Cate Blanchett on faith, work and being the only woman in the room

“I’m always trying to get out of acting,” says Cate Blanchett breezily. “I’ve been trying to get out of acting my entire professional life.” Blanchett, 54, is speaking at Women in Motion, an event sponsored by a luxury fashion conglomerate at the Cannes Film Festival. Even when she and Andrew Upton – playwright, screenwriter and her husband of 25 years – were running the Sydney Theatre Company, she says, she would watch the actors of plays she had directed come on stage while she retired to the auditorium with “profound relief” that, at least for tonight, it wasn’t her up there. It isn’t the first time she has said something along these lines, but it sets the audience back on their expensive heels. What could she mean? Cate Blanchett never seems to stop working.

Blanchett’s career began on the stage at the Sydney Theatre Company in David Mamet’s Oleanna in 1992. Five years later, she made her film debut in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road, since when she has worked with a remarkable rollcall of directors – Terrence Malick, Martin Scorsese, Wes Anderson, Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu – and won two Oscars, including best actress for her unravelling neurotic in Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine. “I think she is one of the greatest practitioners of the art that has ever lived,” says Todd Field, who directed her acclaimed performance in last year’s Tar. “It’s one thing to have a work ethic and incredible discipline, but that does not always translate into great acting, whereas her ability is in many cases almost supernatural.”

Cate Blanchett plays Sister Eileen in The New Boy, directed by Warwick Thornton.

The point she is making, however, is that she wants to do – is doing – so much more, both away from the business altogether. She is a committed advocate for humanitarian causes and various cultural bodies – and, increasingly, a producer of the kinds of films she wants to see made. For her, acting has never been about the role, she says. “For me, it’s about the conversation. And sometimes that conversation involves me being in front of the lens and sometimes it’s back behind.” Where, she admits, she is sometimes “a little bit too bossy”.

Blanchett’s primary purpose in Cannes is to support the result of her latest collaboration, The New Boy. Screening in the section of the festival’s official program dedicated to singular voices, Un Certain Regard, The New Boy has its roots in director Warwick Thornton’s own experience as an Indigenous student in a Catholic boarding school. Blanchett plays Sister Eileen, a stoically determined nun running an institution for orphans in South Australia’s remote and punishingly dry hinterland in the early 1940s. Nobody in the outside world has realised that the priest in charge of this mission school has actually been dead for more than a year. If a letter arrives for Father, Sister Eileen answers in a priestly voice. Delivery men are told he is indisposed. There is a war on. Assisted by an Aboriginal nun (Deborah Mailman) known simply as Sister Mum, and a general handyman, George (Wayne Blair), Sister Eileen is clearly holding onto the hope that they will never be rumbled.

Aswan Reid (centre) with director Warwick Thornton and other young cast members of The New Boy.Credit: Ben King

The New Boy is only nine years old, but he is different enough to represent a threat to their quiet life. A desert dweller, he already knows how to survive. Sleeping on the hard floor under his bed, unable to speak to anyone, he plays with a light he can generate with his own hands, a little bit of otherworldly power that Sister Eileen wants to believe is a miracle.

Aswan Reid, who lives in Alice Springs but comes from a remote community, brings a presence to The New Boy that is indeed miraculous. He was also singularly unaffected by Blanchett’s status as cinema royalty. “He very much knows how to annoy her,” says Thornton with a grin. “Between scenes he would be pulling her hair and trying to wipe her make-up off. She’s way too strong to be humbugged by some little brat, you know what I mean, but he would still try to push all her buttons. Then, as soon as the first assistant director said “standing by”, he would just go completely into his New Boy persona and off they’d go.”

Blanchett with Aswan Reid at Cannes Film Festival earlier this year.Credit: Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images

Edith, the youngest of Blanchett’s four children, stayed on location with them. “She and Aswan were running around,” Blanchett remembers. There were eight other children, playing Sister Eileen’s assorted charges. “I must say, I approach a set with trepidation when I know there are going to be children on it,” says Blanchett. “There’s a duty of care, obviously, but also there are going to be limitations on what one can do, because often filming can be freewheeling and a bit chaotic, but they were absolutely extraordinary. Extraordinary. The level of support they showed to Aswan, their discipline, their curiosity, but also they were just so alive to the situations.” Thornton gives her a sidelong look. “It’s so beautiful, the way you talk about it,” he says. “What I saw every morning was Lord of the Flies.”

They are quite a double act, the patrician Blanchett and dry-as-chips Thornton. They met briefly for the first time at a Berlin Film Festival party in 2020 when they were both at Berlinale Series with Australian television dramas: Blanchett with Stateless and Thornton with Mystery Road. Blanchett had been following Thornton’s career with enthusiasm since he won the Cannes award for a first feature with Samson & Delilah in 2009. “And then in lockdown I started thinking, as did Andrew, who do I really want to work with?” she says. “And we’re thinking about home and about Australia and Australian filmmakers. And I was: ‘yeah, I didn’t get to talk to Warwick long enough’.”

She called him in what became the first of a succession of long, late-night conversations, during one of which he mentioned a script he had written 18 years earlier and stuck in a drawer, knowing it needed “kicking around”, as he puts it. The story told in that early script was very different – for a start, Sister Eileen’s character was a male priest – but Blanchett sensed it was “a thorn in his paw”. When he sent it to her, she and Upton read it in a single sitting. “And we found it really mysterious; there was something there which we didn’t quite understand, but we knew it was a document from which you could make an amazing film.”

As much as anything, The New Boy is about the clash and mingling of two faith systems, two perceptions of the numinous that are brought together in this isolated religious house. To that extent, it is Thornton’s own story. When he first went to a boarding school run by Benedictine priests, aged 11, he had never seen a crucifix. The dying Christ loomed large over their chapel. “So that was pretty wild. A man up there getting tortured and the fear that comes with that – if you don’t pray, if you don’t believe, you will burn. For kids who haven’t been immersed in that since birth, you know, that’s pretty hardcore.” For the boy who has grown up with a belief in spirits, creators and ancestral presences, however, there is plenty in Christianity that is recognisable. There is a tremendous scene in the film where Reid climbs a newly arrived crucifix in the night and is seen clinging to Christ’s effigy like a koala.

Faith is a tricky subject to tackle in a cynical age. “I struggle with it every day,” says Thornton. “Science saves my life every day, but maybe it’s faith that gets me up in the morning, you know what I mean?” He has no idea what is out there. “And I don’t want an answer. I will spend the rest of my life looking for signs and have a great time with spirituality and believing and waiting for all my beautiful friends who died to visit me from the other side. They never do, but I’m still waiting.” And why not hope? “We’ve become a very literal species,” says Blanchett. “I’m a big believer that two opposites can co-exist and that, in fact, you can’t have faith without doubt.”

The project came to Blanchett and Upton at exactly the right time. Three years ago, they joined forces with Coco Francini, an independent American producer Blanchett met while making the limited series Mrs America, in which she played Phyllis Schlafly and also served as an executive producer. They are now working together as Dirty Films, with 15 films on their slate. Three – including The New Boy, Iranian-Australian director Noori Niasari’s Sundance award-winning Shayda and a sci-fi romance called Fingernails by Greek director Christos Nikou – launch this year. Blanchett is taking a break from acting to promote them. “I’ve always been interested in that wonderful American phrase, the process from soup to nuts,” she says. “From the development process right through to marketing. To me, that just feels like an extension of my work as an actor.”

Blanchett and Thornton during filming.Credit: Ben King

As a producer, there are serious systemic issues she has long wanted to address. In the past, she has often been the only woman on a film set. “You wonder why you slightly feel alienated and annoyed some days. Then you do a head count and realise, ‘Not only am I the only woman in the cast, but there are 62 men in the room and yep, I’m the only woman.’ So you think this ratio’s bad, I’ll do it tomorrow. OK, 37 men and three women. Not good enough! It’s really disproportionate. And it means you’re always laughing at the same jokes.”

On Mrs America, the producers resolved to look for women directors. “We were just sitting round a table one day and we said let’s just make a list, let’s make our best effort! And without even drawing breath, we suddenly had a list of 70 women who were all completely qualified, capable and inspirational.” They made a rule that at least one woman and one person of colour should be interviewed for every crew position. “And just pushing people towards that goal brought out all these very qualified people that they just hadn’t met before.” Change is slow, admittedly. “But I think diversity is now top of mind. You can feel sometimes people going, ‘OK, sigh, we’re having the diversity conversation now.’ And that’s good! It means we’re having it a lot. And unfortunately we will need to keep having it, until all those rooms are as diverse as they should be.”

She has thought about directing herself. “I get asked a lot, but for me there are so many things I find enjoyable in the process of making a film, so many directors who I want to work with as an actor and producer, and it takes a long time,” she says. “I’m slow as an actor. I’d be triply slow as a director. I also have four children and a garden. I know this is a cliche, but you do learn patience from gardening – and that is something I need to learn.”

Besides, she is busy; it is hard to say no to a good idea. “I do way too much. Sometimes you do need to be quiet.” Woe betide the person, however, who suggests she could pick and choose because she doesn’t really need to work. “Oh yes, I do!” she barks. “You don’t want to see me when I’m not working!” But has anyone ever seen that? I really doubt it.

The New Boy opens on July 6.

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