Woman Of Glitter And Grit

From: The Australian, 2005-08-22
Date added: 2005-08-25

CATE Blanchett is apologising from the back of a taxi. Riding with her children on her way to a Sydney hotel, she is running late, and they are making quite a racket, possibly because her youngest son has just learned to say "lawnmower". Could she call me back a few minutes after our appointed interview time?

Listening to her unmistakably Australian accent, it is easy to forget just how long it has been since Blanchett appeared in an Australian movie. After the short 1996 drama, Parklands, there was Paradise Road, Thank God He Met Lizzie, and then Oscar and Lucinda, all made in 1997.

Then, before we knew it, Blanchett was winning the kind of accolades for Elizabeth, including a best actress Oscar nomination, that allowed her to pick and choose roles from anywhere in the world, which is precisely what she did.

Nearly 20 films later, and with an Academy Award under her belt for playing Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator, Blanchett is about to appear in her first Australian film for seven years. Set in Sydney's western suburbs, Little Fish is a small-scale ensemble drama about a former heroin addict called Tracy, who faces obstacles on several fronts as she tries to realise the modest ambition of opening a video shop.

Little Fish is the first film for director Rowan Woods since his much-acclaimed The Boys (1998), which also depicted desperate lives in Sydney's west. So why this project as Blanchett's return to Australian film? Her answer begins with a polite correction.

"It's very odd, this sense that one returns to Australian film-making as if there's a plan to ever leave," she says. "Because I don't think one's career has a linear progression like that. There's no time-scale that one needs to be away and then return; there's a constant exchange and a constant dialogue.

"But I've been long wanting to work with Rowan and when other projects came my way, we'd always discuss him as a director. We've been talking about doing this thriller set in the former Soviet Union and that fell through, but he said we've got this other thing that Jacqueline [Perske, writer] and I have been working on and that was Little Fish."

There is another question about Blanchett's casting in the film. Can such an aristocratic presence on stage and screen be convincing in a down-at-heel role?

Having proved her mettle with larger-than-life characters (Elizabeth I, Hepburn, murdered Irish journalist Veronica Guerin and, more recently on stage, Hedda Gabler), playing an ex-junkie from Cabramatta might appear an unusual step.

But this is hardly the first time that Blanchett has successfully delivered a role that requires her to be less than magisterial. In both Pushing Tin and Bandits she played American housewives, in The Gift she was a poor Southern widow, and in Jim Jarmusch's compendium of shorts, Coffee and Cigarettes, she took a double role as Cate the movie star and Shelly, her freewheeling cousin.

So while it's a showbiz cliche to speak of the luminous Blanchett, she has consistently demonstrated an impressive range in her choice of characters. Not only is she convincingly unglamorous as Tracy, she is also credibly feisty and vulnerable. Tracy's relationships with her mother (Noni Hazlehurst), and with family friend Lionel, a gay, former football star with a nasty drug habit (Hugo Weaving), are especially strong and involving.

Only her scenes with Dustin Nguyen, who plays her Vietnamese ex-lover, fall flat (a restaurant date is one of the film's weakest moments).

Preparing for the role, Blanchett collaborated with Woods, who taped interviews with a number of people in Cabramatta for her to study. These included a woman called Ann, whom Blanchett subsequently met. But it would be misleading to view her performance as an impersonation, she insists.

"I know a lot of actors who will say they based a particular character on another person and that really works for them," she says. "For me, the finding of someone might be a touchstone or a jumping-off point for my own imaginative process.

"But ultimately the character has to come from the script, even when you are playing someone like Hepburn, because you have to say, 'Yes I'm playing this recognisable person.' But you then have to also ask, 'What story is Scorsese [The Aviator director] telling? What character has [writer] John Logan created? And where do I fit within that particular rendition of the story?' And then you tailor your research accordingly."

Her work with Weaving in Hedda Gabler for Sydney Theatre Company prepared her for their screen performance together.

"I was well oiled as far as Hugo was concerned because we spent virtually a year together on that play and then walked almost straight onto the set of Little Fish," she says.

"And Rowan was so bizarre about it. After seeing me as Hedda and Hugo as Judge Brack, he was analysing the whole dynamic from a Tracy and Lionel perspective. And he said, 'If you think that their relationship is in any way similar to Brack and Hedda, then we are in trouble."'

Blanchett, who would like to direct a play in the near future, says her theatre and film work complement each other.

"I don't think one is the antidote to the other," she says.

"For me the muscularity [of theatre] and the sense of an audience and the command that one has to have over one's voice, and the problem-solving that you learn ... those skills are remarkably helpful when you go to make a film.

"But the intimacy of a camera close-up is also a very useful thing to break down what could be perceived to be the bombastic performance style that happens in the theatre. It can help you with a sense of naturalism and realism, even on stage."

Her next screen moments will be spread across several very different films, including two with Brad Pitt: Babel, a suite of three stories about married couples directed by Mexico's Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu; and David Fincher's Benjamin Button, in which her romance with Pitt turns strange when he starts getting younger.

She is also preparing to work with director Steven Soderbergh in The Good German, playing the lover of a former American soldier (George Clooney) in post-war Berlin. And she is hoping to take on one of seven Bob Dylan roles in Todd Haynes's stylised biopic, I'm Not There: Suppositions on a Film Concerning Dylan.

Blanchett is keen to dispel the widely reported rumour that she might reprise her role as Elizabeth I in Shekhar Kapur's proposed new film, The Golden Age.

"People keep asking me about that one. I'm friends with Shekhar and I really must rap him on the knuckles," she says.

"He's always making about 100 films and he and Geoffrey [Rush] have spoken to me about revisiting Elizabeth and my initial reaction was why, even though she is an endlessly fascinating woman. So the short answer is no."

Our interview is interrupted again as Blanchett's sons start demanding their share of attention. Are either of the boys likely to follow in their mother's footsteps?

"I was so moved," she says. "I haven't been pushy at all in that department, but we were in the lounge and we were having something to eat and there was this ledge and the curtains were drawn and my three-year-old pulled them back and said: 'I'm doing a show for you, Mummy.'

"And he did this whole play. Andrew [Upton, her playwright husband] must have told him about King Arthur and he said it was about this knight who pulled a sword out of the stone.

"I don't know if it means he will become interested in acting, but this is where drama and theatre and storytelling is so fantastic. Every child should be encouraged to play those things out. The process is all."

Little Fish opens on September 8.

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