IF YOU’RE EVER HAVING A NICE CATE BLANCHETT CHAT WITH AND WANT TO STOP IT DEAD IN ITS TRACKS, ASK HER ABOUT ACTING.
It’s like throwing a bucket of water over her. “I couldn’t be less interested in talking about it,” she says, slowly folding her arms as if this might deflect the question. She would rather talk about anything else. She’d like to talk about her garden (her onions are doing well). She’d like to talk about how amazing it is that we’re standing about 15 metres from where The Beatles recorded (we’re in Abbey Road Studios, which we’ll explain later). Just please, oh God, not acting. Unfortunately, we’re going to make her talk about it because, you may have noticed, she’s really very good at it. And in her new film she’s about the best at it she’s ever been.
Written and directed by Todd Field, TÁR stars Blanchett as Lydia Tár, a fictional conductor at the peak of her profession. Tar is the first female conductor of an unnamed Berlin orchestra, though hates that it’s the “female” bit that qualifies her achievement. She’s an EGOT (winner of an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony). She’s about to embark on her crowning glory, a live recording of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 5, a famously complicated work (it says here). She’s almost running out of things to achieve. But the top is a dangerous place. There is gossip about Tár using her position to seduce women who work for her. As her pedestal begins to crumble, Tár finds herself isolated. And something is haunting her. Her mind and life seem to be unravelling in tandem.
The list of great Cate Blanchett performances is not short. It’s pretty much a list of all Cate Blanchett’s performances. After 1997’s Oscar And Lucinda she was talked of as a talent to watch. The next year she played Elizabeth I and showed she was a talent you couldn’t tear your eyes from. So it’s been ever since. The Aviator. Notes On A Scandal. Blue Jasmine. Carol. You might find some duff films on her CV, but you won’t find a duff performance.
TÁR, though, sees Blanchett operating on a different level. She’s ripping through layers of a complicated, troubled woman in a way that leaves you wrung out just spectating. It’s like watching Whitney Houston sing or Gene Kelly dance. You know they’re made of approximately all the same bits as you, but it’s impossible to fathom how they’ve been able to put them to much more remarkable use. At 53, Blanchett is doing the most astonishing work of her career.
The reason we’re at Abbey Road is because Field and
Right, top to bottom:
Blanchett with TÁR director
Todd Field, singing from the same score; As fierce and formidable conductor Lydia Tár; Nina Hoss plays Tár’s partner, Sharon Goodnow.
Blanchett are, in a very meta move, making a concept album inspired by Tár’s planned Mahler album. Blanchett is readying herself to conduct the Dresden Philharmonic (the orchestra in the film), who will arrive tomorrow. Their chairs are set up, expectantly awaiting orchestral bottoms. “It’s all in the breath,” says Blanchett, waving her hand gently in the air. “If you stop breathing, you break the communication with the orchestra. You stop thinking when you stop breathing.”
She will talk about conducting for as long as you like. She spent months studying it — the right hand keeps tempo; the left instructs the orchestra — as well as learning to play the piano so well that she could interpret a Bach piece in multiple ways. She likes to talk about the brilliant people who taught her things, but resists any talk of her own skills. We try to take her back to the first note of her performance. As it turns out, becoming Lydia Tár began as all Blanchett’s favourite roles do: with absolute terror and confusion.
TODD FIELD HAS BEEN THINKING ABOUT Cate Blanchett for a long time. If you can’t quite place his name, it’s because he hasn’t made a film in 16 years. In the ’00s, he directed In The Bedroom and Little Children, received a load of Oscar nominations and acclaim, then disappeared. In the time since, he started projects, but they all collapsed. The break was largely a choice: directing was taking Field away from his young family, and when his wife became pregnant with another, he vowed he wouldn’t miss a minute of his youngest’s childhood unless it were for something unmissable.
One project, though, left a remnant that wouldn’t shift. Back in 2012, Field was writing a political thriller with Joan Didion. It fell through, but not before he’d spoken to Blanchett about playing the lead. She lurked at the edges of his mind for years, until in 2020 he began writing TÁR, his children now mostly grown. The character kept assuming a familiar face. “I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t tell the studio. They thought I was writing this about a man. I thought, ‘How do I want to tell this story?’ And I thought it had to be a woman and… it’s Cate.”
He was terrified about actually asking, but sent her the script, which he never does before meeting an actor. When Blanchett received it, she was just as frightened. She had no idea what she was expected to do with this woman. Field had written someone difficult and guarded, “whose entire life is driven by transactional relationships,” he says. Tár never explains herself or opens up to anyone. She’s a firmly closed book.
“It was mind-blowing,” says Blanchett. “Because I didn’t know what it was. That, for me, is the most exciting and dangerous way to start a project. Often when you read something you can admire it, but if you know exactly what it is, then you should hand it over to someone else, because it’s already made in your head. I had no idea how to approach this.”
Blanchett set to work immediately. “She
started working a year before we started working,” says Field. Blanchett shot two other features between saying yes to TÁR and starting production. “She’d wrap a 12-hour day on another film then get to work on this,” says Field. “I’d be on the phone to her at midnight, her time, going through material. She memorised the whole script. Not just the words. Every stage direction, every comma, every period.”
Blanchett never really stops preparing. She has an ipad full of bits of characters; pages of notes, links and clips that make sense only to her but might one day become a fragment of a character’s life. They might not have been assigned to a particular character when she saves them. “You never know where the key to a character lies,” she says. “Sometimes it’s in a conversation, in a piece of music you listen to, or a gesture someone did.” She laughs as she remembers one of the references for TÁR.
“I’ve got [a clip of ] some firefighter from Arkansas,” she says, her face screwed up in confusion at how her own brain works. “He’s being interviewed about some natural disaster. This big, hairy guy. I thought, ‘Why is he there?’” She watched the clip and noticed a brief change in the man’s face. “He said something with great certainty and then he doubted it and did this strange gesture. There was a pullback. I thought it was interesting. Not that I’m going to necessarily replicate the gesture, but I saw an interesting relationship to the information he’d just said.”
That ipad is a place for new characters to gestate, but also a sort of crypt for the ones who never made it. She can’t bring herself to delete them. She recently found a file she’d made for Lady Marchmain in Brideshead Revisited, which she was going to make with Luca Guadagnino. “I thought, ‘I should delete this, because it’s not going to happen now.’ But I was reading it on a train and I thought, ‘These are interesting thoughts. Who knows what they’re going to become?’”
Blanchett isn’t really one for constructing intricate backstory, unless the director wants it. “Guillermo del Toro absolutely loves backstory,” she says of the director she worked with on Nightmare Alley. “He’ll talk about it for hours and hours so that the actors and he are on the same page as soon as they enter the frame.” Sometimes she thinks “it can be lip-service” and it makes more sense to “just walk on set and see what happens”. For TÁR, she and Field spent weeks shooting backstory. The script is far longer than we see in the final cut. They shot much more, but it was never meant to be seen — it was so it would seep into Blanchett’s mind. “I see it as part of the rehearsal,” says Field, who uses this technique on all his films. “We shot a lot of things that are sort of homoeopathically still there [in her performance].”
If that sounds like it might be boring, Field says it can be. He hadn’t much missed making movies. Asked if he enjoys them, he says simply, “Not really.” But he didn’t get bored with Blanchett. “The worst thing is you become uninterested in the thing you’re working on,” he says, “and that’s a real possibility. You must work with people who give the best chance of that not happening. Cate is a tremendous insurance policy against losing interest. She brings this ferocious intelligence. She lays herself right on the fire.”
BROADLY SPEAKING, ACTORS TEND TO mellow in the second half of their career. The ‘disrupt the system’ acting is for the young. TÁR suggests Blanchett is going the opposite way. Her film work has never been especially provocative. Not that she’s safe. She’s been avant-garde — playing Bob Dylan in I’m Not There or 13 different people in Manifesto — but she’s never really trying to confront her audience or cause arguments. That’s less true in her theatre work, which can be… challenging. In 2012 she appeared in Gross Und Klein, a wilfully impenetrable German play The Telegraph called “about as bleak a two-and-three-quarter hours as you’re likely to while away in the theatre”. In 2019’s When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other she pretended to penetrate Stephen Dillane with a strap-on in a sadomasochistic dissection of a marriage. TÁR sees her bringing some of that pokiness to the screen.
The film is laden with complex themes, not least a take on the #Metoo movement, but with the aggressor a woman, Tár, not a man. And there’s a key scene in which Tár eviscerates a student who tells her that “as a BIPOC pangender person” they won’t play Bach because the composer is all the patriarchal things they loathe. She ties them up in their own identity politics until they storm out. It’s the kind of scene you can imagine causing some
furious ‘hot takes’ on social media if anyone chooses to take it at face value. And there may be some discussion about a male director commenting on sexual harassment via a female character. This film could make people angry. That’s fine by Blanchett.
“We’re terribly frightened of anger,” she says, leaning forward. This is the stuff she likes to talk about. “I think anger is a really useful, propulsive, transitional tool. You don’t want to live in it, but to be frightened of it, to shut down discussions because of it, I think is really dangerous. This film is provocative, but provocation is important.”
Blanchett loves to have her own ideas confronted. “To be in agreement all the time, to be in a room where everyone thinks the same way or speaks the same way, I’ll run a mile. I think that’s what’s wrong with democracy at the moment. We’ve lost that robust townhall debate.” She brings it all back neatly to music and conducting. “You can only hear harmony if you’ve heard discord,” she says. “You’ve got to tune the instrument.”
BLANCHETT HAS BEEN TUNING HER INSTRUMENT FOR over 25 years now. In the quarter of a century since her first movie, Paradise Road, she’s racked up 60 film acting credits, not including short films or television. That’s a lot. Tom Cruise only
has 47 and he’s been going 16 years longer. Julia Roberts has 52. Famously prolific Nicole Kidman has 68, with a 14-year head start. Blanchett gasps when we tell her the number. “Terrible!” Well, it definitely isn’t terrible, but it does suggest someone who needs to work. “I do find it hard to say no,” she says. “Some things
I should have said no to.” She never really lets herself stop working and isn’t sure what she’d do if she did. “I need to develop some hobbies,” she says. “But I suppose work is my hobby. Or it’s a compulsion.”
She looks almost apologetic when she says this, like she shouldn’t want to work so much. Reading past interviews in preparation for our meeting, there was a theme that kept coming up, which seems to contradict the idea of a compulsion. There’s a recurring suggestion she doesn’t believe this will last. After filming Elizabeth, her Oscar-nominated breakout, she called her agent to tell her, “I think I’ve ended my career before it’s even begun.” After Carol, another Oscar nomination, she said she thought she had maybe a couple of years of work left. In a chat with Julia Roberts for Interview magazine, she said she might give it all up and garden. Is this self-deprecation, or does she actually think about stopping? And is it just so journalists will stop asking her about acting?
“I reserve the right to walk away,” she says with mockimperiousness. “Everyone has a different relationship with work, but I do need to be seduced back into it.” So it’s not that she has a compulsion to work for the sake of work, but that she keeps getting seduced. And she likes to be the seduced rather than the seducer. She still has a big list of directors she wants to work with — Ari Aster, Jane Campion, Park Chan-wook, Kelly Reichardt — but she hasn’t let them know. “I’m quite shy,” she says. The only one she’s not shy with is Scorsese, who directed her in The Aviator. “Every time I see him I say, ‘Come on. I’m not getting any younger. When are you going to make a film with a fucking woman at the centre?’” She says it so fiercely, you have to assume Scorsese is somewhere writing in a panic right now.
When talking about TÁR’S fixations, there’s something Blanchett says that seems to be more a window into her own thoughts, and suggests she won’t be giving up any time soon. “Lydia is obsessed with the notion of legacy,” she says. “As are most conductors, because their job is so ephemeral. It’s lightning in a bottle. How do you capture that?” She keeps asking herself rhetorical questions until her point suddenly takes a turn. “It’s a little bit like being a creature of the theatre. Once you’ve given your Blanche, your Hedda Gabler, your Electra, your Medea, it’s gone. You can film it, but it doesn’t capture the presence.” Perhaps Blanchett, who always has a revolving cast of characters inside her, can’t stop working because each time she finishes a role, a little bit of her is gone. She wants to keep hold of that presence. When you’re known as probably the greatest actress of your generation, who are you when you stop acting? Are you just someone else’s notes to save on their ipad?
Sometimes the presence won’t leave. Blanchett remembers a night during the filming of TÁR. She was coming home every evening and couldn’t relax. She’d play the piano or sit alone listening to Shostakovich. Lydia stuff. “I was consumed by it,” she says. “I woke up one night and I saw my hand going like this.” She starts miming gentle conducting motions, guiding unheard music for the empty orchestra seats behind her. “Like, ‘What is going on?’”
Cate Blanchett doesn’t want to talk about acting because she’s too busy doing it. She’s so good, she can do it in her sleep.
TÁR IS IN CINEMAS FROM 13 JANUARY 2023