Cate Blanchett Interview, Elizabeth The Golden Age

Posted by: Sheila Roberts

MoviesOnline sat down with Cate Blanchett at the Los Angeles press day for her new movie, "Elizabeth: The Golden Age,” directed by Shekhar Kapur from an original screenplay by William Nicholson ("Gladiator”) and Michael Hirst ("Elizabeth”). The film tells the thrilling tale of an era: the story of one woman’s crusade to control love, crush enemies and secure her position as a beloved icon of the Western world.

Reprising the roles they originated in seven-time Academy Award-nominated "Elizabeth,” Cate Blanchett and Geoffrey Rush return for a gripping historical thriller laced with treachery and romance. Joining them in the epic is Clive Owen as Sir Walter Raleigh, a dashing seafarer and newfound temptation for Elizabeth.

In "Elizabeth,” the story focused on the early and somewhat uncertain years of the fledgling ruler’s reign. The young queen faced an uphill struggle to hold on to her throne, outfoxing conspirators and deceivers at every turn. Never certain which of her court and advisers could be trusted, the headstrong and savvy Elizabeth emerged at the end of the film as a Queen, firmly in charge of her destiny.

"Elizabeth: The Golden Age” commences a decade after the period covered in "Elizabeth” and examines the glorious middle years of her rule when Queen Elizabeth I (Blanchett) faces bloodlust for her throne and familial betrayal. Growing keenly aware of the changing religious and political tides of late 16th century Europe, Elizabeth finds her rule openly challenged by the Spanish King Philip II (Jordi Molla)--with his powerful army and sea-dominating armada--determined to restore England to Catholicism.

Preparing to go to war to defend her empire, Elizabeth struggles to balance ancient royal duties with an unexpected vulnerability in her love for Raleigh (Owen). But he remains forbidden for a queen who has sworn body and soul to her country. Unable and unwilling to pursue her love, Elizabeth encourages her favorite lady-in-waiting, Bess (Abbie Cornish), to befriend Raleigh to keep him near. But this strategy forces Elizabeth to observe their growing intimacy.

As she charts her course abroad, her trusted advisor, Sir Francis Walsingham (Rush), continues his masterful puppetry of Elizabeth's court at home--and her campaign to solidify absolute power. Through an intricate spy network, Walsingham uncovers an assassination plot that could topple the throne. But as he unmasks traitors that may include Elizabeth's own cousin Mary Stuart (Samantha Morton), he unknowingly sets England up for destruction.

Cate Blanchett delivers another luminous performance in "Elizabeth: The Golden Age.”. Says Kapur, "Cate has a remarkable combination of talent, control, understanding, intellect and emotion. These qualities – along with incredible discipline – allow her to seamlessly shift between different sides of the character she plays.”

Here’s what the critically acclaimed and award winning actress had to tell us about her new film:

MoviesOnline: What changed your mind about doing this movie?

CATE: I think what convinced me was time, really. Shekhar, the minute we finished the first one, was talking about not only my playing Elizabeth again, but hundreds of other ideas. And we've remained friends and have talked about various projects, and Tim Bevan from Working Title just said, "Look, let us just work a script up, and if it doesn't work, it doesn't work." And I found that the notion of the love triangle, the very structure of the narrative, was quite different. Because I had always said that if they did another one, that Elizabeth shouldn't be the central character, and because the structure of the romance, because it's an unabashedly romantic film, I think was quite different, and so it didn't feel like treading the same ground. So yeah, time, I think, in the end. And also, then, knowing Geoffrey and Clive were onboard, and that Remi was going to shoot it, and working with Alexandra Byrne who did the costumes again, who is a dear friend, and a genius, I think.

MoviesOnline: How do you juggle your various commitments to family and the theatre company with your acting career?

CATE: Well, the commitment to the Sydney Theatre Company...We officially take over as co-artistic directors, my husband Andrew Upton and I, on the first of January. I mean, things have begun. Andrew's been there all year as an artistic associate, and I've been coming and going. Obviously it takes a long time to get...There's some deep time projects which we've begun to set up already. We caretake Robyn Nevin's season next year. So officially, we don't actually start until January the 1st.

MoviesOnline: Congratulations on the win in Venice for Best Actress for I'm Not There.

CATE: It was cool, wasn't it? [laughs] I was very surprised and pleased.

MoviesOnline: What made this role irresistible to you? It seems daunting to play someone like Elizabeth.

CATE: There's a long and glorious legacy of actresses who have played Elizabeth I, from Flora Robson and Bette Davis and Glenda Jackson, Helen Mirren, Anne-Marie Duff. I mean, she's constantly reinvented. One of my favorite plays is a Schiller play, Mary Stuart, about a fictitious meeting between Mary, Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I. She's ripe for reinvention because she's such an enigma. And also, if you think about the Elizabethan age, when the English culture as we know it was crystalized, it's a fascinating period of history. So I think there'll be many more Elizabeths long after this film, because I think she's a fantastic--particularly for a director like Shekhar--point on which to leap off for a story.

MoviesOnline: What about tackling something iconic like Bob Dylan?

CATE: Well, I mean, Elizabeth I is iconic as well. Look, I think I run a hundred miles an hour away 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. [laughs] And it was very daunting. And yeah, I was a bit nervous about returning to a character, I suppose, that had allowed me to walk into a door to an international film career. You don't ever want to feel like you're going backwards. So once I perceived that I could actually progress forwards through playing it, then it became exciting to me.

MoviesOnline: What was it like on your first day of returning to the character of Elizabeth?

CATE: It was quite organic. Obviously I started when Morag Ross, who did the hair and make-up, and Alex Byrne...We had long, long discussions about where to start. And obviously, in the end, no matter how much research you do, you're telling the particular story that the script and the director prescribe. And I think the great thing about Shekhar and I working together is that I'm fascinated by history, and he's utterly disinterested. [laughs] So I think we temper one another really well. You know, we did a lot of research, but in the end, you have to say she's starting off at a point where we kind of left her in the last film, except she was at a point of utter rigidity in the end of the last film.

And so how does one exist within that rigid place? So we had to sort of open that up a little bit. But it felt strange. It was like there was an echo in the room, but yet it felt very fresh. And Shekhar and I and Abbie, because I don't think she had seen the first one, we watched it just before we started to film, and I was incredibly uncomfortable with the notion of...You know, I was thinking, "Oh God, it's ten years later. Have I aged that much?" Being an actress on a film is a bit like you're aging in dog years. [laughs] It's quite confronting. But I was surprised at how well it stood up. And I thought, "Well that's that. It is its own thing." And I was excited by the fact that this film was at once an echo in that you've got the same sort of creative team, a few of the same characters, but it was its own creature. It's a much more internal film, I think, an interior film, despite the kind of epic backdrop. So it was a bit like a homecoming. But I think I was uncomfortable in a healthy, useful way.

MoviesOnline: One of the interesting things about your performance as Elizabeth is the subtle changes in your face that convey her different moods...

CATE: You can say "age." [laughs]

MoviesOnline: What do you do to distinguish each little look she gives that let’s us in on what’s going on?

CATE: I think it's tricky but vital, as an actor working in film, that you have a sense of the third eye, in that you can be aware of what you're projecting, but not in a self-conscious way. So I think if you're internally engaged with the set of feelings and emotions, and also the actions that you're trying to play on the other actor, because it always has to be active, then that will externally take care of itself. I mean, I hope I wasn't mugging too much. But yeah, I didn't think about that on the day very much. I mean, you think about, obviously, when you're getting into hair and make-up, like you were suggesting before, it is a form of masking up. But even when you're in your Elizabethan war paint, you don't want that mask to be opaque. It has to be transparent. So hopefully there was a transparency to it.

MoviesOnline: This film takes license with the facts as Schiller did with Mary Stuart.

CATE: That's what good drama does.

MoviesOnline: Is this a fictionalized history, historical fantasy, or the exploration of a legend? How do you perceive it?

CATE: I think it's all three. In the end, when you only have, I don't know quite how many minutes and seconds the film is, but 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 to the one that's been omitted." So it's never going to be like reading the letters and the court documents, or reading Alison Weir's biography of Elizabeth. It's not the same experience. But then, going to see a film shouldn't be. You are being told a fable, and a fable through the eyes of that director. And it's very temporal too, filming. So hopefully the film has a contemporary quality. I think like all good stories, that they're able to sort of connect to the current collective unconscious, what we're all thinking about, and what it means to be female now as much as what it means to be female then.

MoviesOnline: Elizabeth and Raleigh have a critical romantic chemistry, but their timing seems to be off.

CATE: Oh, but timing's everything, isn't it? What interested me about the relationship between Raleigh and Elizabeth in this particular incarnation, the set of events, was that there was a vicariousness to it. And I think that happens in a lot of circle of love relationships where you almost want to be the person as much as you want to possess the person. And I think that there was a lot of male courtiers that Elizabeth over the years had strong connections with. And I think she was probably fascinated by the freedom that was afforded not only an adventurer like Raleigh, but also the men in the court who could travel a lot more freely than she could. I mean, she never left the shores of England.

MoviesOnline: You have great chemistry with Clive.

CATE: I think every woman who works with Clive has incredible romantic chemistry. [laughs]

MoviesOnline: Is he really a professional charmer in real life?

CATE: No. I mean, he's very frank and open and not at all self-conscious. And I think that that's incredibly attractive when somebody is as attractive as he is, but seemingly as unaware as he is of it.

MoviesOnline: As an actress, what do you have that makes you so believable to an audience?

CATE: Oh, God, I am utterly the wrong person to answer that question. I have no idea. I have no idea. Hopefully, a rich set of life experiences that I'm able to draw on. But at the same time, I'm not at all interested in playing myself or imposing my own value system onto a character. It's like having conversations continually with like-minded people. You get a very skewed perception of the way the world works. So I like having conversations with characters who think in very different ways to me about very different sets of experiences.

MoviesOnline: Is being an international movie star the way you are the equivalent of being a queen in the 16th century?

CATE: No. Anyone who says that is insane. [laughs]

MoviesOnline: Do you think women in power today have an easier time finding happiness in a relationship?

CATE: I was reading Joan Didion's book The Year of Magical Thinking again the other day, and she referred to various psychologists who were analyzing the notion of grief and the grieving process, and saying that somewhere along the way, in the last century, there became this notion that we all need to be happy. And so nobody fully grieves any more because we can't be seen to be unhappy. So the notion of happiness, I think, for someone in Elizabeth's position is sort of a strange one. I think it's a very modern concept that happiness is something that we not only have to strive for, but can achieve in this lifetime. And I think Elizabeth's situation was entirely different.

And in relation to what you're saying about finding a companion, I mean, the reasons for getting married were then deeply unromantic. It was to do with securing a nation, and it was a political tool. Women were used as part of the political negotiation process between countries. And the fact that Elizabeth claimed that political mechanism for herself and was able to use it herself meant that the prospect of finding love for her was very elusive. I mean, I think the history books say -- you know, the history books were written by courtiers at the time -- that the closest she came was the Duke of Anjou. But in Shekhar's first film, the Duke of Anjou was a raving transvestite. [laughs] So everything's up for grabs in these films.

MoviesOnline: How much did you play with the idea that Elizabeth suffered from madness?

CATE: It's interesting, yeah. I don't think I thought about it a lot. I did it in about three or four scenes, one of which was cut because it was talking about Mary Stuart, and I think they decided there was a bit too much discussion about Mary Stuart, so they cut it out. But I tried to see through, and of course it's not in it all, her self-medicating with herbs and being physically unstable. Because I thought at the time that I'm playing her, she would have been quite menopausal. That she was going through "the change."

MoviesOnline: She was in her 40s?

CATE: I think at the time, I keep telling Remi, who shot it, to take off the 12 denier stockings that he was shooting me through to show a few more wrinkles. [laughs] But, you know, Shekhar likes women to look beautiful. So yeah, in terms of that madness, it was what was not only going on for her psychologically, but what was going on for her physically. So I think that's great that you got a little texture of that, but I think the whole complexity of what I was trying to do maybe wasn't in the film.

MoviesOnline: Do you think if it wasn't for Elizabeth, England would be speaking Spanish today?

CATE: Quite possibly. But it's a really interesting thing to look at history, the history of failure. If we analyzed history...The failures that took place rather than the victories have influenced us incredibly, the way we've ended up where we are today. But absolutely, it would have been a very different place.

MoviesOnline: Was there ever talk of a fictional scene between you and Samantha Morton? I would have loved to have seen it.

CATE: I would have loved to. I think Samantha Morton's incredible. She's such a dangerous, exciting, unusual, unpredictable presence on screen. I so admire her work. But maybe if anyone's going to ever do the Schiller, I'd be there with her, absolutely.

MoviesOnline: Can you talk about your role in Indiana Jones 4?

CATE: I can't. I'll be shot. And so will you. [laughs] Don't joke, there's FBI people on the set. [laughs]

MoviesOnline: What’s it like being part of such an iconic franchise like that?

CATE: It's such a well-oiled, as you say, iconic franchise, and one in which I grew up with. And on the first day of shooting, it was extremely surreal. I was watching the monitor as Steven set up the frame, and I knew the iconography of the frame. I knew the trucks, I knew the layout, I knew the way these things were lit, but yet when I was meant to enter the frame, it was a real Zelig moment. So it's been fantastic, and so much fun. And my boys have had an absolute ball. I've got a couple more weeks.

MoviesOnline: Are they sworn to secrecy too?

CATE: Yeah. Absolutely.

"Elizabeth: The Golden Age” opens in theaters on October 12^th.