IN CONVERSATION WITH MATTHEW RANKIN

Matthew Rankin’s second feature film Universal Language is one of the most beautiful films I’ve seen as of late. I had the honor of speaking with him about creating this surreal fusion of Winnipeg and Tehran which he calls a cinematic third space. A blending of cultures, fashion, and architecture to tell a story which is an amalgamation of his real life experience growing up in Canada with his love for Iranian cinema. We spoke about becoming a public facing figure, developing his wardrobe, his love for brutalist architecture, and the influence Abbas Kiarostami’s Close Up had on his new film. Universal Language is now showing in theaters around the US. Make sure to see it up on the big screen and get lost in this dream-like world Matthew and his collaborators have created together.

Hagop Kourounian: I’d love to start this off by asking you about your own personal style and your relationship with clothing. How much time do you spend thinking about clothes?

Matthew Rankin: It's interesting you should ask that. I don't really think too much about it because, you know, I spend most of my time just not sort of in a public world. When we got into Cannes, I was like, wow, I'm really a schlub. I have to get some new clothes. The producer of our film, Sylvain Corbeil, is really one of the most chic and well-perfumed men I've ever known. He told me that I have to go get a tuxedo because there's a tuxedo police in Cannes. I don't know if you're aware of that, but they won't allow you in certain spaces if you're not wearing a tuxedo. This was all very strange for me. It was like an out-of-body experience. I had to start thinking about how I dress as a public facing person. When you make a film you have to go around and talk about it and when people like your film they want to hear what you have to say or are inclined to listen to what you're saying. It's weird because you have to incarnate the movie, you know? You have to kind of be the face of the thing and how you are dressed can have a real effect on how people understand what you've made. So I started to think about this and I have to say I like things to be sort of utilitarian, but nonetheless well put together. I really like how people dress in Scandinavian countries. It's pretty utilitarian, it's not showy or flashy, but it's well put together, I like that. What I'm wearing right now is this: “Le Mont St. Michel” work shirt. I could wear it to work or I could even dress up with it a little bit, you know? I had a very cold palette for a long time and I've been trying to integrate warmer colors into my wardrobe.

Hagop Kourounian: You mentioned wanting to wear utilitarian clothing and from my experience talking to directors, that seems to be like a very popular way of looking at clothing as something that is more so a tool versus something that's showy. I'm curious if you've ever looked at the way other filmmakers dress. Which of them dress well and are there any you look to for inspiration when you were putting together this new wardrobe of yours?

Matthew Rankin: These are really interesting questions to answer. My new friend Carson Lund directed this movie called Eephus. It's very good. I really liked it a lot. He came to Montreal a few weeks ago and he was wearing these really great pants and I was like, man, those are really good. But again, a very utilitarian piece from a brand called "Left Field" and I was like, I gotta get something like this. You could work in these, but you could also engage with the world in a credible way with them. That's what I like. I like things that walk that line. There are some directors who are very chic, right? Albert Serra is certainly one of the chicest directors I can think of. In Canada, one of my favorite directors is Denis Côté. He’s a very iconoclastic filmmaker and his wardrobe is really interesting. He has a lot of tattoos and he wears sort of a country and western goth look. It's these sort of Nashville shirts, but goth is sort of his thing. His eyewear is this cantilever of dark plastic, right? And he's a very imposing person visually. And that's really interesting, particularly because he makes very, very, very minimalist films, but his self-presentation is very maximalist. My films are much more over the top. There's a lot more maximalism at work in them, but I like to try to keep things minimal. I would say one thing that I did think about very carefully was eyeglasses. I used to wear kind of almost invisible glasses. Like they were almost frameless and quite small. All eyebrow action was very, very visible. I busted those glasses in a car accident and they no longer existed. I couldn't get them replaced. So I had to get new glasses. I went to the glasses guy and he asked me what I did for a living. This is a person who, you know, he tries to curate his eyewear. He immediately started showing me all these film director glasses sort of like the kind of Denis wears. These thick, black, dark, hot shot glasses, you know what I mean? And I said, hey, listen, I can't wear these. I have to wear glasses, but I want them to be the kind of glasses where you can gaze right into my eyes, into my soul. I can't be hiding behind a wall of thick plastic, you know. So I like to kind of walk that line. I would never have the courage to express myself with great bombast. Wearing a tuxedo I find to be deeply uncomfortable. It's like an out of body experience. There is sort of a film director kind of presentation, right? The thick glasses, maybe a scarf, like a lot of French directors wear scarves. 

Hagop Kourounian: In addition to writing and directing Universal Language you also act in it. I noticed in another interview you said that your character’s costume was inspired by a one in Abbas Kiarostami’s Close Up. Could you tell me a little bit more about that and how it came to be?

Matthew Rankin: I love Hossain Sabzian, who is the character that was a big reference point for our costume designer, Negar Nemati. He's dressed sort of all in beige. Beige was an important part of our colored palette. When I went to Tehran, I was really struck by all of the beige buildings there. They reminded me of the beige buildings I grew up with in Winnipeg. And similarly, my Iranian collaborators, when they went to Winnipeg for the first time, they had a similar encounter in the reverse sense, something about the beige of that city reminded them of Tehran. And so that became sort of a tuning for. The movie is sort of searching for the Tehran in Winnipeg and searching for the Winnipeg in Tehran. And so beige became key. Hossain Sabzian is kind of a spiritual figure for us. We really love that movie Close Up. It's so beautiful. Sabzian is pretending to be Mohsen Makhmalbaf and convinces this family that he is Makhmalbaf and then they figure out that he isn't that person. Later Kiarostami made this film where they recreate this situation as a drama and they're all playing themselves. There's something about the relationship between the real world and the cinematic world, which is always imperfect, never authentic, always a cheat, even when it feels really real. I love how that movie kind of walks that line. And since I was playing, in a way, something of a fraudulent imitation of myself. Because that's what you're always doing. You're always playing another person when you play in a movie. Even Hossain Sabzian playing himself, playing Mohsen Makhmalbaf is still a performance. It's still not Hossain Sabzian. It's an image of him. And so he's playing that. He's playing himself, right? As I am in the film. He was sort of a big inspiration to us in devising the concept of the film. The idea of a person playing another person, a space playing another space, even the space playing itself is always a cheat. That's the point. There is so much Sabzian hovering over this film that we felt it was nice to sort of reference him in the beige-ness of the clothing that I'm wearing. I am wearing something different from what he wears in the film, but it's definitely in that register. I would say more than that, Negar Nemati, the costume designer, spent a lot of time looking at Winnipeg's street photography, particularly by a photographer named John Paskievich who took a lot of pictures of Winnipeg in the '70s and '80s. Negar had never visited Winnipeg before and she wanted to get a sense of how Winnipegers dressed. There's a lot of costumes in the film that were very much inspired by what you find in the John Paskievich photographs.

Hagop Kourounian: When you're showing up to set, do you change when you're in director mode, or are you wearing the costume your character wears while directing day to day? 

Matthew Rankin: It depends. There's a chance that I might have to run in front of the camera for something. I usually just wear the costume. But the costume people very rightly didn't want me to just wear it all the time, because there's a lot of little composite parts, and I might be inclined to lose a mitt or something, and then we're in trouble. So I didn't normally do that, but it sometimes happened that I'd sort of spend the day, and I'd have to just jump in front of the camera to grab a thing. And it was very convenient to do that, because I was very available. So sometimes it was practical for me to just wear the costume and do the day like that. 

Hagop Kourounian: Is there something that you feel like you can't be without on set when you're filming? Is there some item that you gravitate towards that kind of makes you feel safe or grounded while you’re at work? 

I think there's been a real proliferation of work jackets, like over shirts with pockets. I think that is a very useful thing for shooting a movie, because you have to schlep a lot of little bits around. It's really good to have lots of deep pockets. I usually do like to wear a work jacket of some sort. And then I don't know if I'm feeling particularly vulnerable. I might have a few things I like to wear. My dad was somehow involved with the Winnipeg Arts Council. He gave me this Winnipeg Arts Council t-shirt over a decade ago before he died. I really like this t-shirt. The Winnipeg Arts Council has a really good logo. So sometimes I put that on just if I need some extra spiritual support. But yeah, that's a great question.

Hagop Kourounian: This is truly a gorgeous movie to look at. You can pause it at any moment, print out the frame, and literally hang it up on your wall. I think a lot of that, of course, has to do with the visual language, the architecture, the production design, the costumes. I read a quote from you that said that this film is kind of taking two cinematic languages, bringing them together and creating this third space. I'm curious how you went about creating that third space?

Matthew Rankin: As far as time is concerned, we did want it to be sort of timeless, kind of between eras. There's a lot of clues, though. I mean, there's a lot to tell you when it's happening in time. And now that time is in the recent past. But our feeling was that the style, the aesthetic of even the recent past, in this particular Winnipeg, might be older than what we would imagine it being at this exact moment. It might be a little bit more interwoven that different aesthetic codes of different time periods would be sort of intermingling in a real way. And that's part of the design of the piece. I mean, even the way the story is told, it begins here and then without really any warning, it goes back in time and then moves forward then eventually the time periods meet. That's sort of the tension of the movie. You think you're in one place, but you're actually in another place then slowly the connections are drawn. That's sort of the design of the thing, even in its visual referencing of aesthetic. Its visual code is a little bit disorienting. You think it's here, but then there's something to tell you, no, it's not there. It's somewhere else. That's kind of the whole idea of the movie, you think you're in one place and our brain tries to organize the world into containers. I'm in this space, at this time. There's these patterns that I'm observing, which tell me I'm there. But then other patterns emerge that tell you you're not there. That's a surreal conceit in the movie. It's kind of magical and kind of surreal in the film. But I actually feel like our lives are actually like that. Despite the way we try to organize the world into containers, I think our lives as we live them are infinitely more fluid. This movie was made by an enormous group of Iranians and myself and a few Winnipegers and a whole number of Quebecois. And the fact of all of us building this world together and building a brain, we think of it like that. It's like a brain. And the brain is more intelligent than each one of us individually. It's the brain that's making the movie. This is a very Quebeco-Irano Winnipeg brain. And it is synthesizing all of these codes and all of these aesthetics into a whole. The brain can do that. And so that's what it's about. It's about sort of putting these worlds together in such a way that they're in such a proximity that they're intricately interwoven. And that's what creates this third space. This has been really interesting. We showed the movie in Winnipeg last week and the Winnipegers said to us, this is the most authentic movie we've ever seen about Winnipeg and it's a movie that's in Farsi. Similarly, we showed it in Tehran in an underground cinema several weeks before that. Big turnout, huge reaction. It was the same thing. They were saying, this movie belongs to us. It's as if you made this movie specifically for us. And it's about Winnipeg, a city they don't know at all. So that to us means that this kind of interzone, this crossfading space is one that's really working. It's one that people are really not only able to enter, but actually want to be in it. I think that's what life is like. Like us making this movie together, that's the most normal thing, where we are a host of many codes and it's a whole ecosystem. And when you make a synthesis of that, as we do in our lives, we have friends and family, and we all come from a far away way. And when we're in sort of a proximity and we build something together through friendship, through love, or sharing, through art, that is the synthesis. It becomes a composite of all of us. 

Hagop Kourounian: I'm embarrassed. I did not know anything about Winnipeg. So I was curious to see if brutalist architecture was really a thing there and I was very much surprised to learn that a lot of those buildings are in Winnipeg. I'm curious if you've learned anything about brutalist architecture since this or if you can share some of your favorite buildings and architects with us?

Matthew Rankin: There's this wonderful organization in Winnipeg called the Winnipeg Architecture Foundation. And they have been a huge advocate in preserving modernist structures in Winnipeg, which don't really have a lot of popular support behind them. A lot of people hate brutalism. A lot of people don't get it and don't like it. They don't think it's beautiful. The standard sort of avuncular comment I sometimes get at the end of screenings is from somebody who says, well, I hope the Winnipeg tourism people didn't give you any money because you’d have to give it back. The city looks just so empty and cold. But I actually really love it. I think the movie is also a very warm film. But I find that the angles of brutalism are very beautiful. A lot of the humor comes from blocking the action around these angles. I feel like a lot of the absurdity of the film kind of comes out of that. And the way we filmed it also, we really wanted to film these “boring” structures. In some cases, they're very bland. In some cases, they're quite mesmerizing. But they are minimalist. It's brutalism. It's concrete and steel, and that's it, and glass. But we really wanted to film these buildings with the same spiritual devotions that like Terrence Malick would film a sunset. I think it's a beautiful expression of the city. My favorite architect is Les Stetchesen, who's now a very elderly man. I think he’s 93 or something. He built many of Winnipeg's best buildings, including one that we do reference in the movie. We created a replica of it. It's the ice cream shop in the parking lot. It's not the real one but it's a very beloved institution in Winnipeg. He built that and so many other buildings, many of which have been demolished and mistreated by successive waves of visionless municipal authorities. But I really love him and I really wanted to pay some tribute to him in the movie. 

Hagop Kourounian: I feel like with your movie and The Brutalist, maybe there's going to be a change of perspective on that style of architecture…

Matthew Rankin: It's time, right? 

Hagop Kourounian: I agree. I mean, my family is from Armenia and we have a lot of Soviet brutalist architecture there that is also just completely ignored. I mean, maybe for different reasons, they hate the old Soviet regime and want to just reject everything from it. But as someone from the newer generation, when I go to see it, I'm just mesmerized at how beautiful and uniform and incredible the shapes are. 

Hagop Kourounian: You mentioned a few brands so far in our conversation, but I'm curious, where do you like to shop? 

Matthew Rankin: When I was in Paris, I went to a Le Mont St. Michel shop and I got a bunch of things. I got a shirt there, a work jacket, two pairs of pants, and a bunch of t-shirts. I really just sort of went nuts. I'm a big believer that if you find the right thing that you feel really good in, always get a couple of those items.  I always regret it when I don't. If a thing fits really well, and I really feel comfortable in it, I like to have a few of them. I have a couple Norse Projects shirts. I have one Oliver Spencer jacket. I'm not really a big fan of Universal Works. I don't know. I've had a few of those pieces, but I find they're kind of cheaply made, actually. I don't know if you agree with that. 

Hagop Kourounian: I agree with that 100%, yeah. I'd rather get Le Mont St. Michel. 

Matthew Rankin: That's it. Le Mont St. Michel pieces, they are solid. You know what I mean? Really good.