She has worked with the most famous directors, from David Fincher (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) to Todd Haynes (Carol) to Martin Scorsese (Aviator) and Peter Jackson (The Lord of the Rings). But this year at the 76th Cannes Film Festival, it is the film of a compatriot, the Australian Warwick Thornton (awarded the Caméra d'or in 2009 for Samson and Delilah), The New Boy, that Cate Blanchett came to defend. Selected in the Un Certain Regard category, it tells the story of an Aboriginal child, torn from the bush to be taken in, along with other orphans, in a monastery. A place where everything is about survival, material and spiritual, led by a rebellious nun embodied by the actress. The latter is also the producer of the film, and it is accompanied by executive producer Coco Francini that she participated in Kering's Women In Motion talk on May 20. To address this double hat that is close to her heart, but also the question of the place of women in the film industry.
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In video, Cate Blanchett, guest of the Women In Motion talk in Cannes
Dialogues
"Producing is a natural extension of my work as an actress": it was through Dirty Films, the company launched with her husband Andrew Upton in 2005, that Cate Blanchett added another string to the already extended bow of her talents. In order to pursue in depth what motivates the choice of films in which she is involved: to establish a dialogue with the filmmakers, and to carry the multiple aspects of the vision they intend to defend. "For me, the choice of a film is not limited to a role but to all the stages that accompany its development, from filming to distribution and marketing," explained the Australian.
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An approach that today gives her a global perspective on a rapidly changing industry, whose success should not, according to her, be limited to blockbusters and other franchises led by the superheroes who reign over Hollywood: "For me, Hollywood is something very abstract. What is Hollywood, a slogan on a T-shirt? There are Hollywood everywhere, in Australia, in France. You have to decenter the gaze, think on different scales. In the same way, when we say that a film has not made many admissions, we must also look at how many theaters it has been distributed. We have to be attentive to these figures, do the math."
Women's teams
With Coco Francini, Quentin Tarantino's collaborator, they worked on the mini-series Mrs America (2020), in which Cate Blanchett played Phyllis Schlafly, an American conservative activist committed against the movement for equal civil rights in the 1970s. A work for which they had striven to favor a largely female team: "We gave ourselves a rule: for each recruitment, we had to do interviews with a person of color, and a woman," recalls Coco Francini. "Pushing the teams in that direction has brought us a lot of very skilled people, who they had never met before." "We said to ourselves, 'let's do our best, let's try to recruit women', imagining that it was going to be complex, that we were going to have to juggle with the multiple commitments of each other," adds Cate Blanchett. "But we realized how easy it was, and how lazy the industry is, to its detriment. If there is a lot of homogeneity in this environment, it is because those behind the cameras are precisely too homogeneous."
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A uniformity that Cate Blanchett and Coco Francini have frequently observed on set: "We both had the experience, on a set, of counting the number of men and women. We felt alienated and sometimes annoyed. Because for my part, not only was I the only woman in a cast. But in the team, for example, there were 62 men and I was the only woman, "says the actress. With the weariness that such situations can generate: "When on a set, men are in the majority, we always hear the same jokes, says Cate Blanchett. And we may have a sense of humor, but it's sometimes tiring. The star of Tàr nevertheless notes that things are changing: "There is a lot more happening than since I started as an actress in the cinema. At the time there was a feeling - and to be honest, it came mostly from the media - that women were competing, not collaborating. But we are, of course, collaborators. I've noticed that women support each other a lot."
In praise of slowness
If Cate Blanchett is thriving as a producer, she feels that she is not yet ready to go behind the camera: "I am often asked to direct. But I'm happy to play, to produce. And I'm slow: it would take me a long time to make a film. I also have four children to take care of, and a garden." A place in which she strives to tame one of the virtues she lacks: "It's a cliché but patience can be learned. And you learn a lot from gardening." While cultivating an extreme diversity.
