Cate Blanchett Finds the Death of Me Too ‘Very Interesting’

On Sunday afternoon, the Cannes Film Festival hosted a Rendezvous with Cate Blanchett, who is Australian but sometimes seems French. The actress was in town primarily to talk about the Displacement Film Fund, which she co-founded to support displaced filmmakers and is now in its second year. Soon, the conversation turned to her career more generally as we watched clips from Tár and Lord of the Rings, as well as the full voice-over monologue from Carol after Carol leaves Therese alone in the motel — particularly violent emotional content for an innocent Sunday afternoon. “I feel like I’m in the beginning of Tár,” joked moderator Didier Allouch. Clad in a black jumpsuit and pink-rimmed aviators, Blanchett did, in a sort of Tár-like way, ask everyone to put their phones down and “be present” (this did not happen).

The moderator asked her about her time spent as jury president at the 2018 fest — where, in support of the Me Too movement, she held hands with Kristen Stewart, Léa Seydoux, Agnès Varda, and Ava DuVernay as they walked up the steps of the Palais — and referred to it as the “time of Me Too.” Blanchett interrupted, “Isn’t that sad? We’re talking about ‘the time of Me Too.’ It got killed very quickly, which I think is very interesting. All that it was trying to say was that there are a lot of people with platforms who are able to speak up with relative safety and say, ‘This has happened to me.’ And the so-called average woman on the street is saying, ‘Me too.’ Why does that get shut down?” 

She went on, “What it revealed is a systemic layer of abuse. Not only in this industry, but in all industries. And if you don’t identify a problem, you can’t solve it. I’m still on film sets and I do the head count every day, and it is still ten women and 75 men. Every morning. And I love men! But what happens is the jokes become the same. You just have to brace yourself slightly. I’m used to that. But it gets a bit boring for everybody when you walk into a homogenous workplace. And I think it has an effect on the work.” 

Allouch asked if things had “really changed” since then. “There was a notion of an inclusion rider, which those of us with a platform could put into our contracts,” she said. “But very quickly people said, ‘Oh, we have our own version.’ And then there was a green rider, for making the work in a way that was sustainable. But very quickly the studios were saying, ‘No, we have our own green rider.’ I’ve had experiences where people are like, ‘Here she comes, put out the recycling so it seems like we’re doing something.’ I was like, ‘Guys …’” 

Carol came up more than once. “When we did Carol, nobody wanted to fund that picture,” she recalled. “You didn’t have to be gay to go and see it; it touched a lot of people. But at that time, it was a risky proposition. And I do think there are many more narratives now, many in mainstream festivals, that have nonheterosexual relationships at the core. I do think it’s changed.” Later, a woman stood up and asked her what she was thinking about during the final scene of Carol, when she spots Rooney Mara’s Therese coming toward her across a room.

“I’m about to do a mash-up of Bergman’s Persona and Electra with Nina Hoss at the National Theatre in London,” began Blanchett, in one of the gayer sentences ever to be spoken, “so I’ve been watching a lot of Bergman films again.” She told a story about how Bergman refused to answer such questions because it was “irrelevant” what he was thinking, that “once you’ve done it, you don’t own it anymore.” But then she relented. “I can tell you technically that because of the nature of the shot, Rooney couldn’t look at me, and I couldn’t look at her. So in a way, we were both looking at projections and memories of each other rather than eye to eye … I just had to sense when to turn, and I also had to be engaged in this conversation [onscreen] but not engaged.” She acknowledged the answer might be “unsatisfying.”

Blanchett went on to talk about several projects and directors she’d worked with in the past, beginning with Todd Haynes and I’m Not There. “All of the prep I did didn’t make any sense until I put my eyebrows and costume on and stepped onto his set,” she said. Things finally clicked for her when a friend suggested, “‘You have to put a sock down your pants.’ It would give me a different sort of package. So that was very helpful.”

She recalled the “tough love” she got from Alejandro Iñárritu on the 2006 set of Babel. “The experience of the film was incredibly chaotic,” she admitted. “My son had an accident in Morocco, so I was quite traumatized anyway. So maybe that was art imitating life. I remember the first day we shot, Brad Pitt and I shot a scene, and we did a couple of takes, and Iñárritu came up and said, ‘This is shit. What is this shit?’ He said, ‘There’s nothing here. This scene has to work or the movie doesn’t work,’ and walked off.” Blanchett laughed. “But that knocks you off your center. It’s a form of direction. Some would say, ‘That’s incredibly disrespectful,’ or ‘That’s upsetting to me.’ But sometimes a director can lead with love, but incredibly tough love.” Asked about a particular look she gives in the final scene, Blanchett wondered if “maybe that look was also just me frightened that Iñárritu was gonna come in and say, ‘It’s shit’ to me again.”

The moderator asked her if people come up to her to inquire about the point of Tár. “If you see the film once you could think, that’s about cancel culture,” she said. “But it’s not. I always thought it was a meditation on power…It’s an anagram for art. So for me, it was really about the brutality of the creative process. Someone who is profoundly brutal to themselves as an artist and then the way that often gets externalized.” She paused, then told a long “French fable” that she’d once heard from Guillermo del Toro, centering around a body’s organs arguing with one another about which is the most important. “The asshole pipes up and says, ‘Try doing it without me for a week, and see where the rest of you end up. So the asshole shut down and the body didn’t survive. In a way, we need that asshole to rebel against. The audience stared at her a bit blankly, and she laughed. “You see what it’s like to live in my mind?” she asked.

An audience member asked her about AI, and she mentioned RSL Media, a nonprofit she co-founded that focuses on creating standards around getting consent from artists. “But there is now an inevitability with AI, and it’s a very powerful tool,” she said. “I don’t use it every day. I prefer to read a book or go for a walk.”