A surreal adventure that combines Iranian and Canadian humour, tone, and sensibilities, Universal Language became a major festival darling and was Canada’s Oscars submission for Best International Feature Film this year. The delightfully deadpan and absurdist comedy is set in an alternate version of Winnipeg, where everyone speaks Farsi, the currency is named after Louis Riel, and each part of the city is defined by its particularly dull colour palette. In it, a Manitoban transplant returning from Quebec, a tour guide in pink earmuffs, and a pair of precocious young sisters find themselves unexpectedly connected by a mysterious treasure found in an icy parking lot.
Co-screenwriters, producers, and performers, Pirouz Nemati and Ila Firouzabadi spoke to The Asian Cut shortly after the film’s successful premiere in Winnipeg to discuss how the project began, the many similarities between Tehran and Winnipeg, and the message of unity at the movie’s heart.
(This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.)
TAC: When did you start working on this project, and what was the collaboration process like for this film?
Pirouz Nemati: I met [producer] Sylvain [Corbeil] about 12 years ago, and through him I met [co-writer and director] Matthew [Rankin]. I met Sylvain at a dinner, and we were talking about Iranian cinema. He told me that he had just met with this filmmaker from Winnipeg who wants to make a film inspired by Iranian cinema that takes place in Winnipeg. So, he introduced us and we connected right away.
That’s around the same time I met Ila. So, there is this friendship, this community, that we’ve been building for the past 12 years. Those are all our collaborators. A lot of people from here, that are based in Montreal, and also — because it’s also related to Iran — many connections to Iran, from our community [there].
Ila Firouzabadi: When we wanted to collaborate on writing the script, it wasn’t really like a traditional go and sit and write a script. Most of the time, between the three of us, it was coming from long conversations and jokes because we have a similar [sense of humour]. The dark humor in Winnipeg [is] exactly [the same as] in Tehran. Iranian jokes are very similar because [of our] self-defense mechanism, so [there’s] a lot of dark jokes. That’s why we survive, in way. I think in Winnipeg [this] happens too because of different circumstances, weather-wise, and other difficulties that they’re having. This [brought] Pirouz and I, other collaborators, and Matthew together, and we became very close because of this. Then we collaborated on the process of writing and making the movie together.
TAC: What was the impetus for this story in particular?
PN: For Matthew, there’s a story that his grandmother told him when he was young. When she was a child in Winnipeg during the Depression, Matthew’s grandmother and her brother found this $2 note frozen in the ice. They were fooled by a passerby who wanted to “help” them and sent them on a city-wide odyssey. They came back, and the money was gone.
Later, when Matthew discovered Iranian cinema in his teens, watching these films recalled his grandmother’s story, and he found this connection between Winnipeg and Tehran. Films like The White Balloon and Where Is the Friend’s House? that have this [trope of] children facing adult dilemmas. That was the seed of the project, and it became more and more personal over the years as things changed in Matthew’s life.
Ila and I were, over the years, part of this conversation of how the film was taking shape. During the shooting then, it was very spontaneous. The actors and everyone was part of the creative process. As Matthew says, we became like one brain, each doing their best to put their creativity [in the film and] express it in the best way possible.
TAC: The tone and style of Universal Language is very fantastic, surreal, and absurdist. It’s also very much a unique blend of Persian and Canadian elements. How was that tone and style formed? Did it start from the script or did it come together a little bit later during production?
IF: Yes, it was the script. Actually, Matthew has a very beautiful storyboard. It was the script, but things changed during our conversations. I can give you an example. The two lead actors — they’re two young girls — at the beginning, the script was a story about a girl with her brother, like Matthew’s grandmother and her brother. But when we cast the two girls, and we saw their characters, how they are powerful, and they have their own personality, we couldn’t choose between them, so we adapted the script to them and to their characters and personality.
So many things, even these very small things, happened like this during the writing of the script and even during the shooting of the film. Some improvisations happened during the film. I think that’s the reason why the whole aura of the movie [has] this dreamy, hallucinating aspect and is at the same time surreal. Sometimes Matthew says it’s like a Hawaiian pizza.
But, at the end of the day, when we were shooting, everybody put their creativity inside, and Matthew was so open to all the departments — all the actors, all the non-actors, whoever was collaborating on this movie — they were really comfortable to talk about their ideas. And most of the time, we were really agreeing with them. That’s why, I think, [it became] more and more surreal and interesting because it wasn’t just coming from one director at the top, [dictating] everything to everyone. That was the one of the fun and joyful parts of it too.
TAC: As I was watching, there were maybe a few things lost in translation for an Anglophone viewer, such as the Persian signage that we see throughout the movie, as well as, for non-Manitobans, the more specific Winnipeg jokes. What are some elements that you enjoyed adding in the script that would speak to audience member who would understand them on both of these levels? And maybe you can also start by answering: have you lived in Winnipeg before?
PN: We’ve lived vicariously in Winnipeg through Matthew and through the time we spent there before the making of the film, in prep and after. But, no, we’ve never lived there. We just came the other day — we had our premiere in Winnipeg. In a way, you can say our main target audiences were people of Winnipeg and Iranians. We even had Iranian Winnipeggers who were part of this that got the full joy [of watching the film].
That was really the fun part of making these signs and translating things. Imagining a world that was in Farsi. And it’s not far from reality. You go to different parts of the town, and you find signage in many different languages in different cities. In Winnipeg, actually, in particular, there’s a large Ukrainian community, and so there’s a lot of that. So, it’s just playing with that and borrowing from that and imagining a world that we had fun creating.
IF: There’s also another thing. When me and Pirouz went to Winnipeg two years ago [to shoot] the movie, we realized there is a lot of similarity, architecture-wise, with Tehran because there’s so many beige and gray buildings, in a very [brutalistic] way. And Matthew, vice versa, he had the same feeling 20 years ago when he went to Iran.
Even graffiti-wise — [there’s] so [much graffiti] in Iran, which is completely different [from] Winnipeg — but they’re destroyed. They’re not there anymore because they’re maybe very old, [but] you feel some part of it on the beige walls. That’s why sometimes I say that Winnipeg is [on one] side of the world, and Tehran is on the other side of the world, but two cultures and these people all became one, became united. I think this is very beautiful and that was the main reason of the movie, too. [We] wanted to show that [unity]. Wherever we live or how far we are, we’re so close, in the end.
TAC: That’s a great message. Going on that theme of unity, or let’s say the title of the film, Universal Language — from your point of view, what is the universal language of the film?
PN: We started the film in the name of friendship, and I think friendship was our main message. Something that we found through the making of this film was this connection and community and friendship.
IF: Even talking the other day with Matthew and Pirouz, the language in the movie is Farsi and French, but let’s go beyond it. Sometimes the language could be a gesture of kindness. Language could be just [looking] into someone’s eyes with a tenderness. That could be a new language of living and being together. I think, metaphorically, for us, it was something like that too because, as Pirouz said, the base of this movie was about friendship between us and all our other friends.
Even the other people that were cast in the movie later, they became very close friends. Like the two girls that are our lead actors. Now they [go] to so many activities together. Their families just met each other after the movie, [and] they became friends. I think when the seed is healthy, it’s going to grow in a nice and healthy way. People are going to [be] connected more and more. That’s the movie we made. The audience — from what we heard, everywhere in the world, in so many festivals that we went to — they were really connected. They felt it. I think we were successful in this.
TAC: Friendship is really a great unifier for this film. I wanted to ask a bit more about some of the symbols in the film that viewers may have missed, such as the meaning of the Kleenex and the turkeys—do they have any specific cultural meaning that you wanted to draw out?
PN: (Laughs.) Maybe Ila can tell you about the Kleenex.
IF: Yeah, you tell about the turkey. (Laughs.) Yeah, Kleenex. It’s funny. I think here it’s true too — in Iran, at funerals, sometimes there are people that just come with a Kleenex box, and they offer it to you. They give the Kleenex to you because they see that you’re sad, just as a gesture of kindness. I don’t know — [it’s a form of] therapy maybe just to have the Kleenex and just take your tears out when [you’ve lost] someone and you’re so deeply sad.
That’s one of the reasons that we talked together and said, “Let’s have a character as a lachrymologist.” I was working on this project years ago — my background is a visual artist — and this term of “lachrymology” was invented by a music band actually. It [refers to] tears as therapy, and I was working on [something related to] that. Then I talked with Matthew, and Matthew said, “Why we don’t we have a person as a lacrimologist to collect the tears, go into the funeral, and offer the Kleenex to the people, wanting to ease their pain and ease their sorrow?”
Then, of course, we worked a lot on that and put fun gestures into it, as you saw in the film. We have one part in the movie that [shows] all the bottles with tears collected inside. And the other part, in the bingo scene, the Kleenex man is throwing the Kleenex. This is the humour in it, but the base of it was coming from a sad story, a funeral, but we went in the other direction.
PN: And for the turkey, there’s many reasons. We discovered, through the making of this film that like the characters in this film, the turkey — no one knows where it comes from. The word “turkey” refers to the country of Turkey, but in the country of Turkey, they call the bird “hindi.” Like the French, “D’Inde,” which means “from India.” So it’s a bird with a lost history.
Yet, it comes from here, the Americas! The wild turkey roams around — in Montreal, we have pages dedicated to sightings of these wild turkeys, and they often make the news. But what we loved about it, also, is this story that comes from Benjamin Franklin wanting to make the turkey the national bird of the United States, instead of the bald eagle. Because he thought the bald eagle was a bird of low moral that robbed the nests of other birds. But with the turkey, you get community, you get togetherness. So, in a way, it was the symbol of community and of the place where we were.
TAC: Fantastic. I know the pair of you had — and Matthew as well — put on multiple hats as the writers, producers, and performers in this film. Was this your first time in these roles altogether, especially for performance? You mentioned, Ila, that you are also an artist, so did you see it as part of an extension of your craft?
IF: Yeah, in a way. With Matthew, we have another project that, when Universal Language started, we just put it aside. It’s about the Esperanto language, which is a universal language. On that project, I was the art director. When I started to work with Matthew and Pirouz on Universal Language and with my background in visual art—yeah, I felt that, this is for me, of course, this is film, but [there’s] a lot of artistic things going on, from the art departments to costumes and makeup. So, for me, it’s really something very artistic happening. Matthew always wanted to involve visual artist in making the movie, so I think that was a nice collaboration we did. And for performance — I was just the bus driver. That was the first time I really performed in a film. I really liked to be a punk bus driver, and I will continue just to be a bus driver everywhere, I think.
PN: (Laughs.) I came to Montreal to study cinema. I studied art in Vancouver, and I work on documentaries and experimental films myself. I also have done so many different roles on so many different projects, so it was interesting to focus all that and have a background [in film], but really it was the first time I was part of such a big project. It was an amazing experience. I learned so much. As an actor, this was the first time I had a serious role that you could say.
I did collaborate with Matthew on another project: a series of films Matthew did for Parks Canada. We did one together in Kootenay National Park, and that was our first collaboration, and me being in front of the camera. He had written a role for me [but] in the casting process, it made more sense for me to play Massoud, the character I play, and for another friend to play the role that was written for me. Everything just fell into place beautifully.
TAC: For my last question — we’re getting into spoilers a bit because we’re talking about the ending of the film — when Matthew/Massoud replaces the money in the ice, I thought it was saying that the characters are locked in a world of recursive actions. But then I also thought he simply wanted to turn away from the the greed and temptation that the money represents. Do you want to talk about your own views on the ending of the film?
PN: Yeah, we like to leave it to the viewer to make their own judgment on that and why. For me, it makes sense, in a way, that no one knows where [the money] came from, and so it returns to where it came from. Like the suitcase that was left there for an eternity. Perhaps it’s that. At a screening, I had my family watch the film, and afterwards, my mother told me, “I was so happy that you put the money back because we would have been ashamed if you had stolen the money.” The last thing I wanted to say is, at the end of our film, it was the children who found the way.
IF: I think each time I watch this movie, and it comes to the end scene — it’s become very emotional for me, the last scenes. When I see Pirouz and Matthew changing [into each other], sometimes I think, maybe from the beginning of the movie, it was vice versa. Pirouz was Matthew, and Matthew was Pirouz. For me, [they are] one person, united. Because the Massoud character was really helping — even with his difficult life, even though he took the money and put it back again — but he was helping the old woman, which was Matthew’s mom. At the end, we don’t know if it was really his mom. I like to have this picture — very ambiguous, in a way — and, as Pirouz said, let the audience really think about it. But for me, each time, I’m seeing it as one person, one soul, one brain. I think the beauty of it is just being — I don’t know how to really explain it in English — but being one.
