jacket composed of hundreds of mini candy-canes in cellophane. She would wish you Merry Christmas in the middle of August. I was always amazed by this lady. The adults in my life, I later realized, had a somewhat more ironic relationship with this local eccentric. But to me that’s how she was—just a normal fixture. So when the kids come upon the Christmas Tree Man, it’s completely normal for them. The ornamented tree he is wearing goes completely unremarked upon. There’s something about the absurdity of that which I find to be funny and also beautiful. And very Winnipeg.

All humor requires some degree of tension and in Universal Language that tension lands between the sublime and the ridiculous, the mundane and the sacred. The emotional tension of the movie also comes out of that.

That’s quite lovely. I want to move on to a few about your relationship to autofiction. I saw an interview where you interviewed yourself for press material, and you also play yourself in the film. So, do you like talking to yourself?

That interview emerged out of desperation. Our PR team was desperate to find a celebrity to interview me in time for the premiere at Cannes and they couldn’t find one. At a certain point I thought, “Hey whatever I’ll just interview myself.” We thought that’d be funny because I do play “myself” in the movie and the movie is getting into some mischief with the notion of cinematic authenticity, which is always a fallacy.

As for autofiction, it’s me playing “me” and those two are not the same. One is a person, one is an image. And that’s always the case in cinema. There’s always a cheat. A city plays another city, a season plays another season, day plays night, a person plays another person—even when they are playing themself! Realism is an amazing technical achievement, but where does it get us? I always liked how painting was liberated from realism when photography was born because photography could do realism better, and painting was released, at last, to explore artifice. Me playing this version of me and the idea that I might actually be badly cast as myself is an idea that I find very fun.

Jumping off that, do you notice a difference between yourself and your written self? Not necessarily who is more “true,” but is there a certain way you draw your screen self?

It’s funny to try to depict yourself when you already are yourself. The movie gets into some personal zones. There’s some oversharing. I probably wouldn’t overshare so much in my regular interactions, but in the film I do. But what’s interesting is when I watch it, I don’t see myself. I see the movie as feelings that I know, but I don’t see the person that I am. I call him “him,” even though it’s me.

I’m not exactly sure what that means, but it underscores that there’s a blurry distinction between cinema and reality. That’s a nice tension when you watch a film because it forces you to remember that film is always an artificial construction which we should not so easily mistake for reality. I think the artifices of cinema have enormous expressive potential that we’re only now beginning to explore because we have been [historically] obsessed with making the artificial appear authentic.

For example, Canada is a system, an artifice. There’s nothing naturalistic about Canada. When you stand on the Canadian-American border, you will see space where humans have imagined a line. So what does this structure mean? Why does it exist? Should it exist? If it does exist, what good does it serve? I’m interested in zones where people realize they can step out of the structures they’ve been assigned, and connect across great distances. Those are things that have been meaningful to me and what I most want to explore.

A few beats ago, you said that you said you love to work, which is great. With rest and recovery so in the zeitgeist, do you need any rest and what does that look like?

I just took a week off, actually. In the 28 days of February, I was in 23 airplanes for a promotional death march. When the tour came to an end I went back to Montreal and immediately started working. But about a week and a half ago, I hit the ground after 10 months of free fall and shattered into a billion pieces. I spent all week inside. I read Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles, a biography of Mordecai Richler—he was a rascal; not too many rascals anymore—and another biography of John Norquay, a politician from late 19th century Manitoba.