The first episode of new BBC Radio 4 programme, This Natural Life, is out now. Martha Kearney interviewed Cate Blanchett about her relationship with the natural world as they walk around the Royal Botanic Gardens at Wakehurst in Sussex.

Cate and Kevin Kline spoke to LA Times’ The Envelope about their series, DISCLAIMER*, which is on Apple TV+ now. According to Warner Bros UK, Cate will be attending the premiere of The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim at Leicester Square on 3 December.

There are some interviews with Cate talking about RUMOURS ahead of its release in Australia on 5 December.

This Natural Life

Her [Martha Kearney] new series came about after she interviewed Blanchett about a new film earlier this year. “I bought her a jar of apple jelly. She said, ‘Oh, I should’ve given you some of my honey.’ I said, ‘What? Wait! You’re a beekeeper?’ And she’s a beekeeper, and I used to keep bees.” Blanchett agreed to give another interview about her love of nature and the environment, so they went to look at beehives at Wakehurst, the Sussex outpost of Kew Gardens. “I put on my bee-suit and looked rather like the Michelin man,” says Kearney. “She managed to look stylish in a bee-suit. She had these brilliant yellow glasses and she just looked amazing. She’s a very funny, stylish woman.”

You can listen here.

Disclaimer*

Cate Blanchett and Kevin Kline really want viewers to watch ‘Disclaimer’ a second time

The Envelope sat down with Blanchett and Kline for a quick chat over Zoom at the end of a long London press day 48 hours before the series’ debut. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

I would be remiss in not asking you about working with your respective onscreen spouses, the great Lesley Manville and Sacha Baron Cohen.

Kevin Kline: [Lesley’s] a brilliant actress. It’s such a joy. It was a great, great experience working with her. She’s no-nonsense. Or else the character was no-nonsense. Anyway, just very stiff-upper-lip and very English about things. That was inspiring.

Cate Blanchett: I was working with Sacha, who is [an] absolute genius at what he does. But this is part of a departure he has been making in recent years. He was so open to the experience. It was really great. We talked a lot about the relationship. We had a lot of time to talk, because Alfonso works quite slowly. I really relished those conversations. … The one thing we should say is also our sons [Louis Partridge as Jonathan Brigstocke and Kodi Smit-McPhee as Nicholas Ravenscroft] — talk about phenomenal actors. I have always wanted to work with Kodi, back from his very first film, when we were producing theater in Australia. Desperate to work with him. To me, at the heart of this piece is the relationship of fathers and sons, and mothers and sons, and two parallel families. It was an absolute joy to work with Kodi.

Without divulging spoilers, please tell me about shooting your pivotal sequence.

Kline: Well, it’s on Cate. It’s mostly listening for me.

Blanchett: That’s easier said than done. There are qualities of listening, Kevin.

Kline: Well, I was hoping you’d say that. [All laugh.] I was very attentive, and listening with quite a deeply ingrained bias about what I’m hearing and what I’m believing and doubting.

Blanchett: But your character’s been goading my character for such a long period. It’s a very unlikely setting for a very unlikely unburdening. And so, the strangeness of the setup, really, informed the way we shot it. Also, knowing — I talked to Alfonso a couple of days before we started to do it — there would be flashbacks in there, we decided to then shoot all 40 pages to camera rather than treating some as voice-over and flashback, so that we got the whole story, and then he could work out what he wanted.

Kline: Which was extraordinary to me. … [Cate] narrates the whole story to my character, and she just did it! It’s just a phenomenal leap of faith and talent.

Is this the first time you’ve worked together?

Kline: Yeah.

Blanchett: Is it the last?

Kline: I believe so. [Both laugh.]

In general, what surprised you about each other?

Blanchett: Alfonso’s quite exacting about what he wants. So, we had to sort of find a way of all working together in a similar way. I was so taken — [to Kline] I mean, I knew your invention, your wit, your humanity, all of that. And your craft. That was unsurprisingly brilliant. But I think your patience and your openness to the process, I was —

Kline: I was just gonna say all those things about myself. But also, I would add that —

Blanchett: More of a curmudgeon. [Both laugh.]

Kline: It’s always interesting to watch your fellow actors working with the same director you are, obviously. My first film experience was working with Meryl Streep on “Sophie’s Choice.”

Blanchett: It’s all been downhill since then, is that what you’re saying?

Kline: Pretty much, yeah.

Blanchett: Look where he is now. [Laughs]

Kline: I know. … I just learn so much watching my fellow actor.

Blanchett: Watching you. You were exceptional. I mean, it was unbelievable.

Kline: The degree of confidence Meryl exuded. I go, “Wow! She just doesn’t question herself at all. How do you do that?” And then [indicates Blanchett], I got the same vibe from this one.

Blanchett: Oh, I question myself plenty, don’t you worry.

Kline: Well, I suppose we all do. But when someone’s acting with authority, you forget. It doesn’t matter what past things of theirs you’ve seen them do. There’s just a presence you react to. I’m not making any comparisons, but [affected voice] I’ve worked with some of the best. [Both laugh.] No, it was just great to watch how Cate works.

What would you like audiences to leave with at the end of “Disclaimer”?

Blanchett: Well, the most satisfying thing I’ve heard is the fact that you watched it a second time. I can’t tell you the joy and relief that brings me. Because often with episodic storytelling, people either want to binge-watch it, or they’re time-poor, or watch it with two or three other things on board. And there’s so many almost imperceptible details that Alfonso has woven in — and encouraged us to weave into our performances — that hopefully it is rewarding to watch a second time.

Kline: Alfonso is very, very detail-oriented. That’s what struck me the first day of working. I had never worked with a director who was that meticulous and that concerned with foreground, background, decor, costume, hair, makeup, accent, acting, mood, atmosphere.

Is there anything else you want to say in the last minute or two I have with you?

Kline: [Long pause] I’d just like to apologize.

Blanchett: [Laughs, reacts to offscreen voice] They’re saying Kevin has to go. [To Kline] Is that what they’re saying?

Kline: Oh, I have to go. Oh, good! No, no. My performance is indefensible. [Blanchett laughs.] I have nothing more to say. The defense rests. [Both laugh.]

Rumours

One of the very strange images at the centre of the hilariously weird satire Rumours is a giant brain – a pulsating organ found glowing in a forest clearing. Just don’t ask the filmmakers what it all means. “Well, the giant brain is simply an image, an undeniable image,” says Evan Johnson, cryptically. “What you see there is a large brain. We’ve always felt since it was first suggested… we just said, ‘Yes, a large brain!’” His co-director Guy Maddin smiles. “A good image requires no explanation. You can project your ideas onto it…”

As Evan points out, it’s not the first film in which he’s used a giant brain. See his 2015 feature debut The Forbidden Room, co-directed with Maddin. “It ends with a much bigger, giant brain. It’s something of a recurring image,” he says. “I find brains funny; for some reason, they look funny. For all the work they do and the profundities, they look undignified.” As his brother Galen points out, he took inspiration from a Volkswagen Beetle when designing it with this art department. “We actually just said: ‘[We want it] the size of a Volkswagen.’”

Naturally, the cast is none the wiser when it comes to the meaning of the brain. “I try not to think about it,” laughs Cate Blanchett, who stars as German chancellor Hilda Orlmann. Among her co-stars, British actor Charles Dance plays the U.S. President, Edison Wolcott, complete with inexplicable British accent. Inglourious Basterds star Denis Ménochet is French president Sylvain Broulez, Nikki Amuka-Bird is the British Prime Minister, Cardosa Dewindt, and Roy Dupuis (who featured in The Forbidden Room) is the Justin Trudeau-like Canadian PM, Maxime Laplace.

Maddin, the surrealist Winnipeg director whose work includes The Saddest Music in the World and Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, has recently been saying he was semi-retired. So, did making the movie make him want to return to directing full time? “I’d like to make more,” he admits. “Besides, I have no savings and no job. All I can do is make movies or teach about making movies. People come to me and say, ‘You’re so brave making the movies you do.’ Brave? I have no choice. When I come down to making a choice, I can’t sell out – I don’t know how to.”

Certainly Blanchett – who met Maddin through the Beau is Afraid director Ari Aster – was impressed by Maddin’s mad musings. “Oftentimes when you read a script, there’s a kind of an over-wash to the dialogue – you feel like any lines can be substituted between characters, but it really couldn’t be the case in this,” she says. “If you took out a word or substituted a sentence, it didn’t have the same flavour, and it felt like they were going for something really particular, which I found really exciting, because you felt like you were stepping into their dreamscape, in a way… to be inside Guy Madden’s mind.”

They’re a weird mob, the presidents and prime ministers making the big decisions. Cate Blanchett, who plays a fictitious but quite recognisable German chancellor in Rumours – very probably the only zombie horror-comedy ever to be set at a G7 summit – is remembering the footage of real G7 meetings watched by the cast as they rehearsed their unlikely roles as world leaders fleeing from undead Neanderthals.

“You’d have these incredibly awkward, horrendous photographs of them sitting in rooms together,” she says. “There was a strange familiarity, but an awkwardness to their connection.”

Hilda Orlmann, the sensibly coiffed host of the summit, inevitably has something of Angela Merkel about her, but the film’s parallels with real life have more to do with an overall dynamic.

“Mostly it’s about power,” says Denis Menochet, who spends much of the film being pushed around in a wheelbarrow as the French president. Whimpering with self-pity, he bears little resemblance to Emmanuel Macron. “It’s about people with power, like kings and queens, almost.”

Twenty-six years since Elizabeth, for which she received her first Oscar nomination, Blanchett herself retains a queenly authority. In a year when she had predicted she would be stepping back from acting to concentrate on producing, she swept into the Venice Film Festival in September as the star of both Alfonso Cuaron’s episodic thriller Disclaimer and Rumours, this wacky satire directed by Canadian eccentric Guy Maddin and his Winnipeg cohort Evan and Galen Johnson.

The force of the fandom gathered to see her walk the red carpet was impressive: a horde of teenage girls struck up a chant of “Cate, Cate!” as Blanchett gave them a regally friendly wave. They were roughly Ariana Grande’s demographic. Blanchett is 55. That doesn’t seem to matter.

Two weeks later, she was at the San Sebastian Film Festival to receive the festival’s Donostia Award for artistic achievement. Two thousand people gathered to watch the tribute, which included footage of George Clooney comparing her to Marlon Brando and Meryl Streep and saying how grateful he was for her friendship. “F—ing George!” she gulped at the end of it, wiping away tears. She wasn’t the only one.

It is this combination of popularity and credibility that she brings to Rumours, a film that would probably not have been made without her. She had always wanted to work with Guy Maddin, she says in San Sebastian, but what spurred her on was a 2017 film he made with the Johnsons for the San Francisco Film Festival called The Green Fog, which was a reconstruction of Hitchcock’s Vertigo using found footage from other films and TV shows shot in San Francisco. There was no dialogue, but the narrative was patched together with these urban snapshots.

“No one else could conceive of that but those three,” she says. “There is an inherent tongue-in-cheek madness and irreverence and technical genius there that I’m in awe of. And I relished being around that, so I wanted to help get this film made, you know, about the G7 leaders who meet, every year, to try and solve the crisis – the crises, rolling crises, ever-growing crises – in the world, but they don’t have the language to do it. To me it’s a little bit like a fever dream of an episode of Scooby Doo.”

Of course, these important people never imagined that the buried bog men would have been reawakened and want revenge on the living. Their anxieties are stirred only when the waiters supposed to be refilling their wine glasses fail to emerge from the bizarrely livid dusk.

Harsh but fair, one might think. “When you go to Westminster or Canberra or wherever it is, there is kind of a strange boarding-school quality to the environments,” says Blanchett. “They are so hermetically sealed, so far away from the real world and yet they are making important, impactful decisions.”

In Rumours, these are decisions that are simultaneously loaded with gravitas but are not expected to affect anything. “There are no consequences,” says Menochet. “They discover these mummies that have been killed because they didn’t deliver a good harvest. But never, at any time, do these G7 leaders think they will face consequences for failing to deliver.”

“But what I loved,” Blanchett adds, “is that you could say yes, this is a political satire but then the guys have called it Rumours [after] the Fleetwood Mac album, which was put together when there was so much infighting in the band and everyone was sleeping with one another and bickering.” For her part, Hilda presses herself on the Canadian prime minister while they are stumbling through the woods, trying to evade the zombies, with some sexy talk about liaising with the private sector.

“So there’s that quality too, that this is fuelled with regret, and longing and is quite sexually charged,” says Blanchett. As well as being, as she says cheerfully, so “profoundly stupid” that nothing seemed too weird to include.

“When we were reading it and got to the giant brain I was like, ‘Yeah, of course’. It just felt like the most natural thing in the world. They had a giant derrière in one of their films, so I guess they just like big things. Like the Big Pineapple or the Big Merino. Australians are going to love this movie!”

Cate Blanchett’s CV is a cavalcade of films like this, unlikely contenders she made for her own reasons; even the blockbusters, like the Lord of the Rings films, began as personal, quirky choices. It is a constant striving without a fixed goal.

“I don’t think in a creative life, or life in general, that there can be an end point or destination,” she says. “You have to be alive to going on little unseen paths. To be open to surprises, to take off from the track you thought you were on.”

It’s surely that attitude, an enthusiasm for adventure felt even when not so explicitly expressed, that wins over those legions of young fans. “I’m profoundly lucky that I’ve worked with so many extraordinary directors who have given me extraordinary opportunities,” Blanchett says in San Sebastian. “Some have worked, some not. When you get a chance to work with Terrence Malick, you might end up on the cutting-room floor. But that doesn’t mean the experiences weren’t great.”

Cate Blanchett exerted a political presence in Cannes this year, although Rumours – the satirical film where she plays a bureaucratic, lustful German Chancellor hosting a G7 summit – was more a lark than a strong political statement. It was at a press conference on cinema about refugees where, in her capacity as a UN Goodwill Ambassador, the Australian actress spoke about having recently travelled to Africa. She said her “interactions with refugees in the field” had totally changed her perspective on the world.

“There are so many stories to be told that are so inspiring and unusual and off-the-cuff,” she said.

Blanchett was an executive producer on the movie, which was mostly filmed at night.

“When Guy approached me about this, I thought we’d be shooting in Winnipeg, where he lives,” says Blanchett, who resides in the UK.

“And all of a sudden we were in a forest in Budapest doing five weeks of night shoots. I’d never done that many night shoots back-to-back, but there was something magical about it. I mean, it’s the good side of being a shift worker – and not that I wish shift work upon anybody.”

“You’d wake up at two in the afternoon, but my kids were with me, so we woke up earlier than that. So it was a bit like being at a slumber party. It felt like something only we would understand, a bit like the characters.”

Blanchett says the film is about what might happen if all the elements of the politicians’ lives, their positions and their relationships dropped away.

“It just suddenly changes and they’re in this altered state. I think that somehow the setting, the atmosphere, the tone and the image that they finally look out on seems much more possible than it did 15 years ago. But if you talk about things in a head-on way, you lose an audience.”

“The film is drawing on the collective anxiety and despair that any thinking person is probably feeling, but it’s also inviting an audience to laugh at it and feel like they can maybe go out slightly refreshed and more purposeful. If it makes them talk about those things, I think it’s fantastic.”

But can politicians take the joke?

“I think any leader worth their weight in salt has a sense of humour about themselves,” Blanchett replies. “It’s like when you go to the correspondents’ dinners in America or the National Press Club in Australia where they do all the political roasts. You think okay, yeah, I might approach trusting you. It’s when those people don’t have a sense of humour that I start to worry.”

Is she an optimist or a pessimist?

“I think probably an optimistic pessimist. You know, plan for the worst, hope for the best.”

“I don’t like making fun of the state of the world. I love the world. But I don’t think that what we’re doing to the planet, the systemic fiscal inequality, is at all amusing.”

“But [it is a good thing] if you can satirise it, and invite people to see it and talk about it, because the best way to head towards the deep-throated apocalypse is to not talk about it, to think it’s somebody else’s problem, and to be inert and inactive and disengaged.”

“What I love about cinema is it asks you to engage in worlds of someone else’s invention and imagine your way into different storylines.”

Is that easier to do it with comedy?

“I feel like this is as much a comedy or a satire or a tragedy, and I’d have never seen the current state of affairs played out with that particular tone.”

“It’s a zombie movie and it’s a Mexican soap opera. We were discovering the tone as we went along and Guy always has a unique perspective. He’s really playful and wicked and naughty, but also soulful and yearning and so full of self-reflection.”

As for AI, Blanchett says she can’t believe there isn’t more of a discussion about it.

“It affects all of us, but none of us have the power to be able to vote on this issue. We’ll have a referendum about an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, but who’s having the referendum on AI and whether we want certain companies to be able to control our identity?”

“I have four kids, so I think about what’s going to happen in the future and I’m frequently overwhelmed.”

Are her kids overwhelmed?

“No, my kids are strangely optimistic. I have robust discussions with them and I’m grateful for their perspective on the world, their energy and their honesty about what they see and what they find reprehensible, you know – the wars, the conflicts that are going on, and the way that they are being kind of massaged away.”

In creating her German Chancellor with blonde bouffant hair for Rumours, she says there are certain signifiers of what represents a powerful woman in politics.

“There has to be a block colour, not alienating, and your hair has to be a certain way. There’s an iconography to it about the gestures, the way that women have to use those bow gestures, and you can just see them being coached. They’re so separated from themselves, and the more they live in public life their voice changes – they don’t want to go up at the end of the sentences or whatever.”

Blanchett has a strong relationship with Germany.

She invited Berlin-based Schaubühne Theatre’s production of Hamlet (starring Lars Eidinger) to Australia when she was director of the Sydney Theatre Company (with her husband Andrew Upton), and she created and starred in the Australian mini-series Stateless, which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, as did Steven Soderbergh’s The Good German, in which she starred alongside George Clooney. Her portrayal as the fictitious German conductor Lydia Tár earned her an Oscar nomination.

“I said to Guy, ‘You do know that I don’t speak German, so why do you want me?’,” Blanchett recalls. “He said, ‘Well, I’ve always wanted to work with you.’ I guess he was thinking, what else can I play? I could have maybe played the big brain! But I’ve been profoundly influenced by German theatre and physical dance, and some of my favourite performing artists are German.”

Blanchett also currently appears as the older version of Leila George in Alfonso Cuarón’s AppleTV+ mini-series Disclaimer, which she executive-produced.

She has re-teamed with Soderbergh for the spy drama Black Bag, releasing in March, and she has also re-teamed with her Coffee & Cigarettes director Jim Jarmusch on the upcoming Father, Mother, Sister, Brother, the story of estranged siblings who reunite after years apart.

She is – as usual – very busy.

Sources: Warner Bros, The Guardian, LA Times, Filmink, SMH, InDaily