Cate Blanchett is not a diva, but a star. Thanks to her boundless versatility and yen for risk-taking, she's at home in arthouse films as she is in Hollywood blockbusters. The greatest secret of her appeal is her elusiveness: she's always fully present and yet strangely ethereal at the same time – whether she's playing a character like Lydia Tár (in Tár) or Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings movies.
Her portrayal of Timothea in Jim Jarmusch's Father Mother Sister Brother feels somewhat different, however. Blanchett has specialized in playing extroverted or strong women, but Timothea is childlike in her assumed brightness and eagerness to please. Her awkwardness and vulnerability speak volumes when she and her louche sister Lilith (Vicky Krieps) attend the annual tea party hosted by their chilly, punctilious novelist mother (Charlotte Rampling) in their Dublin hometown.
Blanchett's performance in this middle part of Jarmusch's triptych film demonstrates her uncanny gift for showing how unaware people can be of behavioural tics that reveal their neuroses – and get under the viewer's skin. She talked to theartsdesk in a video call.
PAMELA JAHN: You play wonderfully against type as Timothea. What was the most challenging part for you in preparing for this role?
CATE BLANCHETT: Working with Jim Jarmusch, no doubt. It's about presence, about showing up and being available to what happens in the moment. Also, Jim's films have such a wonderfully unique feeling to them, they often belie the instinctual, fluid nature in the way that he works.
You're both a mother and a daughter yourself. Did you draw from your own experience when you were creating Timothea?
We've all got family, and we think our relationships with our parents and children are utterly individual but there are so many common threads. Before I had children, I didn't fully realise just how much your position in the family affects how your personality evolves. Oftentimes you'll meet someone and you'll ask them, are you the youngest child, or the oldest? Or, you'll go, your the middle child, aren't you? Which I am, and there's a lot of benign neglect to the middle ones, which I found quite liberating. That said, all mothers and daughters are inimitably themselves, and that's why it was so important that I didn't transpose my own experiences.
How do you approach a character who performs composure even when the room is clearly shifting under her feet?
In this particular family dynamic, Timothea was probably thought of by her mother and her sister as being unconfident, but she's just self-contained, I think. Not repressed. She has come to be a private person in the wake of her younger sister being an exhibitionist. Because, if someone is sucking all the oxygen up in the room, you learn to breathe in a more shallow way, I guess.
The annual tea ritual they're performing is so perfectly cringe, though.
Yes, it's strange and formal and stiff, but there's also such a twinkle in Charlotte's eye; it's a game that we play within our little group. I thought it was very interesting that the mother starts on the sofa quite relaxed, talking to a therapist in a free-flowing way. But then when the people that she's most intimate with arrive, there's an inherent form, a sense of control and procedure that allows things to stay at arm's distance. In a way, I was curious that Jim wanted to examine that set of relationships in this way.
Is curiosity a driving force in your career?
I'm always drawn to the surprise. In a way it's a bit of active anthropology, isn't it? Playing a character, you get to inhabit somebody else's life, not just their relationships and concerns. We're all the heroes of our own narratives and you don't have to be an actor to get caught up in an echo chamber. And so, yeah, it keeps me, in a very visceral way, actively engaged with the rest of the world.
What is it that drives Timothea to keep going?
One aspect that the film explores is that we're always trying to define and confine and solve our family relationships and dynamics. Yet, there's no solution to the glorious, painful mess that is family. We're all evolving outside of that collective space. And somehow we often tend to be ignorant about who it is [another person] has evolved to be. But that's the real challenge of keeping the family organism alive – to maintain your sense of who your brother or sister or mother or cousin has become.
Did the Irish setting change the way you inhabited the role?
Definitely. Like always, when you arrive on a new set for the first time, it does affect your physicality, particularly if there's only one location and the setting is a character in and of itself. It certainly affected the blocking and, therefore, how we played the scenes, because it was all filmed in a handful of rooms. It really started to come alive once we had an afternoon in the space together, to work out where we'd be, where we'd sit. And since we shot the segment in Ireland in January, there was a limited amount of light as well.
Jim Jarmusch has said that people underestimate how difficult it is to make three people sitting and talking at a table seem effortless. Do you agree?
I suppose that's the trick, isn't it? That it always looks like the first time. Even if it's an artificial environment, you want to feel that that's the only choice that that person could make or what they say. Jim cares deeply about these things. That statement is probably evidence yet again of how much of himself he invests into every moment of every film that he makes. The reality is, though, that we didn't have a lot of money, so we were always having to move incredibly quickly. But again, there's an accuracy to the way Jim works. He wants it to feel fresh and messy, but he doesn't want it to be a scruffy experience for anyone.
How does a filmmaker like him fit into the fast-paced world we live in?
The film is really gentle and subtle – it has this kind of subterranean quality but it's almost imperceptible. And if you're watching it with two or three windows up on your laptop, you might miss the kind of emotional musicality that underlies what he's created. The rhythm, the kind of the softly spoken jazz that he was playing with, really affects the audience when you're watching the film on the big screen. There's something about Jim as a filmmaker and as a human being that makes people surrender. I don't think that's changed to this day.
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