by Gill Pringle at San Sebastian Film Festival
If San Sebastian Film Festival is a thrilling celebration of Spanish cinema – as well as showcasing an eclectic array of international films – then just one woman dominates this year’s 72nd edition: Australia’s own Cate Blanchett.
Cate Blanchett’s face adorns every billboard, every ticket and every cinema frontage, in a stunning black and white official photograph of the actress taken by Gustavo Papaleo.
It’s an honour usually reserved for Spanish cinema royalty such as Javier Bardem, Antonio Banderas or Penelope Cruz, but it’s because this year the two-time Oscar winning actress has received the Donostia Award, SSFF’s highest honorary prize.
Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón, who recently worked with her on Apple TV+’s Disclaimer, introduced the actress and producer with a speech praising her “insatiable thirst for knowledge, just causes and art,” adding how the actress refused to move to London during the long shooting period, instead choosing to drive four hours back and forth to “fulfill her role as a mother.”
For much of the past decade, Blanchett and her husband Andrew Upton have lived in the British countryside with their four children, three dogs, two cats, pigs and chickens.
Cuaron went on to praise her, saying how she “has been a tireless voice in her call for compassion towards 114 million refugees,” highlighting her activism and work towards causes such as climate change and Indigenous rights.
As she took to the stage to collect her award, wearing a golden glittering floor-length gown, a video message from her friend and longtime collaborator George Clooney appeared on the screen, recorded while the actor was at the Venice Film Festival a few weeks earlier.
“I want to say that there’s acting as a profession, and then there’s acting as an art,” said Clooney, ranking Blanchett alongside Marlon Brandon, Katherine Hepburn, Meryl Streep and Robert de Niro. “Cate, I feel lucky that I had the chance to work with someone who is so gifted and kind, and I am proud to call you a friend,” added the actor before jokingly saying the reason he couldn’t make it to the ceremony is because he was drinking and had no pants on – a quip to the video only showing his top half.
Mid-laughter, she began her acceptance speech by exclaiming, “Fucking George!”
Bravely attempting a few words in Spanish, she eventually gave up, laughing, “I think I’ll stop there. Otherwise, this will turn into a comedy.”
A graduate of NIDA, she spoke about her three decade career, saying, “It transcends borders. It really does. And as an Australian working abroad, I’ve had the great privilege of transcending many borders, and my work has taken me to Australasia, to Europe, the Americas to China. It’s taken me all over the world, and here now in Basque country, at this extraordinarily vibrant festival that itself transcend borders, cultural, regional and international. It feels like a real homecoming. So, I’m so very honored to receive this award. Thank you. San Sebastian.”
After thanking Cuaron and describing how making Disclaimer [below] with him was “one of the greatest privileges” of her career, she told him, “You’re always experimenting. You’re always pushing for how we can bring cinema to the small screen without depleting it in any way. And I want to thank you, not only for being here tonight or your kind words, but for the conversations with you about the state of our industry and the future of cinema, your genius has been utterly inspiring to me.”
Becoming reflective, she added, “Now, I don’t know much about much, and the more I do, in a way, I think, the less I know. And I’ve had a very eclectic and strange career that has taken me many places. But perhaps, if there’s any connective tissue in my career, it’s the desire to know, it’s the quest to unlock what it means to be human, that strange nub of fearful, joyful uncertainty that it is to be a human being.
“And it’s bewildering to me that there seems to be a lot of chest thumping certainty in the world, a lot of righteousness and a lack of doubt in the world, when, in fact, the world is a deeply uncertain place, and to live a creative life, it’s fueled with uncertainty and doubt. It’s the DNA of how you begin any project. You have to humble yourself and say, I don’t know. I’m here to find out. And I worry that we’re finding answers too quickly. And it’s this uncertainty I think that drives me on. It’s a very uncomfortable place to be, and I think it’s something that we all share as humans. We’re living in very uncertain times.”
Clearly emotional, she told the audience how her make-up artist had applied too much mascara which was now, she said, running down her face.
Speaking about how she had been recently reading Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector’s work, she ended her acceptance speech with one of Lispector’s quotes: ‘There are certain advantages in not knowing. Like a virgin territory, the mind is free from misconceptions. Everything I do not know forms the greater part of me: This is my largesse. And with this, I understand everything.’
“So, I live in hope. The journey continues. There are only islands of certainty, and thank you for this small island of certainty tonight. I’m forever grateful to San Sebastian, to Donostia, gracias.”
Earlier in the day, she spoke with us about globalization at the cinema. “There’s not a lot of call in international movies for Australian accents, so I often speak in accents that are not my own. And I was talking with a dialect coach about how television has actually removed regional accents because we’re all receiving the same sort of globalized newsfeed and television programmes and one would think that – and I think people who are perhaps bad at developing things – therefore there’s a way of doing generalised storytelling that appeals to everybody, but I think that way lies creative death.
“I think the more culturally specific things are, the more powerful that they are; the more chance they have for being powerful in cultures other than their own. And that’s where San Sebastian is so fantastic. It’s celebrating filmmaking from the region, and juxtaposing it against filmmaking that is made internationally. And I think there’s a danger where we think we can try and create things that appeal to everybody, which is, of course, you could never start making anything from that point of view.
“But look, I am Australian, and I’m an Australian who’s been lucky enough to work and learn work in many different cultures, with directors who speak many different languages, and in culturally specific works, like Rumours was filmed in Budapest by three directors who had only left Winnipeg, maybe one time before and with people from all over the world. So, you couldn’t have got something perhaps more culturally diverse than that, and bonkers as that,” she said of her film directed by Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Gary Johnson which was screened following Blanchett’s award.
“But I am Australian, and so I am constantly invested in the development of the film industry there. I think it’s an incredibly powerful filmmaking culture that punches above its weight as the expression goes, given what a small community it is, so I’m always referring back to that and drawing from that,” said Blanchett, 55, who is the co-founder and director of production company Dirty Films, through which she has produced titles including Carol, Tar, The New Boy and Fingernails.
A Global Goodwill Ambassador for UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, and a member of the Earthshot Prize Council, Blanchett is also the inaugural Ambassador for Wakehurst and the Millennium Seed Bank. She received the Crystal Award at the World Economic Forum in Davos and the Kuwait-America Foundation Humanitarian Award, and is lifetime member of the Australian Conservation Foundation, a strong supporter of the Actors Benevolent Fund, the SAG-AFTRA Foundation, the Australian Wildlife Conservancy, an AFI Ambassador and Patron of the Sydney Film Festival and the NIDA Foundation.
Reflecting on her early days in drama, the actress says, “A lot of opportunity is luck and timing. When I came out, I knew so many incredibly talented directors who don’t work nearly as much as they could, as they should, as they’d like to. And you see a lot of incredibly talented actors drop off the so-called map and then they get discovered again. Like Kevin Kline, who I just worked with, had semi-retired, and audiences are going to be blown away, yet again, by having not seen him for a while,” she says referring to her thrilling new role in Cuaron’s Disclaimer mini-series which also stars Sacha Baron Cohen and Lesley Manville.
“But when I first came out of drama school – and drama school doesn’t work for everybody – but I found it very useful, I didn’t work like a lot of my counterparts … But someone who ran, then one of the biggest casting agencies, took a shine to me and asked me to come in and be a reader opposite people who were auditioning….
“I couldn’t get arrested as an actor. And I was weird looking; no-one knew what to do with me; and I probably didn’t know what to do with myself, to be perfectly frank. And I would read. I went in three, four times a week, and I would spend three or four hours reading opposite people who were auditioning, and I would be in the room as an object, and they would talk about the actor before they came in and after they left. And you realised a lot of those decisions are not personal, and a lot of those decisions are made before they walk in: Who has already been cast; whether they’re too short or too small, and unfortunately, and this has changed, women get talked about in a very certain way, which I’m sure happens less and less. I would hope so.
“But I realised that it’s not personal, and often those actors who walked in and thought, ‘I’m not sure whether I want to work with this director. I’m not really sure I want the role. I’m going to use this to try and find out if I do want the role’. So, they claim back some space to play in an audition and ask questions and make the space their own. They’re the ones who got a call back. I think the big takeaway for me is it’s not personal, and sometimes you have to work out: Do I want this job? How much do I want this job? And because not any job is necessarily worth taking. And then I would take jobs that people couldn’t see an opportunity in. Like: I die on page nine. And they were saying: ‘Don’t you want the bigger part?’ ‘No, no, that’s the interesting role’. So, you can actually make opportunities in the things that other people don’t perceive as opportunities. I think you have to work out what the opportunities are for you. I suppose, take a bit more agency. Have you got more agency than you think?” she asks.
Disclaimer premieres on Apple TV+ on 11 October 2024
