Actors on Actors; TĂR Conversations & Nominations
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Actors on Actors; TĂR Conversations & Nominations
Good day, Cate Blanchett fans!
Cate Blanchett, with Deborah Mailman, made an appearance at this yearâs Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts (AACTA) Awards via video. They were on set of Warwick Thorntonâs The New Boy which wrapped this week in South Australia.
We have added a section on the site where you can see the list of the awards and nominations Cate received for her performance in TĂR â left sidebar of the site (if on desktop) or scroll down if you are using mobile.
Variety released the Actors on Actors conversation with Cate Blanchett and Michelle Yeoh. Various conversations with the cast and crew of TĂR are now available to watch. There is also a new interview from Screen International and we updated the gallery with some stills from the movie and FYC posters.
this was the message from cate & deb that was played at the aactaâs last night ? pic.twitter.com/RMbptFB7JG
â zee (@cursedsapphics) December 8, 2022
Award-winning First Nations filmmaker Warwick Thorntonâs spiritual drama The New Boy wrapped this week in regional South Australia, with major production funding from Screen Australiaâs First Nations Department alongside Fremantle and Gretel Packerâs Longbridge Nominees, who join producers Kath Shelper for Scarlett Pictures; and Cate Blanchett, Andrew Upton, Georgie Pym and Coco Francini for Dirty Films.
Newcomer Aswan Reid has been cast in the titular role, alongside Blanchett, Deborah Mailman and Wayne Blair. An ensemble of new faces, including Shane Brady, Tyrique Brady, Laiken Woolmington, Kailem Miller, Kyle Miller, Tyzailin Roderick and Tyler Spencer, round out the cast.
Set in 1940s Australia, The New Boy is the story of a nine-year-old Aboriginal orphan boy (Reid) who arrives in the dead of night at a remote monastery, run by a renegade nun (Blanchett), where his presence disturbs the delicately balanced world in this story of spiritual struggle and the cost of survival.
Screen Australiaâs First Nations Department provides major production investment in association with Screen NSW and the South Australian Film Corporation. Roadshow Films is handling distribution in Australia and New Zealand. The First Nations Department first backed the project in development over a number of years.
The film is produced by Shelper for Scarlett Pictures, Blanchett, Upton and co-producer Pym for Dirty Films, and Lorenzo De Maio (of De Maio Entertainment), with Francini serving as executive producer for Dirty Films alongside Packer for Longbridge Nominees.
Conversations and Nominations for TĂR
The Franz Liszt Academy of Music shared some photos of Cate when she visited the academy. If you will remember Cate was in Budapest during the second quarter of 2021 for filming of Borderlands that is yet to have a release date. While on break from filming, she was preparing for her role as Lydia TĂĄr. Emese VirĂĄg, who is a teacher at Liszt Academy, was Cateâs piano coach.
Emese VirĂĄg and Cate Blanchett at Liszt Academy
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A post shared by Liszt Academy Budapest (@zeneakademiaofficial)
The 2022 Atlanta Film Critics Circle Awards
Best Lead Actress:
Cate Blanchett â TĂR#AFCC #AFCC2022Awards #TĂR @tarmovie @focusfeatures pic.twitter.com/lH2e4LuoSC
â Atlanta Film Critics Circle (@ATLFilmCritics) December 5, 2022
4th DiscussingFilm Critic Awards
Taylor Russell, Bones and All
Michelle Yeoh, Everything Everywhere All at Once
Cate Blanchett, TĂĄr
Danielle Deadwyler, Till
Mia Goth, Pearl
See the full nominees list: https://t.co/izJK6UYPgb pic.twitter.com/4WDt0e69In
â DiscussingFilm (@DiscussingFilm) December 7, 2022
2022 #SatelliteAwards Nominations
ACTRESS IN A MOTION PICTURE DRAMA
âą Jessica Chastain â The Good Nurse
âą Cate Blanchett â TĂĄr
âą Michelle Williams â The Fabelmans
âą Danielle Deadwyler â Till
âą Vicky Krieps â Corsage
âą Viola Davis â The Woman King pic.twitter.com/zjQjOKdZQF
â Satellite Awardsâą (@SatelliteAwards) December 8, 2022
Click the image to watch the conversation with Nina Hoss, Sophie Kauer, Todd Field, and Cate Blanchett moderated by Adam Gopnik in New York (October 2nd 2022).
Click the image to watch the conversation after a BAFTA screening in New York (October 5th 2022).
Click the image to watch the conversation after a SAG screening in Los Angeles (October 7th 2022).
Variety: Actors on Actors â December 7th 2022
Variety: Actors on Actors Photoshoot
Variety: Actors on Actors behind the scenes
Cate Blanchett recalls the moment after she said yes to âTĂRâ
Cate Blanchett was in Budapest, filming video-game adaptation Borderlands for Eli Roth, when her agent called to say Todd Field had written a script especially for her. âWe had met maybe 10 years ago, on a project he was doing with Joan Didion, and for one reason or another it didnât happen,â recalls Blanchett of Field. âBut he doesnât leave the house very often to write and direct. Itâs a rare thing. So my agent said, âI think you should read it quickly.â She doesnât say that very often. Sheâs only said it once or twice. I read it immediately and I couldnât put it down.â
TĂR, Fieldâs first film as writer/director since 2006âs Little Children, tells the story of Lydia TĂĄr, a pre-Âeminent concert conductor and EGOT winner, who is preparing to record Gustav Mahlerâs âSymphony No. 5â with her Berlin orchestra. But as spectres from the past return to haunt her, the highly strung and volatile Lydiaâs personal and professional lives unravel, resulting in a devastating fall from grace.
âI was bamboozled by it,â says Blanchett of Fieldâs script, which touches on issues of #MeToo, cancel culture and the corruptive nature of power. âYou open the page and here comes an eight-page monologue about a whole lot of things I only vaguely understand, with terminology I had never heard, and I realised it made existential and rhythmic sense to me before it made intellectual sense. It haunted me. I said yes straight away. Then I got the knee sweats and realised just how much work I had to do.â
She jumped right in, learning piano, how to conduct and wield a baton. âBecause of lockdown, a lot of musicians were unable to perform, which was an incredible gift for me, selfishly,â she says. âDuring the day, I was kicking and punching and flying through interstellar space. In the evening, I was having piano lessons and Zooming my friend [conductor] Natalie Murray Beale to dissect Mahlerâs âFifthâ and work out which pieces we should conduct in the rehearsals. It was an incredibly schizophrenic but exciting way to prepare.â
Blanchett trawled through online rehearsal videos and masterclasses. âThank God for the internet and YouTube. I started with the masterclasses of [Russian music teacher and conductor] Ilya Musin, because the first person I met was the conductor of the Scottish National Opera and he trained with Musin. He said to me, âItâs all about breath.â In that way, itâs not so dissimilar from acting. The backstory of the character is she was a child of deaf parents, so I thought about sign language influencing her style. There were so many things brought to bear beyond simply learning that the right hand does the beating and the left hand does the expression. Anytime she was conducting, I wanted it to be as dynamic as possible and to advance the drama. Conducting is all about communication.â
It was Blanchettâs idea that Lydia speaks German to her musicians, despite at the time having only a school-level knowledge of the language. âTodd had said early on that he wanted to be a fly on the wall, he wanted to feel you were bearing witness to these rehearsals, to these peopleâs lives, so I said to him, âIâm making a rod for my own back, but she has to conduct the rehearsals in German. Thereâs no way she wouldnât â it would be disrespectful. A friend put me in touch with Franziska Roth, who teaches opera singers to sing Wagner. She understood the language, the musical language, and was an enormous help.â
Lydia is an indelible creation: abrasive, petty, acerbic, deeply flawed, selfish, totally lacking in self-Âawareness, monstrous. Blanchettâs committed performance saw her scoop the Volpi Cup for best actress at Venice, where TĂR premiered in September â ahead of the filmâs North America release via Focus Features in October.
âPowerful forces move through a conductor. Thatâs why theyâre called conductors, I guess,â muses Blanchett. âEven before I got to the end of the story, I thought, âWhat is she running from? Does she know how to be herself?â Sheâs someone who believes in the ability for human beings to be transfigured by genius, who has surrendered and devoted herself to the supreme God of music, at great personal cost. The character is about to turn 50, which is enormous, and I always saw her as being in transition. Sheâs got to accept thereâs this change happening.â
A birthday party sequence was shot, which âwas extraordinary. But that whole thing has been excised from the film, and itâs only there in a subtle way. But I was very aware of that fact.â
Working with Field was, she says, âvery symbioticâ. Many scenes were shot in extended takes. âWe goaded one another creatively, to go outside our comfort zones, in ways Iâve experienced in theatre but rarely in film,â Blanchett reveals. âHe is one of the great screenÂwriters, so there was an incredible architecture of the story to hold us. And within that, his preparedness to improvise, to see what happens, and to throw everything we had in our arsenal, was exhilarating.â
Blanchett is an executive producer on TĂR, a role that has come to the fore for her in recent years with Carol and miniseries Stateless and Mrs. America. âI spent a decade with my husband [Andrew Upton] running a very large cultural institution in Australia and had an incredible creative surge doing that,â she explains, with reference to the Sydney Theatre Company. âWhat has been waning, in terms of the respect for it, value for it and space for it, is the creative producer. People who understand how things are made, who have a sense of the whole, not just their part within it.â
âI have always, as an actor, been interested in the whole,â she continues. âThatâs why Iâve played characters who died on page nine, and characters whoâve been in every frame. Creative producing, being the friend of the director, I find incredibly exciting. I donât have to be in it.â
With Upton, Blanchett is producing Apples director Christos Nikouâs English-language debut Fingernails and developing a film of 1960s TV show The Champions with Ben Stiller. As she speaks to Screen International, she is back home in Australia for the first time in four years, starring in and producing feature film The New Boy for Warwick Thornton âabout the intersection between Indigenous spirituality and Catholicism. Heâs an Indigenous director Iâve always wanted to work with.â
Blanchett plays a nun â a long-cherished ambition, she reveals. âI watched a film years ago where Hayley Mills burnt down a convent and I thought, âOh, being a nun would be so exciting,ââ she laughs. âIâve since watched documentaries about the Carmelites⊠and maybe not.â
TĂR FYC PostersTĂR StillsSource: SAFC, Screen International