Cate Blanchett’s Golden Age

If it's not impossible, she's not interested...Playing complicated women is what this versatile, Oscar-winning actress does best.

by Timothy Rhys | Published January 26, 2007

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MM: Do you do that on purpose? Do you take projects that are completely different from each other and juxtapose those? From the work you choose, you’re obviously always looking for a challenge.

CB: If it doesn’t seem impossible then I don’t tend to gravitate toward it. Which means that by your own personal yardstick you’re constantly failing. But I guess it’s that desire to keep getting better that keeps one going.

I know I’m fortunate. I’m not sure if it’s the way I entered the film industry, but I’ve been asked by directors to do very different things. And once a director has asked you to do that then you’re crazy not to give it your best shot. This year alone I’ve played Hedda Gabler and Bob Dylan! (laughs)

MM: Those are pretty crazy bookends. Tell me about playing Dylan.

CB: Yeah, well it’s pretty Brechtian in that I’m a woman. It’s much more than a biopic, it’s more of a riff on an elusive identity—a musical shape-shifter and somebody I’m completely enamored with in music. He’s been an enormous influence. He’s studied in American high schools—in poetry classes, you know—but call him a poet and he’ll dodge that label. Where I play him is interfaced with the press, and he’s kind of claiming the right to not define himself, which I found hilarious and quite inspiring. I play him when he went electric on the tour in ’66, which is, visually, his most iconic period. It’s the hair, the suit, the electric guitars…

MM: Hard to imagine now that when he first went electric he was called a sell-out and got major grief from his fans.

CB: I’d say so. What was great is that Jeff Rosen, his manager, was completely behind the project, so that meant the snippets of press conferences that you get in the great Scorsese documentary No Direction Home were available to me in their entirety, because Jeff had them on tape and gave them to me—which was fantastic. I mean, I wasn’t particularly interested in reading people’s analyses or accounts of his music—I thought that’s what the film was trying to escape, so it seemed a bit pointless. I mostly just listened to him and watched him and then kind of ran with this crazy kind of Felliniesque style. My section was all shot in black and white, and it was so individually and uniquely wrought by Todd. It was all in Todd’s head—a complete directorial vision.

MM: Todd’s a great director. You’ve had the good fortune to work with some of the most amazing directors in the world— Scorsese, Soderbergh, Jarmusch…

CB: I’m lucky, huh?

MM: Yes, it must be all luck! (laughs) As this is for MovieMaker, I think our readers would be interested to know what the qualities are that you think embody a director whom an actor would love to work with? Actors seem to have disparate opinions about this. Some say they want a director who’s a strong visionary—an authoritarian—and some want a director in the mold of a William Wyler, who was rumored to just say “do it.”

CB: It’s chemistry, I think, in the end. They need to be a good reader of people. They need to know when to step in, when to hold back, when to be verbose, when to stop talking, when to be firm, when to be soft and when to say “Just pick up the fucking glass and move over there.” (laughs)

MM: That’s what Fellini would say, right? He saw actors as puppets.

CB: But if Fellini tells you to pick up the glass, you just do it I would imagine.

MM: He had that gravitas of personality.

CB: Yeah, he knew what he was doing. And that’s what I mean about chemistry. Some people will ask you to pick up the glass and you think “Why?” And you can’t explain it.

MM: So you’re talking about respect.

CB: Respect and trust. You can’t demand respect, but you can command respect. I think some people have that and some people don’t. You can definitely learn it. People keep saying that Ang Lee is very quiet and it’s difficult to get any sort of verbal direction from him at all. I mean, there’s a shape-shifter. But you look at his films and they’re utterly exquisite. You can tell pretty quickly if someone knows what they’re doing.

MM: So, has it ever been your experience that your preconceived notions of who a director was were completely changed when you started working with him?

CB: No, because I think the bravest thing one can do as an actor is to come in with a few options and remain open and not get paranoid. Because I think when you’re working with people like Jarmusch or Scorsese or Todd Haynes, who had such a particular vision, or Soderbergh, who also had a unique vision with The Good German, you think ‘God, am I doing it right? Am I inhabiting their vision?’ And if they don’t say anything, you can become quite paranoid. But say, with The Good German, I walked onto the set on a Monday and thought, ‘Well, I’ll just do it, and if he doesn’t like it he’ll say so.’ I did one take and he said, “Okay, let’s move on.” And I said ‘Uh, can we do just one more?’ And he said “Sure.” So I had to trust that he was happy with what I was doing, because Soderbergh—clearly he knows what he wants.

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TAGS alejandro gonzalez inarritu andrew upton babel bob dylan brad pitt cate blanchett david fincher george clooney i'm not there jim jarmusch judi dench katharine hepburn martin scorsese notes on a scandal richard eyre shekhar kapur steven soderbergh sydney theatre company the aviator the curious case of benjamin button the golden age the good german the lord of the rings: the two towers todd haynes

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