Falling into the void: Cate Blanchett tackles Blue Jasmine with Woody Allen

CATE Blanchett tells how her stage experience informed her take on a challenging Woody Allen film role.

Cate Blanchett

CINEMA has embraced Cate Blanchett's return. After appearing in bit parts in a handful of major films, Blanchett's lead performance in Woody Allen's latest, Blue Jasmine, reminds the medium what it has missed in the past five years.

Her performance as an estranged New York socialite is a dynamic portrait of pain, vulnerability and fire marking a homecoming after five years as co-artistic director of the Sydney Theatre Company with husband Andrew Upton.

Well, "kind of", she says, smiling, too humble to believe anyone really could give a hoot. "Maybe, after having not made one for a while. [But] you sort of get sick of yourself, you really do," Blanchett says with a laugh.

And one becomes more discerning. She already has films by directors George Clooney, Peter Jackson and Terrence Malick in the can, beyond Allen's film. The Academy Award winner has her choice of projects, yet her motivations remain rather simple.

"The first question is who's directing and the second question is when are they shooting and is it over the kids' holidays," Blanchett says. "Your priorities have to shift and you can't do everything that comes up."

She chose very well with Blue Jasmine and the stage informed her performance as Jasmine. It is a performance that has thrust her back into hearts and minds again, with Hollywood already pencilling her name in as a certain Academy Award nominee.

It is an Oscar-worthy performance and Allen has a knack for writing well for women - nine actresses have earned 10 Academy Award nominations from his films. It must be said, though, that such prognostications can be premature; the present favourite for the best picture Oscar, Clooney's The Monuments Men, in which Blanchett co-stars, hasn't been screened anywhere. Nevertheless, Blanchett's performance is objectively strong. Not that she can tell.

"I suppose I've made enough films now, I've made a couple of films where I thought, 'Oh, I don't know that the director and I were telling the same story.' Or: 'They cut that; I thought that scene was really important to the telling of the story.' "

Often it's not even the director's decision if they do not have final cut, she explains. Filmmakers and producers may later decide to slant or market the film differently and that is not necessarily a slight on an actor's performance or something they could have done anything about.

"So it's very difficult to have an objective sense of whether something has worked. The film may have worked but have you done a good job as an actor? It's really hard to tell," Blanchett notes. "Really hard to tell. Until someone stops you in the supermarket and says, 'Oh, I didn't really like that!' "

In contrast to the dislocation of acting in film, theatre provides her with that feedback every night. "You can tell the quality of the applause, whether they've had a troubled night, how silent they are before they clap, how much they're moving and, of course, a Friday night audience is entirely different to a Wednesday matinee."

Blanchett's opportunities to feel that connection with audiences were many, varied and acclaimed during her semi-hiatus from the screen. After working intensely in film for almost a decade, she was "ready to try another rhythm, the rehearsal rhythm" of theatre.

Beyond the joy of performance, Blanchett embraced the operational and managerial side of the business.

She contends her stint at the STC was invaluable for her return to film in such a focal role, providing her with the confidence she required in her first substantial lead part since 2010's Robin Hood and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button in 2008.

Jasmine, who she portrays in Allen's movie, is now being compared with Ruth Madoff, the wife of disgraced New York Ponzi scheme architect Bernie Madoff, and A Streetcar Named Desire's Blanche DuBois, who Blanchett brought to life in Liv Ullmann's 2009 theatre production. But Blanchett demurs, noting Tennessee Williams's universe, poetic landscape and fragile characters butting up against the brutality of the world around them, particularly in Streetcar, are entirely different from Allen's neurotic, urbane universes. "So you can't overlay one with the other," she says.

Nevertheless, in broader terms, Blanchett adds: "I don't think I could have played this role without having spent such a concentrated amount of time on stage."

Jasmine French - formerly Jeanette - has a breakdown after her marriage with her husband, Hal (Alec Baldwin), a high-flying New York financial tycoon, collapses. It destroys her sense of self and place in Manhattan and Hamptons society, leaving a schism between who she is and who she perceives she is.

"She's estranged from her biological beginnings, she's estranged from her socioeconomic reality, she's invented the way she speaks, the way she walks, who she speaks to, how she dresses, how she thinks and she's changed her name, so she's so dislocated from any sense of reality," Blanchett observes.

"The sense of who she should be and who she actually is has produced such a void that when the artifice and her obsession with class, money and material possessions, when all those externals are dropped away, who is she? And is she who she thought she was? That interface between those two things, that's a concept that came out of playing Richard II [in the STC production of The War of the Roses]."

Blanchett would never have put those two characters (Jasmine and Richard II) together were it not for the way her experience in the theatre, where she has the time to create something to play for between five weeks and three months, showed her how she had to have enough to draw on to keep feeding a character and making it live every night.

"And so it [makes] you more inventive in how you free associate," she says.

She's a complex woman, Jasmine. Need it be said Blanchett has the chops to play her. And it's some affirmation Allen believed she was the actress to interpret her. A nod from a director gives an actor more confidence than the outward affirmation of an Academy Award, she says. "It is that, a director saying I'm going to trust you not to screw up and I'm going to give you Jasmine French and trust that you're going to make it work."

Blanchett had given up hope Allen would one day call. After that one brief call, he sent her the script. "It was brilliant and you are curious, though, to see what he'd throw at you," she says. "Who would he think you might be?"

Blanchett didn't even know whether it would be a comedy. "And I certainly didn't know that from reading the script," she adds. "Because you have to know this is the guy who made Interiors and Bananas and so which way is it going to fall?"

That question was particularly pressing, at least to this writer, after Allen's recent batch of films, a series of commercially successful but arguably cynical forays into European eye candy - Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Midnight in Paris and To Rome with Love. Allen had lost his edge.

Her first reading saw the connection between the characters - including a bunch of working-class schmucks played by the unlikely but effective trio of Bobby Cannavale, Andrew Dice Clay and Louis CK - as "quite insane and absurd and funny".

She read it again and saw it was a painful tale with the dire resonances of the banking sector and the economic collapse next to Jasmine's own grand delusion. Blanchett's challenge then became tone. Before Allen toyed with his lead.

The only direction he gave her was during an early camera test, a time in which Blanchett is particularly calm trying clothes and testing lights. "I love camera tests because no one's looking at you and you can try little things out, it's the only rehearsal you get and he kept moseying up beside me and just quietly, as if he wasn't talking to me, [said], 'You know she's bad.' And then he'd walk off," Blanchett recalls with a sparkle.

Then he'd whisper to her: "You know she's got a really loose grip on reality? She's mad." When they assembled for the first day of filming, Blanchett was insecure, trying to calibrate the character, ensuring she wouldn't "flatline" as a slightly demented woman. Until Allen approached her and noted, "She's not that mad." Blanchett roars with laughter at the recollection and his wisdom in essentially telling her on day one: "Here's the wheel, take it back again."

It was reminiscent of Martin Scorsese's direction when she played Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator, a performance that won her a supporting actress Academy Award.

Blanchett puts on her "Marty" voice, rushing through his advice without a break: "Are you going to be blonde? You don't have to be a redhead. You don't have to look anything like her. She wore pants but you don't have to wear pants. You can wear a skirt!

"And I realised what he was doing for me was to say you are utterly liberated to play as much or as little of her externals as you want to," Blanchett recalls. "He was giving me freedom but also therefore giving me direction."

Of course, there was direction. Three weeks into the filming, Allen told her: "You know this is a serious movie?"

"I thought: 'God, you could have told me that three weeks ago!' " she says, laughing.

And Allen was confident enough to tell her when a take was "awful". Not many directors are that confident, she adds. Most feel they must be polite; not that Blanchett is concerned. "I've got a pretty thick skin," she says. "I don't think I did 20 years ago but I've got a thick skin now. "But also it's the brutality. He's got the brutal relationship to his own work that is born out of the brutality of stand-up."

Again, Blanchett draws on the simpatico nature of stage and screen, noting theatre actors have a similarly brutal relationship to the fickle nature of things working or not. Even during strong theatrical runs, there are nights when productions lose audiences. Allen has that "tangible sense of audience".

"He would constantly say" - Blanchett claps her hands - " 'better go again because the audience has already left the theatre'," she recalls. "He knows who he's making it for."

Blue Jasmine will be released nationally on September 12.