BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. -- Minutes into her press conference, Cate Blanchett is asked the inevitable question. Can she talk about her role in the new Indiana Jones adventure?
This query prompts one of those disarming Cate Blanchett grins -- and the inevitable answer. "I can't," she giggles. "I'll be shot!
" She looks out at the assembled journalists. "And so will you!" she adds mockingly.
"Don't joke. There are FBI people on the set." On the other hand, she feels free to discuss her portrayal of -- would you believe?
-- Bob Dylan in I'm Not There . That portrayal earned her a best actress award from the Venice Film Festival. "Look, I think I run a hundred miles an hour from projects every single time, and in the end, the ones that stick are the ones that sort of pursue you and you can't say no to.
And the idea of playing Bob Dylan was just so utterly ludicrous that of course I had to say yes. And it was very daunting." At one point, she was also ready to run away from Elizabeth: The Golden Age which opens Oct.
12. Blanchett has a fear of repeating herself, and here she would be recreating someone she had portrayed nearly a decade ago in Elizabeth. "Yeah, I was a bit nervous about returning to a character that had allowed me to walk through a door to an international film career.
You don't ever want to feel that you are going backwards. So once I perceived that I could actually progress forward through playing it, then it became exciting." Mind you, Blanchett needed a nudge from fellow Australian Geoffrey Rush before making up her mind.
Rush, who returns as Elizabeth's crafty spymaster, Walsingham, in the new film, was instrumental in engineering a meeting three years ago between himself, Blanchett and director Shekhar Kapur. "Shekhar, Cate and I had a fleeting opportunity . .
. when we all happened to be in L.A.
for the one evening," Rush recalls. "And -- through all the various co-ordinators and publicists and minders -- we said. 'let's set aside a couple of hours and really talk this idea through.
'" Rush had first worked with Blanchett on stage in the early 1990s. "She's a very exploratory, very risk-taking and very unpredictable chooser of roles, and maybe she felt that reinventing the same character was not going to be as great a challenge as she would like," said Rush. "I knew her very much as a colleague and a friend.
I just leant on her and said: 'You know, even in the theatrical repertoire, the roles become less as you get older. In terms of film, it's probably going to be even less opportune, and a great multi-dimensional character like this needs an actress of your calibre.'" Rush also wanted the thrill of working with Blanchett again.
"I wanted to be there on the sidelines, watching her rev up those Rolls Royce engines," he says. Once Blanchett read the new screenplay by William Nicholson and Michael Hirst, she became satisfied that Elizabeth: The Golden Age would not tread the same ground. "The very structure of the narrative was quite different," she suggests.
Furthermore, she was glad that the film would offer a deeper look at the complexities of court and political life in Tudor England. "I was excited by the fact that that this film was at once an echo in that you've got the same creative team and a few of the same characters, but it was also its own creature. It's a much more internal film, I think, because of the epic backdrop.
" In the film, Elizabeth is threatened by the advancing forces of Spain's Armada and the plottings of her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots (Samantha Morton) -- but also emotionally as a woman whose love for Sir Walter Raleigh (Clive Owen) is held in check only by her greater duties as queen. Blanchett sees The Golden age as an "unabashedly romantic film" because of the unusual "love triangle" that surfaces between herself, Owen and Abbie Cornish as her most treasured lady-in-waiting. As for the movie's historical inaccuracies, she holds the view that good drama must always take licence with the facts.
"When you have a couple of hours to tell an incredibly dense period of history by the process of selection, you're automatically telescoping the events and you're automatically saying: 'This event has more significance than the one that's being omitted.' So it's never going to be like reading the letters and the court documents or reading Alison Weir's biography. It's not the same experience -- but, then, going to see a film shouldn't be.
You are being told a fable." Blanchett sees Elizabeth as a woman forced to experience much of life vicariously. "There were a lot of male courtiers that Elizabeth had strong connections with over the years.
And I think she was probably fascinated by the freedom that was accorded not only an adventurer like Raleigh but also the men in the court who could travel more freely than she could. I mean -- she never left the shores of England!" Blanchett is candid enough to wonder whether her Elizabeth goes far enough in showing signs of emotional instability -- even possible madness -- under pressure.
"I thought at the time I was playing her she would have been quite menopausal -- that she was going through 'the change' . . .
" Blanchett, 38, also kept pleading with director Kapur to show a few more wrinkles in this forty-something woman. "But, you know, Shekhar likes women to look beautiful," she laughs. "I think the whole complexity of what I was trying to do maybe wasn't in the film.
" Blanchett will be a less visible presence on the screen for the next while. That's because she and her theatrical husband, Andrew Upton, officially take over as co-artistic directors of the Sydney Theatre Company in January. The appointment means that she will be concentrating on her first love, the stage.
Meanwhile, there are two other films still to be released --one of them the top-secret Indiana Jones saga in which she costars with Harrison Ford for director Steven Spielberg. In the case of Indy's new adventure, she unbends sufficiently to report that she's part of "a well-oiled iconic franchise" and that for her the experience has been "fantastic and so much fun." More importantly, her two sons, who were on the set with her, "had a ball.
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