Although it took the better part of a decade to see through, Matthew Rankin could always know he had an incredible ice breaker for his second feature “Universal Language,” as much literally as figuratively. As a child, his grandmother had shared with him the story of a $2 bill she saw trapped under a thick layer of ice during a particularly cold winter in their native Winnipeg and her desperate efforts to pocket it, only to have it end up in the hands of someone else who tricked her out of the money. It was the kind of simple, affecting tale that reminded Rankin on films he saw coming out of Iran during the late 1980s and early 1990s, and indeed, while he would set “Universal Language” in Canada, it is a 500 riel banknote that starts the action in the enchanting comedy as a young Iranian-Canadian girl named Negin (Rojina Esmaeili) stumbles upon it while she’s in search of her sister Nazgol (Saba Vahedyousefi).
Fans of Rankin from his first film, the wonderfully surreal satire “The Twentieth Century,” will know the director has already begun to distinguish himself with a cinematic language all his own, but alongside co-writers Ila Firouzabadi and Pirouz Nemati, he brings together Iranian and Canadian traditions for an adventure in which Negin’s curiosity proves contagious as her search for an axe to free the bill leads her around the Persian community while he mischievously slips into the role of a recently unemployed man named Matthew who is beckoned back to his hometown, finding it unrecognizable in some ways from the place he grew up, but also potentially rejuvenated by its newest residents. That Rankin puts on a suit awfully similar to the one worn by Hossain Sabzian in Abbas Kiarostami’s “Close Up,” in which the actor pretended to be the great Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, is indicative on the many levels the film is working on, but it is most obviously a deeply charming look at how communities evolve over time and are enriched by all those that bring something different to the table when they move in.
If Rankin needed proof of the film’s central idea, he’s received it time and again as “Universal Language” has traveled the world since its debut at Cannes last summer, watching as the product of great collaboration amongst his friends has resonated no matter where it has played, ultimately landing a spot on the Oscar International Feature shortlist. With the film now making its way into theaters across the U.S., Rankin graciously spoke about how he was able to transcend borders both formally and geographically with his latest creation, seeing a production as an extension of the community that makes it and setting a unique tone with the film’s marvelous opening scene.
How did this come about? From what I understand, this may all have started with a $2 bill.
It came from a little detail from my grandmother’s life during the depression in Winnipeg and it was something that captured my imagination. It was just something I remembered. And then later when I got to know [about these] very poetic Iranian films that have been produced by the Kanoon Institute. There’s always fables about children and their responsibility to others and something about these Iranian films made me think of my grandma. It was moving to me that there was a connection between my grandma in Winnipeg and these Iranian films on the other side of the world. That was something that also was very beautiful for my collaborators. Pirouz Nemati and Ila Firouzabadi, just this idea of putting the world together in a way that we don’t typically put the world together and that’s something that art can do.
Art can propose parallel geographies, parallel identities. We’re not necessarily beholden to absolute simulacrums. We can create new spaces for ourselves to inhabit. So that was something that kind of appealed to our idealistic nature. Originally, the idea was just to tell that story of my grandma through the cinematic language of these Iranian films, but then the film really emerges of a long dialogue between all three of us and as we discussed it, it became more complex, this idea of making a film in Farsi in Winnipeg. That was something that was really exciting to us.
It was interesting to learn that you actually went to Tehran as you were just getting into filmmaking with thoughts of starting a career there. Was something like this in mind for a while?
Yeah, very much so. My big hope was to study filmmaking at Makhmalbaf Film House with Mohsen Makhmalbaf. I really loved his films, and I’d learned that he’d started this film school. As a very young person, I went to Tehran with the naive hope that I could learn Farsi and study there and when I arrived, I learned that he had already closed down his school and he had left Iran, so my plan didn’t work out at all. But I was inspired to go to Iran and do this because I love these Iranian films so much and I spent about three months in Iran in the end, and met a lot of really great people and that trip was very much formative.
It’s part of the movie in a real way and something that put me on this path to dialoguing with Iranian cinema. That trip also led me to working with Pirouz and Ila, who are two of my closest friends in the world. They really are my family, and making this film together was, in a way, that that film school [I sought out in Iran]. I feel like every time you’re making a film, it’s kind of a school and you should approach it as a learning process. You’re learning how to see, and that was very much the experience of making the film for us.
Ila has joked that auditions for the film were dinner parties that you’d have since so many people you just knew generally became the cast of the film. Did you know from the start how much you’d be bringing your immediate community into this?
That was always the idea. I’m a big believer that you should always make movies with people you’re very close to. Making a film is a very intimate, very spiritual undertaking. It’s not a transactional thing and I love to make movies with my friends. I feel like that’s why we make movies really. It comes out of a thing we do when we’re teenagers and we just are being creative with our friends. So that was always the idea. We wrote the characters for our friends — Ila is a good example because she plays the bus driver in the movie. And we really made that character and that bus an expression of her. The thinking was what a bus would be like if Ila was driving it, and that made the world of that scene a lot more specific and fun. It really brought a lot of personality to that character, and all of our actors had something personal to say through the character they were playing.
Was there anything that cracked this open creatively for you that you may not have anticipated?
To a very large extent, the three young actors in the film were people we didn’t know. All the adults in the film we know quite well and there’s a few even professional actors. But the kids we didn’t know and there’s billions of kids in the world, but not all of them have a desire to act, and not all of them speak Farsi and French, so this is a very small pool of people we were looking to cast, so we just put out an open call at a local Farsi language school in Montreal called the Dekhoda Institute for anybody who’s interested in a movie to come meet us, no experience necessary. Very swiftly, about 50 very precocious kids showed up and everybody who wanted to be in the movie is in the movie. I have a very school play approach to casting. I feel like when a person really wants to do something, you can find something for them to do that they can do and you can set them up for success so that they’ll do well in that.
But the three main kids, Rojina Esmaeili, who plays Negin, and Saba Vahedyousefi, who plays Nazgul, and Sobhan Javadi, who plays Omid, are the three that really had to do the most heavy lifting and it was just totally miraculous to meet them. They’re really strong personalities and very talented. They’re very funny. They have a very developed sense of irony and developed sense of the absurd and they caught the tone of this movie right away. They understood what it was. And it’s a very unusual tone, so that wasn’t a given. But they really got it. We rewrote their characters a little bit to reflect their personalities a bit more so that they could really kind of express themselves freely through when they were in character. And I feel like meeting them opened up the whole project. There was no idea of Regina, Sabah, and Sobhan when we started figuring out these characters, but once we met them, and the characters became them in a way, so it was a very beautiful process. I’m a big believer that when you really listen to people, and you see how they are and you’re attentive to their personality, and how they express themselves, you make space for that, then they really shine.
You set the tone for this so well yourself for audiences in a really unexpected way – the opening scene uses sound to suggest a porousness of walls and you’re bringing them down throughout in a variety of ways. Did you have a strong idea before getting into post-production of how you could make this less rigid formally?
These are ideas we were following very intuitively. The film is a merging of codes and cinematic language and some of the cinematic language that I associate with Iranian film does involve something of a disconnect between image and sound. Sometimes you’ll see a conversation, and there’s a typical way of filming a conversation in the West, where when I’m speaking, the camera’s on me, when you’re speaking, the camera moves to you. That’s a very Western notion of following the action. But in a lot of these Iranian films that we reference, often the camera is removed from the action, so we might focus on a person who’s listening, rather than a person who’s speaking, or we might see a building in which a conversation is taking place and hear it very close, but we don’t see the actors having that conversation.
These were ideas we were exploring, and we tried to redefine them and take them into new territory. And it’s true, the opening scene of the film is very much a statement of theme, because it begins outside, and we follow a character inside, and as we do, the sound moves through a very, very brutal concrete wall, and we’re hearing it very close, but the image we see of the conversation happening is very, very tiny. We just see a little man on the other side of a window, but we hear through the wall. Then we come back out as another character enters, and we’re hearing outside and inside at the same time. And that’s what the movie is about. It’s in two spaces at once, and sound can deliver that idea in a way that a camera can’t do. That whole design was conceived by Sacha Ratcliffe, a brilliant sound artist in Montreal, and it began with exploring cinematic language of sound, but it evolved into something that really energizes the theme of the film. Our experience of sound in the movie is that the wall is not necessarily porous, but the sound can walk right through it. We can walk right through these walls and flow right through them, if we choose to.
“Universal Language” opens on February 14th. A full list of theaters and dates is here.