Guy Maddin wades into more conventional fare with 'Rumours.' It's still weird.

Guy Maddin has built a career helming bewildering, dreamlike, avant-garde films, but the Winnipeg auteur's new dark political comedy "Rumours" may be his most accessible work yet.

Guy Maddin has built a career helming bewildering, dreamlike, avant-garde films, but the Winnipeg auteur's new dark political comedy "Rumours" may be his most accessible work yet.

Ahead of its North American debut at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 6, the 68-year-old quips the stylistic departure could open "Rumours" to awards season consideration.

"The idea is to get 12 or 13 Oscars -- or at least the noms -- so that would have meant a slight tweak of the dial from my previous work. But luckily, this is a script that demanded such dial-turning anyway," Maddin says on a recent video call from his Winnipeg apartment with co-directors and co-writers Evan and Galen Johnson.

"Do they do with the Oscars what they do with the Stanley Cup here in Canada? You go to your hometown and you drink out of them?"

"Is this how Oscars campaigning works? Is that what we're doing?" jests Evan.

Helping their cause is the fact it's produced by indie horror darling Ari Aster of "Midsommar" and "Hereditary" fame and stars two Academy Award winners in Cate Blanchett and Alicia Vikander, making it the most star-studded cast Maddin's ever assembled.

The comedy centres on the seven leaders of the world's wealthiest democracies during the annual G7 summit, hosted by Blanchett's German chancellor Hilda Ortmann. Responsible for crafting a provisional statement on a global crisis, the politicians -- including Vikander's secretary-general of the European Commission and Roy Dupuis' Canadian prime minister -- find their efforts thwarted by various obstacles, from a zombie apocalypse to a giant brain.