Sunday Mornining Herald December, 2006
Drama Queen
By Suzanne Wangmann
Drama Queen
A GRITTY wind whips around the rocky, desolate hills of Morocco,
where a local farmer is bargaining for a rifle. He doesn't have
the asking price, but the addition of a goat seals the deal. The
farmer gives the gun to his two young boys to shoot the jackals
that are attacking the goat herd.
Unfortunately, that’s not all the boys shoot at. Cate Blanchett,
or her character, Susan, is riding in a tourist bus when she
cops a bullet in the neck, and thus begins Alejandro González
Iñárritu’s new film, Babel. It’s a harrowing ride as four
stories, set in Morocco, Mexico and Japan, intertwine, each
linked to the gun.
Babel doesn’t let you relax for a moment. You walk out of the
cinema shell-shocked, thanking God for everything that is
hum-drum and banal in your own life. It’s a masterful piece of
film-making from the director who brought us 21 Grams.
A universe away from those moonscaped Moroccan hills, Cate
Blanchett is sipping peppermint tea with lemon, surrounded by
the harbour at the Sydney Theatre Company’s Wharf restaurant.
It’s an unseasonably chilly day and she’s dressed in a black
velvet blazer, which she hugs around her thin frame. Wearing
glasses, she looks more like schoolteacher Cate than her
glamorous alter ego on these pages.
“I didn’t want to make it,” she says of Babel.
“I wanted to work with Alejandro but I didn’t want to work. He
kept saying, ‘It’s only three weeks. It’s really important to me
that you do it.’ I said, ‘I don’t want to drag the boys to
Morocco.’ I’m really pleased he pushed me to do it. Isn’t it
extraordinary?”
The last time I interviewed Blanchett was in April last year.
She was flying out to Morocco that afternoon to start shooting
Babel, which opens in Australia on Boxing Day. It was her first
acting role with Brad Pitt, her home was in London, and she
talked about enjoying the frayed edges of her life.
Fifteen months later, she has another three films under her
belt, she and her husband, writer/producer Andrew Upton, have
packed up the boys and returned to Sydney, and the couple have
been recruited by the Sydney Theatre Company as co-artistic
directors, commencing in 2008.
Both are rehearsing plays for the company, while “greening”
their home in Sydney’s leafy Hunters Hill: installing solar
power, rainwater tanks and so forth. The couple also hope to get
the STC off the power grid in the coming few years, again
through the use of solar power and suchlike.
“Everything is in boxes (at home),” says a weary Blanchett. “I
honestly thought I’d cleared out, got rid of all the detritus
two years ago. You have to be quite ruthless when you’re moving
into a new place.”
When I suggest she’s hoarding the odd baby outfit, as all
mothers do, she shoots back, “Try 20 baby outfits! And the look
on your girlfriends’ faces when you try to pass them on, these
precious things that now look like rags. I couldn’t throw out
the love letters and I couldn’t throw out the baby clothes.”
Her conversation sways from the intellectual and passionate
theatre buff to regular mum and loving wife. In Upton, she found
a soul mate and a voice of reality in a tinsel world. They
married nine years ago and have two sons, Dashiell, five, and
Roman, two, and Blanchett hopes to have another child.
“I have a huge array of Spanx (control underwear) in my wardrobe
for after my next baby,” laughs the slender 37-year-old.
Meanwhile, the career challenges continue, most notably her
professional directorial debut at the Sydney Theatre Company, a
short play called A Kind of Alaska by renowned English
playwright Harold Pinter. Based on the work of neurologist
Oliver Sacks, it’s the story of a woman who’s contracted the
sleeping disease Encephalitis Lethargica, an epidemic of the
1920s, and wakes up 29 years later with no knowledge that she’s
been asleep.
“I’ve always loved the play,” says Blanchett.
“I was lucky because I read a footnote in the book that Oliver
Sacks had actually made a documentary about it and I thought,
‘I’ll never find it.’ Then I thought, ‘I’ll call (Martin)
Scorsese’s archivist,’ because he found something for me before,
and he found it! It was incredible.”
The play features actors Justine Clarke, Robert Menzies and
Caroline Lee, “an actress from Melbourne who I went to
university with,” says Blanchett. Lee plays Deborah, the woman
who wakes up after her lengthy sleep.
The performance is a double bill, with Andrew Upton directing
David Mamet’s Reunion, about an estranged father and daughter
who reunite.
“Short plays from great writers are like bonsais,” remarks
Blanchett.
“You can see lots of hints or echoes of other plays and when you
consider Mamet and Pinter and how utterly influential they’ve
been, to place them in dialogue with each other for the evening
– it was Andrew’s idea – I think is remarkable.”
Two of the actors will also appear in Reunion, “doubling the
cast” as Blanchett calls it. “Both Andrew and I love doubling.”
The plays run until January 14.
“I’ve thought about directing for a long time,” she says, “and
I’ve always said to Andrew it would have to be the right play. A
lot of actors want to direct in reaction to their experiences,
bad experiences, as an actor, but I’ve always had good
experiences. I’m not trying to repair anything. I’m certainly
enjoying being on the other side of the ring.”
Later next year Blanchett will also direct a full-length play
called Blackbird by David Harrower. In the meantime, Upton’s
latest play, Riflemind, will be directed at the STC by
Oscar-winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman next year.
So do the couple plan to bring Hollywood Down Under?
“Phil is hardly Hollywood,” she laughs.
“He runs LAByrinth, which is a public theatre in New York. I was
working with him on (The Talented Mr) Ripley and he and Andrew
hit it off immediately, so the boys stayed in contact.”
Blanchett makes that celebrated and starry side of her life
sound very ordinary and natural. Until it comes to George
Clooney, with whom she recently finished making The Good German,
due out on March 8.
“He’s a tour de force, that man, really,” she says, “and he acts
very judiciously upon what he believes. I learnt a lot from him.
I think it’s interesting the way he plays his cards. Without any
shame or compunction, he’s able to do the Ocean’s, do those big
films, in order to facilitate what he loves,” she says, implying
that big money-making ventures allow Clooney to produce more
arty, political, box office-risky films.
“I mean, Philip Seymour Hoffman is like that and I hope I’m like
that, too. You don’t know what you’re going to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’
to or how you’re going to behave until it’s all in front of you.
The way George and Phil ski across that slope is great.”
Likewise, she’s a big fan of Brad Pitt. “Brad is so smart and
generous. You know he’s able to use his cachet to get an
audience in to see (Babel) who perhaps ordinarily wouldn’t feel
it was speaking to them. He’s so wonderful. I love him, love
him. I don’t love him in the sense that I love my husband,”
she’s quick to add, “but I adore him.”
She and Pitt have recently worked on another film together
called The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which is still in
production. Blanchett, who’s the face of SK-II skincare,
explains, “It involves a lot of prosthetics, which I’ve never
done before. Brad has done a little bit, like the eye bags in
Babel.”
“Aren’t they really his own eye bags?” I interject. “No, he’s
gorgeous,” she says. “And anyway, we were sitting in the chair
and we went through three weeks of make-up tests and he was
covered in eczema from it all. We were talking about what we
were going to do because our skin was taking a battering and so
I had this girlie conversation with him and put the SK-II
products down, lined them all up in front of him and he and
Angie went around the table trying them.
“I’m very basic,” she says of her own skincare. “I just use the
range. The things I really love are those eye masks.” They must
be working because despite her youngest son going through what
she says is “a nightmare stage”, waking her up three times a
night, and Blanchett flitting to LA for less than a day to
appear at a film premiere, and rehearsing the play, she looks
positively bag-free.
Clooney recently commented on Blanchett for an article in US
Vanity Fair magazine. “I’ll tell you right now,” he said.
“She’ll win an Oscar (for The Good German). She’s the best actor
working today. Intimidating, in a way, to work with an actor
that good.”
Blanchett hasn’t read the quote but says airily, “He said
something nice about me.” I offer to read it to her and she cuts
me dead. “You don’t need to tell me what he said,” she insists.
Whether it’s self-preservation or that she simply regards it as
a waste of time, Blanchett doesn’t read anything about herself,
and she doesn’t watch TV either. I ask if she read the last
story I wrote about her? “I have to confess I didn’t. I think
it’s the way I cope with things. I just do them and I keep
moving forward. You know people have opinions on the things you
do, but you just focus on what’s going on.”
Surprisingly, Blanchett doesn’t get the paparazzi-badgering her
acting status would suggest and she says she pays little
attention to press intrusion. “I don’t spend a lot of time
thinking about what’s in the media. I spend a lot more time
thinking about what the media isn’t telling us. That stuff,” she
says of celebrity gossip, “is junk food.
“I’m not particularly public. I absolutely accept that there’s a
public side to my job. We get up in front of people and so
you’re bound to be scrutinized, and if you pretend that’s not
the case you’re kidding yourself. But if you don’t want to be
seen, there are certain places you don’t go.”
One place Blanchett was recently photographed, along with Upton
and the two boys, was at the Walk Against Warming protest in
Sydney. A crowd of 40,000 joined the walk, which attracted a
similar number in Melbourne.
“It was heart-warming,” she says.
“Two years ago I remember coming back (to Australia) to see a
show, I think it was Summer Rain, ironically enough, and I read
an editorial in The Australian saying that in 10 years time
Perth would run out of water. I just stopped, got on the
internet and waited for the front-page news to follow in the
wake of this editorial. Silence. Coming back, I always thought
people would be talking about it, and now finally it’s become
fashionable. Finally water tanks are looking beautiful.”
This is clearly an issue Blanchett feels passionately about, and
she’s keen to talk about it.
“It’s a sad and sorry day when the environment has to become
groovy before people pay attention to it,” she says.
“I don’t care how it gets in the media so long as it’s lodged in
people’s brains and change happens. You can’t stand on a soapbox
about it. If you say anything vaguely humanitarian you
automatically get written off as a lefty wacko or as part of the
cultural elite, which is the biggest insult anyone can levy at
anyone in this country. This is non-partisan. As a human being,
as a parent, as an Australian, I don’t care who you vote for… as
a democracy we’re facing some of the hugest decisions we’ll ever
have to face.”
Soon we’ll see yet another new Blanchett film, Notes on a
Scandal, which opens on January 11 Again, it’s a tumultuous
emotional ride as her character, a young art teacher, Sheba
Hart, becomes involved with a 15-year-old student and is held to
emotional ransom by an older history teacher, played by Judi
Dench.
Sheba says, “My father always said ‘mind the gap’, the
difference between life as you dream it and life as it is.” My
final question to Blanchett is, what is her gap?
“I don’t think I have dreams and then set about enacting them,”
she ponders. “I don’t think ‘I want to be here’ and start going
about it. Something in the way Sheba delivers that line is with
a sense of disappointment. I get disappointed in the human race,
which I’m part of. Unlike Sheba, I don’t perceive myself as a
victim – I’m complicit. If I feel disappointed, or that there is
a gap, I either accept it or I do something about it.”
Cate Blanchett is ambassador for the Australian Film Institute.
The AFI Awards will be held in Melbourne on Thursday. |
