Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
Cate Blanchett and writer-director Warwick Thornton are visibly shivering on an unseasonably windy rooftop at the Cannes Film Festival.
Im suddenly freezing, Blanchett says when we meet, tucking her hair into her jacket.
And Im wearing a woolen suit!
Theres a lot of adrenaline from last night, she says, ordering a hot tea.
[Both laugh.]
:We had a relationship for two years and Warwick couldnt even remember my name!
No, it was right before the pandemic, at the Berlin Film Festival.
You were there withMystery Road,and I was there withStateless,both in the TV quadrant.
Wed bumped into each other at a party.
And youd met Andrew, right?
It was brief and noisy.
I said, We should call Warwick and see what hes up to!
And it went from there.
It was mostly over Zoom.
Phone calls, actually.
W.T.:Yes.
You found a book about … C.B.
:Oh, people disappearing!How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found.
Did you want to disappear completely?C.B.
:It was something I was contemplating doing.
Its a self-published book someone gave me.I still find it so interesting.
Its a way that you completely eradicate your identity and your footprint so you cannot be found.
It wasnt a spy handbook or anything.
And you, Warwick, had just had that come-to-Jesus moment, where youd taken a walk … W.T.
:On the beach, yeah.
So you were both thinking about faking your own death?C.B.:Yes.
We were both in a similar state of erasure.
:Or maybe faking our own birth.
:I think I have the name of a psychologist who can help you with that.
What brought that desire on?C.B.
:Im hazarding a guess that it was the pandemic for me, anyway.
You were left alone with your own thoughts and dilemmas and trying to connect with the dilemmas of others.
:And creating your own failure.
The pandemic created so many failures in all of us.
Oh, Ive got time to learn Latin now, havent I?
Time to learn those three country-western chords on the guitar!
You just set yourself up to fail.
:Did you make sourdough?
Every man I know grew a beard and made sourdough.
:Or ginger beer.
Cate, you were making sourdough?C.B.
:My husband was.
And I ate it, unfortunately.
Where were you both physically while having these calls?
Seems like they were some really wide-ranging conversations.C.B.
:I was in the country in England.
:I was in Sydney.
They were, because of the time difference.
Generally Cate seemed like more of a morning person.
It was you in the morning, and me after a bottle of red wine at about 11:30. :It was a bit random.
Sometimes Id get texts from you that were like, Oh my God.
Its four in the morning, your time.
Why are you still up?
I totally lost my sense of time.
It was immaterial to me whether I was talking at three in the morning or in the afternoon.
I think thats what facilitated these open-ended conversations.
I said, Id love to work with you, and I dont think he took me seriously.
And I said, Of course.
And I just fell in love with the predicament and the characters.
But I thought, Oh, well, theres nothing for me to play in there.
:It was a slightly black-and-white story, as a priest and the new boy.
But when we changed it to a nun, all of these shades of gray happened.
Which is what a story should be.
An evil person and an angel is such a boring place for storytelling.
Why do you think you two bonded so deeply?
Its unusual to Zoom with one person that often and for that length of time.C.B.
:I think it was phone calls, actually.
We didnt know what each other was wearing.
Thats too much information.
But theres something about the telephone.
I love when the person says, Mind if we have a phone call?
It feels to me like people are saying, I really want to talk.
Theres something about the computer screen where I do click off mentally.
:You stop listening and you look at your own image.
Youre just working on that image.
You cant not look at yourself.C.B.
:That is the truth.
Its like a mirror.
Who came up with the idea that Sister Eileen would be this secret alcoholic?
And the rest of her backstory?W.T.
There we go, thats all done.
Literally four hours later, we hung up.
We had a four-hour conversation about her backstory.
:Alcohol was always in there.
Her alcoholism had this strange, subtle connection to Jesus.
:All cultures western, Indigenous use certain hallucinogens to communicate with God.
To get closer to whatever youre looking for.
What did that feel like for you?C.B.
:I dont think you ever really leave the Australian film industry, to be honest.
Were used to taking risks.
Strangely, Id been in South Australia relatively recently to filmStateless.And it was very important to me, actually.
I want to be onstage every year or 18 months, just to touch that well.
And I feel the same way about being on terra firma in Australia.
Theres just something … its the light.
Its really meaningful to me.
You said in the press notes that Australia haunts your dreams.C.B.
:It does.[Laughs.
]Not always in a good way.
Its a very magnetic country.
I dont know if you feel that way about where you were born.
An intensity.C.B.:Yeah.
:Its a young country.
Even though its one of the oldest countries in the world.
:As a nation, quote, unquote, its young.
:Two-hundred years old.
Theres a fear of the landscape and a colonization of the landscape.
And people do not understand the landscape.
If you talk to an Indigenous person, youll get a lot of answers quickly.
Theres an incredibly special connection, and other people in Australia are looking for that.
You dont really understand Australia until you go to the desert.
:Australia is a veranda.
Everyone lives on the edge.
:Just a small question to end on!
The more I think about all of it, the less I know.
Its pretty cool on the other side.
And it never happens.
But I believe it will, still!
Its this great conundrum Ill never work out until I die.
:I get bewildered by the degree to which most western religions have this backbone of certainty.
They preach and they lecture towards certainty so that eradicate doubt.
I find that a lot of organized western religion is not open to the world and is incurious.
Therefore, I dont gravitate towards it.
I had the most profound experience there when I was 19.
I dont know anything about the geology of it, but that is ancient.
That is beyond me.
It made me feel deeply doubtful and uncertain.
My last question is for you, Cate.
Can we clear that up for him?C.B.
:Oh, God, no!
We hope to work together on something else again.
:Hes gotta get in line now.
:I just bumped into Ethan Hawke in the hotel.
I cant wait to see the short.
This movie was just too big at that point in time.
He wasnt ready to work outside Spain at that particular point.
And I totally respect that.
Weve been talking about working together for 20 years.
So, I mean, theres no rush!
Im impatient in some ways, but I believe the right things happen in the right way.
