‘Universal Language’ Director Matthew Rankin Wants Everyone to Make Art with Their Friends
Director Matthew Rankin’s odyssey through a Winnipeg dotted with homages to Iranian film history — and featuring the coziest Tim Horton’s ever designed — has the same title in English and French, “Universal Language.” But in Farsi, the language that is most spoken throughout the film, the movie is called something else.
The Farsi title, ???? ???????, translates to “The Song of the Turkey,” and the reason why is emblematic of both the film’s warmly absurd sense of humor and the community that came together to make it.
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While Rankin directed and acted in the film, taking up the mantle of a haunted Canadian bureaucrat (who nonetheless is directed to say only neutral to positive things about his time in government) wending his way back to Winnipeg, he co-wrote “Universal Language” with Ila Firouzabadi and Pirouz Nemati, and they cast and crewed the project with friends and collaborators they felt could become part of a collective “brain.”
Rankin sees the director as the point of synthesis, but every piece of the brain is making the movie together. “Any filmmaker that tells you, ‘Oh, I am totally in control of everything,’ I think is a lie. I don’t think any film is made that way,” Rankin told IndieWire on an upcoming episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “I feel like it’s about building a brain that can produce its own thoughts. With this movie, we’re creating this [brain] between Winnipeg, Tehran, and Montreal. And everyone was expressing themselves through the brain.”
One such expression of the “Universal Language” brain came from actor Bahram Nabatian, who plays a pink cowboy hat-wearing, wheelchair-using turkey-seller named Hafez who, not unreasonably, refuses to give some of the movie’s younger heroes a bone saw when they ask for it and sings to his deli meats at night. In addition to the script, Rankin’s very comfortable drawing storyboards to flesh out the world of each scene. But the singing was Nabatian’s idea.
“[Nabatian] came on set on the day of filming and of course, we had planned a certain number of things. And he took me aside and said, ‘I had this idea that I should sing for the turkeys.’” Rankin and the rest of the crew quickly changed the lighting setup so it would appear to be night — if you’re singing to poultry, Rankin reasoned it would naturally happen at night — and let Nabatian perform.
“He sang this beautiful poem by Saadi, which is in the ultimate film, and it’s so perfect. It just fit like a glove, [and gets] right into the heart of the movie. But I have to say, in the moment we filmed it, we didn’t know exactly how it would fit. It was not exactly an improvised scene, but it was something we shot spontaneously,” Rankin said. “For us, it [was] really a synthesis moment, and it’s also an example, I think, of the kind of miracle that can happen when you really make space for your collaborators and how they feel about the material.”
It’s ultimately through that collaborative process that the movie reveals itself. In the case of “Universal Language,” Nabatian’s performance of the Saadi poem, the poignant haze that Rankin and cinematographer Isabelle Stachtchenko placed it in on production designer Louisa Schabas’s extremely pink set, and the way that editor Xi Feng moves in and out of the song set up the film’s final aerial twist, emotionally-speaking.
“[Our collaborators are] really expressing themselves freely through the prism of the movie that we’re making together. So they have something to say about it. And when you make room for that, I feel like the thing really comes alive and you make these discoveries,” Rankin said.
It’s in Nabatian’s honor and in tribute to the impact that moment of collaboration had on “Universal Language” that Nemati suggested the Farsi title, “Song of the Turkey.” But given how prominently turkeys feature in “Universal Language,” it probably wasn’t a hard sell. Rankin’s a fan of Benjamin Franklin’s preferred national bird for the United States, in part because in the (apocryphal) story, Franklin’s reasoning is not just that eagles are, apparently, of “low moral character,” but turkeys are creatures of community and solidarity.
At least on “Universal Language,” they were also very solid performers. “You sort of think there’s a certain amount of chaos that might follow these beasts but they nailed [their group shot] on take one. It was really incredible. Then Isabelle Stachtchenko, our DP, said if we waited for a half hour, we could have extra light, so we waited a half hour and they nailed it a second time. This was like the Juilliard School of turkeys,” Rankin said. “One of them did escape at one point, but he came back to deliver a very soulful performance.”
In all fairness to the turkey, going on a walkabout only to soulfully return is incredibly true to the spirit of “Universal Language.” The turkey may well have been picking up the impulses of the shared brain that Rankin and his collaborators built.
“It’s just so nice to be inside this brain [that] we made together. We just like being inside it [and] it’s just beautiful to make things with everybody. I want to make all my movies with this group of people,” Rankin said.
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