Cate Blanchett recalls Iñárritu’s brutal notes on Babel

The actress opened up about her career in a new interview while in Cannes to talk about the Displacement Film Fund, which she co-founded to support displaced filmmakers and is now in its second year. Speaking at the Rendezvous in the Bunuel Theatre at the iconic film festival, she recalled her first day filming Babel with Brad Pitt and director Alejandro Iñárritu in 2006. “My son had an accident in Morocco, so I was quite traumatised anyway. So maybe that was art imitating life. I

remember the first day we shot, Brad Pitt and I shot a scene, and we did a couple of takes, and Iñárritu came up and said, ‘This is s**t. What is this s**t?’ “He said, ‘There’s nothing here. This scene has to work or the movie doesn’t work,’ and walked off. “But that knocks you off your centre. It’s a form of direction. Some say, ‘That’s incredibly disrespectful,’ or ‘That’s upsetting to me.’ But sometimes a director can lead with love, but incredibly tough love.”

Asked about a particular look she gives in the final scene, Blanchett wondered if “maybe that look was also just me frightened that Iñárritu was gonna come in and say, ‘It’s s**t’ to me again.” Blanchett later went on to reveal that as she gets older she’s had to change the types of roles she tackles because she’s no longer physically able to perform in the way she could a decade ago. “As you get older, the palette that you’re playing upon gets perhaps more

calcified and less malleable, so there’s a lot of stuff you cannot do,” she said. She added: “I used to be able to tap dance. I can’t really tap dance anymore. The sad thing is I’ve got a facility for learning things quickly, but then I have a sort of physical dementia and I forget it.” She also shared her disappointment over the #MeToo movement “getting killed very quickly” in Hollywood. “It got killed very quickly, which I think is interesting,” Blanchett said. “There are

a lot of people with platforms who are able to speak up with relative safety and say ‘this has happened to me’. And the so-called average woman on the street, person on the street, is saying me too. Why does that get shut down? “What the movement revealed is a systemic layer of abuse, not only in this industry but in all industries, and if you don’t identify a problem, you can’t solve the problem,” added the Oscar winner.

Cate Blanchett, Cannes, Rendezvous, Bunuel Theatre, Displacement Film Fund, displaced filmmakers, Babel, Brad Pitt, Alejandro Iñárritu, #MeToo, Oscar winner