Total Film 2004

Pale Rider

Elizabeth goes West, Galadriel get grim and gritty. Total Film demands to know: is The Missing ever-rising Aussie star Cate Blanchett's roughest, toughest shoot yet?

Words Ceri Thomas

Cate Blanchett is determined to cut through the bullshit, right from the off. As soon as Total Film inquires about the hardships of filming gritty Western The Missing on the cold, wet slopes of New Mexico's mountains, she downright refuses to give in to how-I've-suffered-for-my-art actorish self-pity. "Well, yeah, the conditions we were working under on The Missing could be harsh, " she shrugs, "but then you read some of the diaries of the women from the time and you think, 'Oh fuck off! These people actually life this life. I'm just acting!'"

Yes, she's bushed after a long day of interviews in a New York hotel, but Blanchett hasn't lost or even blunted that edgy, get-on-with-it attitude that's defined a busy career since she first snared our attention as the pasty titular monarch in Shekhar Kapur's Elizabeth. An attitude, in fact, that's led to The Missing's director Ron Howard calling her a "gracious, no-fuss, no-muss professional."

She grins when Howard's compliment is repeated back to her. "I don't know if I'm gracious," she says. "Oftentimes people say that sort of stuff top you guys rather than to me. Then again, maybe they say it to you because they know that you'll just say it straight back to me..."

It's difficult to believe that Blanchett's been short of compliments over the last few years. Not just one of the best, but also one of the most consistent movie actresses around, she's as comfortable turning in extended cameos for The Lord of the Rings (she happily admits that she took the role of elven queen Galadriel at least partly so she could wear a set of pointy ears, which she's kept and bronzed) as she is headlining the likes of Elizabeth, Charlotte Gray and Veronica Guerin.

The Missing sees the 34-year-old Blanchett take on her first oater, playing hard-nosed frontier single mother Maggie. When her eldest daughter is kidnapped by a gang of renegade Apaches, Maggie teams up with her long-lost dad Samuel Jones (Tommy Lee Jones) -- who deserted her to go and live with the Apaches when she was a child -- to hunt them down. But it's a film that nearly didn't happen. Ron Howard's follow-up to A Beautiful Mind was supposed to be The Alamo, but the director formerly known as Richie from Happy Days had budget disputes on the historical Western and passed it on to John Lee Hancock. While he was dangling from a loose end, someone passed him an adaptation of Thomas Eidson's cowboy novel. He loved it and booted The Missing into production.

"I signed on about two days after I first heard about it," remembers Blanchett. "I was making a short with Jim Jarmusch called Coffee and Cigarettes so I happened to be in New York and Ron was in town. We had a cup of coffee together and got on. We talked about a whole heap of things, and at the end, he said, 'I'm thinking about this film set in the south-west -- what are you doing in January/February of next year?' So he sent me the script, we had a conversation about it and ... Well, maybe I'm very low-key, but he then rang me back and said, 'Do you want to do it?' like he couldn't work out whether I was interested. So I went [her voice rises to an excited shriek at this point], 'Yeah, yeah, of course I do!'" You have to wonder, though, why she felt so drawn to what - on the surface - looks like, well, an action movie...

"An action movie? Is this an action movie?" She asks thoughtfully. "I suppose it has an action component. To me, the centre of the film is a relationship full of yearning between a father and a daughter, though. And what's so poignant about it is that they never have the time to sit down and thrash it out, because of the 'action component'. The chase keeps getting in the way."

The character of Maggie is a long way from the goody-two-shoes frontier women of Western myth. For a start, there's a strong vein of bigotry running through her. It's something that Blanchett fought to include. "I just didn't want her to be the noble white woman pitted against the odds," she shrugs. "Samuel has flaws, but Maggie has flaws as well. For a lot of people the genesis of racism is fear and ignorance. The genesis of Maggie's childhood agony goes back to Samuel leaving and the fact that he went native. So her fear of Native Americans began quite young. It was kind of there in the book, maybe unintentionally, but it was something that wasn't really in the script which I pushed in there more." You see, while she's not exactly what you'd call 'trouble' on the set, Blanchett's also no walkover. If she feels that something needs altering in a film, she's not shy about saying so. "Well, that's part of my job really. It's a bit boring if I'm just going, 'Well, where do you want me to stand?'"

One problem that Blanchett always seems to have a ready solution for, though, is what her character should sound like. From clipped English (Elizabeth) to Scottish (Charlotte Gray) to Irish (for last year's role as real-life crusading journalist Veronica Guerin, who was murdered by drug dealers) to a whole variety of regional American accents, she's ready and willing to transform her usual soft, Australian tones into any accent that comes along. She laughingly balks at Total Film's suggestion that she's the new Meryl Streep ("Hang on a minute, Meryl Streep's still alive and kicking!"), but soon snaps into seriousness in a way that leaves you in no doubt just how important she finds the whole accent thing. "It's always a technical exercise, learning an accent, but it's like a child learning how to walk. Basic. No excuse for not getting it perfectly. It's part of assuming a character -- if you work in many different cultures and play characters from many different places, then they speak in many different ways."

So is The Missing her most physically demanding movie to date? "It's very hard to say, because often what comes across as gruelling to an audience, if it's working on a set, then it's cathartic and it's gone. What's hard is when something isn't working and you have to push it throuhg. Take Veronica Guerin. It's very..." -- she pauses, searching for the right word -- "difficult. And it was confronting, both for myself and for Veronica's family. But she was such a postivie life-force that playing her was quite inspiring in a way.

"Now Heaven [in which Blanchett plays a woman who accidentally kills some children with a homemade bomb] was a deep, dark nightmare. That was really tough. Living with what went on in that woman's head, with the images of the people, the children that she blew up. I found some websites on the internet  which are just horrific, so I printed up those images and had them plastered all over my trailer. They became second nature to me. I'd walk in every day and see these images of people from bomb blasts because that was what was going throughout my character's mind every second of every day."

Great preparation for a role, sure, but not such a good idea when you're entertaining... "Someone brought their kids to see me and I opened the door to my trailer and said, 'Come in!' Then I realized what was inside and I slammed it again, going, 'No!'"

Even though she's about to take a break to have child No2 (she's four months pregnant when Total Film meets with her), Blanchett's managed to get two more films in the can. One is Wes Royal Tenenbaums Anderson's The Life Aquatic ("I play a pregnant reporter who comes to interview Bill Murray's character. It's a very strange film..."); the other is The Aviator, Martin Scorsese's biopic of Howard Hughes, in which she appears opposite DiCaprio's Hughes as Katharine Hepburn.

"It's a delicate challenge," she says, "because it would be a bit grotesque to get up there and do a cabaret-act Katharine Hepburn. I asked Martin Scorsese what he wanted and he said, 'Well, you're playing a character who's called Katharine Hepburn. Here's the script.'

"It's not a film about Hepburn, it's a film about Howard Hughes and the part that I"m in is about the very private relationship that they had. So its' not about me doing an imitation of her in The African Queen or The Philadelphia Story," she laughs. "Obviously, I watched all of her films -- Marty screened them for me -- but there was one interview that she gave in 1973 with Dick Cavett that was hte most telling thing for me. She didn't know that the camera was rolling for about 20 minutes so you could just seher being her. The way an actor is on screen, their acting voice and mannerisms, are often incredibly different from who they are in everyday life. I should know that...

"You move through mimicry into habitation so that you become the person." She pauses. "Hopefully. I haven't seen the film yet..."

The Missing is released on 27 February and reviewed on page 34