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Cate Blanchett Press Conference
One of the interesting things about Elizabeth is the subtle changes in
your face that convey her moods.
(Laughing) “You can say ‘age’.”
What do you do to distinguish each little look?
“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 warpaint, you don't want that mask to be opaque. It has to be transparent. So hopefully there was a transparency to it.”
Is this a fictionalized history, historical fantasy, or the exploration of
a legend? How do you see it?
“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. 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.”
Elizabeth and Raleigh [played by Clive Owen] have romantic chemistry, but their timing seems to be off.
“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. 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.
I think that there was a lot of male courtiers that Elizabeth over the years had strong connections with. 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.”
You have great chemistry with Clive Owen.
“I think every woman who works with Clive has incredible romantic
chemistry (laughing).”
Is he really a professional charmer in real life?
“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, but seemingly as unaware as he is of it.”
As an actress, what do you have that makes you believable?
“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 can convey different ways to me about
very different sets of experiences.”
Do you think women in power today have an easier time finding happiness in
a relationship?
“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. I think Elizabeth's situation was entirely different.”
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. (Laughing) So everything's up for grabs in these films.”
Page 3: Analyzing Queen Elizabeth I and Her Role in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
