Cate Blanchett

Julie Rigg interviews actress Cate Blanchett about her career since Elizabeth, and her new film The Gift.

From: Arts Today, 2002-03-01
Date added: 2003-09-05

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Well actor Cate Blanchett’s been based in America and London since her career took off so meteorically with the huge success of that movie Elizabeth, but Cate says that she wants to contribute now to the Australian film industry and she’s just taken on a new role as ambassador at large for the Australian Film Institute, and she’ll host a season of Australian films at the Barbican in London.

She’s taken time out to talk with the Australian media as she promotes her latest film, it’s a thriller written by Billy Bob Thornton called The Gift. Here she is with Julie Rigg: a career update on our Cate.

Julie Rigg

Cate Blanchett really wants a holiday. She’s hanging out for one and counting the weeks. She’s been doing film and theatre projects, an astonishing run of them back to back for 18 months, and now she’s sitting in a small conference room in London at midday on a Sunday while Australian journalists take turns questioning her over an echoing video conference link.

Blanchett has just come off a shoot of Bandits, another film which pairs her with Billy Bob Thornton, and she’s in the middle of the Gillian Armstrong-directed war drama, Charlotte Gray. Beyond that there’s The Shipping News, and then she can stop.

Cate Blanchett

I’m ready for a break. I’ve sort of been working non-stop for about 18 months. It feels a bit sort of like creative cannibalism, I think it’s really important to take time out and re-engage with the world, a world that’s actually real.

Julie Rigg

So you’re planning that quite soon? Will that be possible?

Cate Blanchett

Very soon.

Julie Rigg

Cate Blanchett doing her first video link interviews with the Australian press who were mostly this Sunday less concerned with the shaky sound and more concerned that her bright blond hair has been cropped ultra short. Apparently it was shaved completely for her role in the caper film Bandits with Bruce Willis and Billy Bob Thornton and it’s now grown out to the pineapple stage. But I have to say she still looks stunning. Even on a video link in which her expressive hands and face jerk like Lady Penelope in The Thunderbirds.

Since her Oscar nomination for Elizabeth Cate Blanchett has done a string of juicy screen roles and some theatre. There was the role of Meredith that Anthony Minghella created for her in The Talented Mr. Ripley. She played Lady Chiltern in An Ideal Husband, and then produced an immaculate American twang as Connie Falzone in the comedy Pushing Tin. She’s also squeezed in guest appearances in Peter Jackson’s upcoming trilogy Lord Of The Rings.

Now Blanchett just come off the shoot with Thornton of another Barry Levinson film, a kind of bank robber caper comedy called Bandits. She’s squeezed in a role as a Russian dancer called Lola in Sally Potter’s new film The Man Who Cried, and been in a much applauded revival at London’s Almeida Theatre of David Hare’s scathing play about the Thatcher years, Plenty.

Now she’s in the middle of making Charlotte Gray, the wartime drama based on Sebastian Faulk’s novel about a woman who becomes a special operations agent in occupied France. And she’s here to talk about the film releasing now, The Gift, in which she plays a psychic in a small southern town who tries to use her powers to help others and to support herself and her three kids. There’s an ugly local murder and Annie the psychic has privileged information from her clients and some very scary premonitions about the killing. Annie has to decide whether to speak up.

It’s an interesting film, strong drama from a screenplay by Billy Bob Thornton and the director Sam Raimi focuses the film very strongly on Cate’s Annie, his camera just lingers on her face, her very expressive face. When we meet Annie first she’s wrestling with a recurring nightmare about her husband’s death.

Julie Rigg:

I was really intrigued when you talked about the preparation for the role of Annie because one of the things that touched me about the film was that blindness to the needs of her own children. Tell me how you thought your way into that.

Cate Blanchett

I have quite a lot of friends who were brought up by single parent families and I think it’s very much a sort of a saccharine view of family relationships that those dynamics are always loving and caring and people are there for one another. I think when you’re in an environment where there’s not a lot of money, when you’re bringing up three boys there’s a lot of tension, and particularly given that Annie hadn’t accepted the death of her husband so the children are living, breathing proof that she’d once had a love in her life, and I think that it makes for a very sort of difficult blind relationship to her children and to herself. And I think that that is what prevents her from actually seeing what’s in front of her face and the danger that she places herself and her family in because she’s not dealing at all with it.

It’s very easy I suppose to deal with other people’s problems, maybe that’s why I’m an actor, I prefer to look at other people’s lives rather than my own.

Julie Rigg

One of the strengths of the film is this ongoing story of Annie and the children and her own guilt. But you also said you’d paid a research visit to a psychic?

Cate Blanchett

I went to quite a few.

Julie Rigg

Have you ever had a psychic experience? Do you believe in them?

Cate Blanchett

I’m not a disbeliever. I think I have a in everything on the side of wanting to believe things than disbelieve them. But no I haven’t, I really wanted to. But I’d never been to a psychic before preparing for The Gift, it was a role that was completely unknown to me.

Julie Rigg

No family stories? I had a grandmother for example who believed she knew when her son died, that he’d gone down in water because when she got into bed, her feet touched water, that sort of family legend stuff. Nothing like that?

Cate Blanchett

No, I mean as a child at a young age when my father died I looked on every street corner, you know in every closet, I used to lie awake at night thinking somehow Dad is going to appear to me. But no, it was all very dull. He never did.

Julie Rigg

Did you draw on that loss of your own father at ten for part of this work?

Cate Blanchett

Oh I’m sure I did. Acting’s not therapy for me, it wasn’t my family life. But I’m sure unconsciously, you know I was brought up by a mother without a husband and one of three children, I guess.

Julie Rigg

Cate Blanchett via a rather tricky videoconference link from London. And she’s just told Andrew L. Urban that she’s always rather hoped she would grow out of acting but so far hasn’t thought of anything else to do, and she’d never particularly thought of a career path. From the outside she tells us all “it may look as though all dots join up with these roles I’ve been doing, but I’ve just been busy going from one dot to another”.

Cate Blanchett’s first film, produced a mere five, was it six years ago, was a 50-minute drama called Parklands. Then came the comedy Thasnk God He Met Lizzie, and a cameo role in Paradise Road after which Elizabeth, and the career took off.

What Cate Blanchett looks for she says are first of all good scripts, and then because not all scripts look promising on first read, interesting directors. And it’s clear there have been some productive friendships made along the way, including the one with Billy Bob Thornton, who’s based the role of Annie Wilson the psychic in The Gift in part on his own mother.

Did she meet Billy Bob’s mother? Does she know much about her story?

Cate Blanchett

I didn’t talk to Billy about his mother at all until Billy and I just did a job together called Bandits and his mother came to stay and I finally met her. I spoke to her once on the phone and she told me a lot about the characters that Billy had grown up with, and I think that there’s a few sort of Billy Bob archetypes that turn up in a lot of their work.

Julie Rigg

You made a kind of a professional friendship that’s obviously been fruitful very early with Billy Bob. What’s the basis of the rapport you have?

Cate Blanchett

He just makes me laugh. He’s like a brother and I really like him and it’s just something that’s evolved. We made a connection on Pushing Tin and he’s one of those people, a bit like Geoffrey I suppose that I won’t speak to for six months and then it’s just like you sort of saw them yesterday. And it’s really great I think because film can be very isolating, you can feel like you’re orbiting around yourself, a bit like now. And so it’s great to have that ongoing sort of creative relationship.

Julie Rigg

This is Julie Rigg with Arts Today on Radio National and I’m speaking with the actress Cate Blanchett about her astonishing career success since Elizabeth by video link with London.

And the theatre Blanchett has done has been strategic and effective. One of her most considered performances came in Sydney in the David Mamet play Oleana about a woman who uses a charge of sexual harassment to advance her career. When she read the script Cate said she thought at first it was a heap of misogynist shit. So why did she do it?

Cate Blanchett

I think Mamet is one of the most incredible writers, he’s amazingly provocative and when I first read the script I threw it across the room and I went to auditions for Michael Gow and I was so angry and I think that part of doing the role was to give over to the story and to give that and to provoke the audience. I mean I think it’s sort of great, great, great plays and I’m really very pleased that I did it. It was great because I think I’ve had the most intense and far reaching conversations in the foyer afterwards. It’s far better I think for a play to provoke intelligently rather than to be polite, and I think that the theatre can be a little bit too polite.

Julie Rigg

And Plenty, another interesting choice because I always think of that as a play about the Thatcher years in a way. How’s it relevant now?

Cate Blanchett

I think it’s a play in a lot of ways about the death of honour and the loss of idealism and someone descending to despair. I mean it’s a very intense play, a very an angry young man play. But I think it’s quite brilliant.

Julie Rigg

It’s a great role. I’m only sorry we haven’t seen it. When you were presented to Her Majesty you felt the need to declare your republicanism. Is that true?

Cate Blanchett

Oh that was weird. I’m sort of quite naïve. I was rehearsing at the Almeida for Plenty and the Queen was coming on a tour of theatres and they asked if I would come and meet her and I said that’s terrific I’d be honoured. And I turned up at this big rehearsal room in Islington and there were Australian television crews there and the Republican debate was going on and they asked me why I was meeting the Queen, and I said do you want to know if I’m a republican? Yes I am. And all of a sudden I’m some, I can’t stand the Queen and I refuse to curtsey.

Julie Rigg

Cate Blanchett, who despite her declaration of republicanism on being presented to the Queen in London last year tells me she would think very carefully before using her status to make a political statement. I’m not a platformer is how she puts it, I’d hope my work would do it for me.

But she’s just taken on a new job as ambassador at large for the Australian Film Institute, and it’s clear that she feels very strongly about some of the predicaments the Australian industry now faces.

Cate Blanchett

I think it’s a very strong position, you know. I hope that it’s not undermined by the government reducing funding for development because I think that what has made the Australian film industry so incredibly eclectic and fantastic and independent is that government support .That you’re not simply relying on a studio’s benevolence to develop writers and directors. And I think it’s great that we have a lot of first time directors, but I think it’s important to encourage directors to go back and make their second and third and fourth and fifth films in Australia and to work with larger budgets.

I think it’s also important that there is a sense of fluidity between other countries and Australia so that the people aren’t punished for going away and working overseas. You know it’s very important to keep that dialogue happening, and I think that there’s incredible excitement and curiosity internationally about the Australian film industry and it’s with great foundation because we do have a great pool of talent given that we’ve only got 20-million people. You think about the number of actors and directors and writers and cinematographers who come out of Australia.

Julie Rigg

And now that so many international roles are opening up for her would Blanchett want to work back in Australia? How does she see the Australian industry and the buzz around it currently?

Cate Blanchett

It’s really important to me that obviously I do want to work in Australia because I am Australian. I don’t necessarily know I’d want to bring Hollywood to Australia, I don’t know what that means. Does that means crap commercialism? Absolutely no. I think that the Fox Studios are a great facility in Sydney, but I wonder that you know that still the majority of films that come out of Australia, directed by Australians are still working with incredibly small budgets and can’t afford to use the facilities. So we’ve got I think probably one of the best resources which is the crews, Australian crews, and I think that often when those get taken up by say Star Wars, then those great practitioners are not able to work with up and coming directors, so those directors don’t get to work with really experienced cinematographers.

Obviously the Olympics did a lot to put Australia culturally on the map, I mean we had one of the best parties I think the world has ever seen. So I think it’s a whole, it’s a blancmange of cultural events that have happened in Australia. And I could cite the Barbican Film Festival, that was done by English people who are passionate about the Australian film industry, and I think that that happens, it’s happening in Asia, it’s happening in America, and it’s certainly happening in Europe. I think that’s largely to do with what is coming out Australia.

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