Interview 2003

The Earthmoving, Sea-Changing, Sky-Reaching Cate Blanchett

Interview by Graham Fuller

WHY is Cate Blanchett such fine actress? Here's a proposition. We spend decades wrangling with some people, but others drop into our lives for an hour, a day, or a week and lodge themselves permanently into our peripheral visions to the degree that even when we're not thinking about them, we know they're always there-maybe as a salve or as a curse. That's the effect the manipulative Tom Ripley has on Meredith Logue (Blanchett) in Anthony Minghella's sumptuous '50s period piece The Talented Mr Ripley: No matter that she's giving her heart to him, this hopelessly callow socialite slumming in Europe is no more than a counter on Ripley's board game. At the end of the movie we're left wondering if Ripley, searchingly played by Matt Damon, will get himself out of his latest jam. Three days later we might find ourselves pondering what became of Meredith in the '60s and the '70s and beyond. What lasting damage did Ripley do to her? What bad marriages did she make? We'll never know, but somehow she'll al ways be there. Let's hope she found a comer of joy.

Briefly popping in and out of the movie, the twenty-nine-year-old Blanchett makes us think all these things about this far from dynamic and not especially fascinating tourist. She gives us as much to mull over with this small performance as she did in her star vehicles Oscar & Lucinda (1.997) and Elizabeth (1.998). It's screen acting at its most sublimely indelible.

GRAHAM FULLER: How would you say you've changed since you've been making films?

CATE BLANCHE1T: The more you do, the more confident you are in some areas, and then the more unconfident you are in others, so it's kind of odd. I think I'm actually happier. And I have no idea if that's got to do with where I am personally or professionally. I'm not as pessimistic, maybe.

GF: Were you pessimistic before? CB: I don't know-I'm just trying to figure it out. People say, "My God, this has all happened so quickly," and I understand what they're saying when they talk about this. They're talking about the films I've done, but the steps to me have been incremental.

GF: What do you mean?

CB: One step was coming out of drama school. An enormous step was getting the opportunity to work with Geoffrey Rush onstage in Oleanna, because Geoffrey's like a god at home [in Australia], and I had long been a fan of his work. That was six years ago, and I would say I only notice change every four or five years.
GF: You've chosen to be in several films recently in which you weren't the lead. Was that a conscious decision?
CB: Absolutely. After Elizabeth, I thought I could see a path that was being laid out for me that I could step onto, and I knew myself well enough to realize I wasn't ready to step on it. And I'm not there yet. People think I'm there because all of the pieces are in place, but I want to try and do different things and play different kinds of parts. I couldn't have found a better antidote for myself after playing Elizabeth than the character I played in Pushing Tin [1999], which was totally different.
GF: In The Talented Mr. Ripley, too, you're a pivotal character, but you're not on-screen all the time.
CB: {laughs] Oh, that's very polite! I think it's more true to say I'm hardly on-screen at all. I sort of bookend the story.
GF: Your character, Meredith, is gauche and impressionable, and she has to work hard at attracting Ripley - it doesn't come naturally to her. How do you boldly go about playing someone that unsure of herself?
CB: People talk about the freedom of the late' 5Os and early' 60s, but girls from the upper echelons of East Coast society like Meredith were still chaperoned, and attending things like debutante balls was their whole life. I saw her as someone who is trying to break out of the chrysalis she's in, but she probably never will.
GF: But that's external. Did you have to get in touch with that part of yourself that is. I don't want to say "shy" because it may not be applicable, but less confident?

CB: I don't know. Sometimes it just comes to you. The very first scene we shot was when Meredith meets Marge [Gwyneth Paltrow] and Peter [Jack Davenport] at the cafe in Piazza di Spagna in Rome - the meeting that Ripley orchestrates. It was incredibly hot, even in the middle of winter, and I thought, This is never going to work. I was kind of spacey, but I'd been having such an overwhelmingly fabulous time since I'd arrived in Italy that I also felt very free, which is the antithesis of what Meredith was feeling. Often it's really helpful to be in a completely different space to the one your character is in so that you're more aware of the distinctions rather than the similarities between yourself and the character.
GF: So you were being unself-conscious playing someone who is self-conscious?
CB: Yeah. If that makes sense. I think I work best when I feel the best, though that doesn't necessarily mean that the outcome is the best. On Ripley, I found a particular freedom in my anonymity, in not being focused on, in not being at the helm of the ship. I could go about putting together the little dominos that made up the character and just do my bit. There were things - personal, tiny things - that I wanted to express from an acting point of view; I can't even remember what they are now because I must have done them and moved on. They may have worked, they may not have worked. But to have someone asking me big questions about those things would have meant I wouldn't have been free to try and actually deal with that minute.

GF: Had you been unable to do that on Elizabeth, where you carried the picture?
CB: It was just different. There's a type of acting energy that goes along with playing a so-called heroine, and it's a different type of energy and a different skill than those you use when you support a story. You exercise different muscles as an actor, and there are muscles I wanted to make sure were still working when I did Ripley.
GF: As Elizabeth discovered her power, in a way she became more constrained, because she had to sacrifice her private life for her public life. Do you feel that you've had to make similar sacrifices?

CB: Because I left Melbourne, where I'd grown up, and went to drama school when I was nineteen, I quickly found that I had to find a different way to maintain my friendships, and I've continued to work on that. You do sacrifice seeing the people that you love and care about three or four times a week. The downside to having a lot of focus on you is that the air you breathe is somehow rarefied and can lead to a disconnection from the way people move and talk and think, and so therefore how can you represent them? But I'm not in the press very much, and it's not a particular interest of mine. I just sort of get on with things; I work, and I go home and wash my socks. I'm sorry, but it's that boring.
GF: You're going to be playing another queen - Galadriel, Queen of the Elves, in The Lord of the Rings. People are going to be saying, "Ah, Cate Blanchett - regal and ethereal." But I get the sense that the real you is much more down- to-earth. What would you say?

CB: Oh, dear. {laughs] It's horribly difficult to say how you are as a person. I really don't have a static sense of myself. Some people treat me like I'm strident or opinionated, and some talk to me like I'm shy. I was just at the Australian Film Awards and one guy I'd met before came up to me and put his hand on my shoulder and said, "You're so great-keep up the naivete." And I thought, My God, was that patronizing or does he really think I'm naive? You have to laugh.
GF: Are you still in touch with what made you want to act in the first place?
CB: See, I don't actually know what the original impulse was. Even at drama school, I didn't feel I was necessarily going to continue acting. I've always thought of it as slightly frivolous and I assumed I'd go back to university to study architecture. But in my third year I did some work with a woman named Lindy Davies that seemed to me to have real value. It drew together the strands of what was happening around us and we were able to blurt it back at the audience. It seemed relevant, I guess. So I thought I'd give acting a go for a few years, and then I kept working, and that's addictive.
GF: Do you think your father's death when you were ten may have contributed in some way to your choice of career?

CB: It didn't necessarily lead to me becoming an actor. But I think it made me intensely curious about other people's emotional states. When, as children, you see adults in a state of distress it confirms for you that there's a whole set of experiences you have yet to undergo. In a strange way, my father's death probably made me less focused on myself, although, God, I'm as selfish as the next person. [laughs]
GF: Do you think you've reconciled yourself to that loss?

CB: I don't know if you ever reconcile yourself to it. Death freaks me out. It's something I'm not at all resolved about. I am restless about it. I am terrified of it. But at the same time, I am not going to try to arrest the aging process to stave it off. I find the concept terrifying and exhilarating.

When a parent dies when you're young, that's the circumstance in which you grow up and you take it in your stride. You live with the loss, so it just seems like a normality. When my father died, it was simply something that happened, like the fact that I fell in the pool when I was nine and got a scar on my knee. It was much harder on my mother. When your parents die when you're older, your own set of personal fears and agendas are implicated in the death. You understand the spiritual side of sadness, not just the immediate loss.

GF: Has marriage made a difference to the way you approach your work?
CB: I can't even go into the depth of my adoration for Andrew [Upton, her screenwriter-film editor husband]. He's the first person I ever dated or ever met whom I can talk to about my work in every single facet. Unless other people are around, you can't act. And if you're not doing it, you feel like you have no skills and you tend to get quite superstitious about it. But I don't feel superstitious when I talk to Andrew about it, and I don't feel I have to
harbor irrelevant secrets. I can talk to him about it like it's a real thing. It's a part of my life that's. ..it is. I don't really know how else to say it.
GF: Do you analyze your characters or do you just dive in?

CB: It depends on the story. I sort of paddle around the edges. [pauses] When I was young, I was this awful, right-on little kid who used to stand up to the schoolyard bullies because I hated seeing other kids victimized, but every child's cruelty will come out some way. When I was about nine, I did this thing with slugs, because I'd seen this science show called The Curiosity Show. I got all these slugs and snails-about seventy of them- and heaped them in a pile and poured salt all over them because I'd heard that salt drew all the moisture out of them. And, of course, they all started to foam and bubble. I tried to wipe the salt off them, and I ended up running away-1 didn't even watch the end of the experiment. When I came back the next day, they were all dead, and I buried them in a mass grave. I haven't forgiven myself for it. To answer your question, this, I guess, is the kind of scrutiny that you put your characters under. You pour salt over them and see what happens.

GF: And do you, too, have to wriggle and squirm as part of that process?
CB: Yes. Sometimes it's like drawing blood from a stone.
GF: And It's exciting at the same time?
CB: Yeah! Like pressing a bruise. It was intensely painful for Meredith to fall in love with someone who didn't return her affection. I felt she would look back on that when she was fifty and realize it was the turning point in her life. And I relished playing that. The other thing about acting is that it depends on who you're working with. You have to be comfortable who you're telling the story with, who's looking at you.

GF: You had to look a lot at not one but two Fiennes brothers - Ralph in Oscar & Lucinda, Joseph in Elizabeth-in quick succession. Many women, I suspect, would have liked to have changed places with you. Any thoughts?
CB: At the time I thought, Surely this is too weird. But they're both great and couldn't be more different. It's a blessing but also a difficulty for there to be so much incredible talent in one family. It's kind of disgusting, really. [laughs]
GF: OK. Last question: Earlier you said you were happier. But are you happy?
CB: I've always been terrified of being content, because it seems such a stodgy or smug place to be stuck in. But, yes, I am happy in a sense that I am not frightened of momentary disappointments or depressions. That means a lot of things bounce off me today that wouldn't have bounced off me a few years ago. It's a difficult question because happiness is a thing you don't necessarily want to admit to--you don't want it to go away once you're experiencing it. Actually, I find the less I think about happiness, the happier I am. The amount of energy you spend on it could run quite a few lightbulbs.