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Cate Blanchett touched down in Toronto for a wide-ranging talk about creative conflict on film sets, making big-budget films “risky” and why her six-time Oscar-nominated film “Carol” struggled to find funding.
Blanchett, who is at TIFF supporting Alfonso Cuarón’s Apple TV+ show “Disclaimer” and Guy Maddin’s film “Rumours,” was welcomed at the Royal Alexandra Theatre with a standing ovation, after fans lined up early to acquire rush tickets to the event.
Early on in the conversation, Blanchett talked about her love for performing theater in front of a live audience, which led her to address the “streamers out there” that don’t release viewership data.
“We want the numbers,” Blanchett said (though she didn’t specifically name-drop “Disclaimer” maker Apple, which, like most streamers, tends to shield its audience metrics). “Not so we know how much money is being made, but we want to know how many eyeballs have been on things that we have made. That’s greatly important.”
Blanchett recalled doing live theater and hearing people leave the room midway through a monologue — the pflump of auditorium chairs snapping shut.
“You look at the seats and you go, ‘OK, that was 70 pflumps.’ The next night, there’s 20 pflumps. And hopefully by opening night, everyone is riveted,” Blanchett said, prompting laughter from the audience.
Later in the conversation, Blanchett was asked about how she handles creative disagreements with directors on set. While she said there has been “no conflict” with her longtime collaborator Todd Haynes, Blanchett recalled a moment on the set of “Carol” in which the director struggled to find the lighting in a particular scene, so the actors allowed him the space to clear his head while they searched for alternate solutions.
“There is a misconception somehow that making the film, when it’s great, it’s like summer camp, and I’ve been on a couple of those, and the films have been fucking awful,” Blanchett said. “Polite disagreement, respectful disagreement is super duper important in the creative process.”
In “Carol,” Blanchett plays a middle-aged mother who becomes wrapped up in a romantic affair with a younger woman (Rooney Mara), who works at a department store. While the film came out not even a decade ago, in 2015, Blanchett said it took five years (and multiple directors) to get it made, because it was “so hard” to get the project funded.
“At one point, another director was going to do it, and he got sort of taken off the project,” Blanchett said. That prompted her to step away as well, until Haynes expressed interest in the project and got Blanchett back on board. “It was a five-year period, because no one wanted to fund it at that point. No one wanted to see … who was going to watch a film with one woman, let alone two women, falling in love?”
She added, “We do think about how much still has to change within the industry in terms of equity, inclusion and making films more sustainably. But, you know, we have made huge advances.”
Blanchett remarked that the last several years of film have been “vibrant” because “the voices are less homogenous.”
“It was a risky endeavor at the time, unfortunately,” she said of “Carol.”
Speaking of risk, Blanchett spoke about her “eclectic” range of movie roles — from indie dramas to billion-dollar franchises — and said that her representation at the time was surprised she wanted to take on “Lord of the Rings” and “go for three weeks and play an elf.”
“When there’s a sense of risk in those tentpole films, and you can feel it when there is a risk, then they have a chance of being successful,” Blanchett said. “I mean, ‘Barbie’ worked, not only because of the component parts, but because it was a risk. Someone took a risk on that. That’s why it worked — it was so fucking crazy!”
Speaking more broadly about big-budget movies, Blanchett said, “I think it’s when they become self-satisfied and bloated … bloat is the enemy of creativity. You can have too many resources.”
Blanchett, whose credits include “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” to “Thor: Ragnarok” to “Borderlands,” added that large-scale popcorn flicks “make space for people to remind themselves how great it is to go to the cinema.”
During an audience Q&A section, Blanchett took a question from a child actor asking for advice on entering the industry.
“I hate giving advice,” Blanchett said, before saying, “Go out in nature. … Anything that gives you the time to think long thoughts and think uncomfortable thoughts, because being an actor, it’s pretty uncomfortable a lot of the time. There will be times where you flow, there will be times when you take off as a group of people and those are the moments you cling onto. But 97% of the time it’s slightly uncomfortable. And being in the rehearsal room … unless you’re slightly uncomfortable, you’re not working from the right place.”
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