Highlights from the one-hour onstage conversation with the australian actress
The two-time Oscar winner Cate Blanchett took center stage yesterday at the Rome Film Festival: in the morning the actress presented Eli Roth’s The House with the Clock in its Walls, which premiered in the evening.
The family fantasy film is the story of a young orphan living with his warlock-uncle, and a good witch (played by Jack Black and Cate Blanchett) who have to face the consequences of living in a magical house.
At 5:30 pm the australian actress participated in a Close Encounter, an on-stage coversation about her career with the Artistic Director Antonio Monda. Blanchett commented some of her most iconic performances as Monda showed the audience, in a sold out Sala Sinopoli, some scenes from her films.
The australian actress, 49, started joking about her fictional relationship with actor Brad Pitt in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008): «It was so hard to feel those feelings for this guy. I mean, he’s so desperately ugly.»
When watching a sequence from Todd Haynes’ Carol (2015), based on Patricia Highsmith’s book about a love story between two women, she said: «I’ve never been asked more questions about my sexuality than when I played that role.» She told the audience that, during the press junket, many journalists seemed to suggest with their questions that, for heterosexual actors, it was essential to have a lesbian experience to understand such a character. «I’m not interested in the gender of my characters, I like to explore their perspectives. I will fight to death to suspend disbelief and play roles beyond my experience» she continued. «I think that reaility television had an extraordinary impact on the way we view the creation of a character, but the downside of it is that now, particularly in America, we expect people to make a profound connection to a character only when it’s close to their experience.»
Blachett also confessed her passion for theater and explained her approach to both the stage and the big screen: «They are really different experiences, for the actors and the audience: in theater you’re deeply aware of the presence of the audience, the relationship is more “physical” and the performance is never the same of the night before. Cinema gave me the awareness of the wide shot and of the close-up in particular which creates a direct contact with the audience, even if in a very different way.»
The Close Encounter also included scenes from Barry Levinson’s Bandits (2001), Richard Eyre’s Notes on a Scandal (2006), Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There (2007) and the two films that led Blanchett to the Oscars: Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine (2013) and Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator (2004).
Commenting The Aviator she said: «When my agent told me that Scorsese wanted to talk to me, I had to sit down because I was shaking. If you ask me something about the conversation I had with Martin, I can’t recall anything. I only know I said “yes”. When I finally realized that I had to play Katharine Hepburn, I was terrified.»
Monda finally showed a sequence from Cate Blanchett’s all time favorite film, which happens to be 1977’s Opening Night by John Cassavetes: «If you’ve never seen this film, I urge you to do that!» she said. «Gena Rowlands’ performance is incredible: she explored the unconscious space which separates the character from the actor, the role from the person, the perception of the person from the perception you have of the character as a human being. Opening Night is the staging of the shattered identinty of a woman who is also an actress. To me this film has always been a source of inspiration. »
