Cate Blanchett plans to produce, direct

THE ACTRESS on the day of our interview. She says that, while her identity is not dependent on the awards she has won, she appreciates critical recognition. Photo by Ruben V. Nepales

LOS ANGELES—Cate Blanchett, the Best Actress front-runner in this awards season, is also setting her sights on directing and producing. “There are a couple of things I have been interested in [to direct],” announced Cate, elegant as usual in a Fausto Puglisi color black dress on this morning that the Academy announced her as one of its Best Actress nominees for “Blue Jasmine.”

JULIE DELPY has “something in development” with Cate, who says she is a fan of the French actress. HFPA

“There’s a novel that, with Oren Moverman, I am working to bring to the screen,” said Cate in that languid voice and tone that can be hypnotic. “It’s a great story, and yeah, [I will do it] as a director.” She was referring to Herman Koch’s acclaimed novel, “The Dinner,” which screenwriter-director Oren Moverman, whose credits include “The Messenger” and “Rampart,” is adapting for her.

She added: “I have something in development with HBO at the moment, which I am hoping to do with Julie Delpy, whom I greatly admire. Hopefully, that will come to fruition. But these things take time.” In this project that Cate will produce and star in, Julie is adapting “Cancer Vixen: A True Story,” the graphic novel/memoir of The New Yorker cartoonist Marisa Acocella Marchetto about her battle with cancer.

One gag of a cameo

Cate also confirmed a guest appearance that she makes in “Rake,” the Australian drama series (a US version by Fox Network debuted this month). “I am in it for, I think, two and a half seconds,” Cate said of her cameo. She politely declined to describe her role “because it’s one gag.”

Asked what she remembered best about winning Best Actress-Drama in the recent Golden Globe Awards, Cate said with a smile, “Unfortunately, my category came up rather late in the evening so I was a couple of sheets to the wind. Once your name is read out, it’s a high like no other so I can’t remember a lot.” She broke into a laugh as she quipped, “I hope I didn’t do too many things I regret.”

Cate enthused: “It was a roomful of wonderful people. I couldn’t move a lot because of my dress. It was amazing to be at the table with the Sony Pictures Classics… Mariel Hemingway, Dianne Wiest…” (Fittingly, Cate, whose “Blue Jasmine” was directed by Woody Allen, sat at a table with several actresses who memorably appeared in his films.) “So many people who have known and worked with Woody! I have admired Dianne for so long.”

That Armani gown

She said of the star-studded International Ballroom of the Beverly Hilton Hotel: “It was great to see Jane Fonda again and Emma Thompson, of course. I met Lupita Nyong’o for the first time. What she did in ‘12 Years a Slave’ is remarkable.”

In that ballroom and earlier, on the red carpet, Cate stood out with her elegance and aura that evoked old Hollywood glamour at its finest. “It helps when you have someone else doing your hair and makeup,” Cate remarked. “And when you are wearing a piece of Armani Couture that has been tailored to you… I mean, half the job is done there. That’s a pleasure and a privilege.”

Did she get to keep that dress? “I am working on it,” she quipped with the most meaningful smile.

On dressing up for the red carpet, Cate said, “It’s very instinctual. You can’t dress to please everybody; I don’t really try. You try and keep it fun. Fortunately, my family is here and I was

LUPITA Nyong’o’s work in “12 Years a Slave” is remarkable, says Cate. HFPA

with friends. That was really great. You don’t take it too seriously. I was fine the day [before the Globes]. But I woke up the next day and I was horrendously nervous. It was a very long press line.”

The actress claimed that she did not see herself as beautiful in her growing-up years. “I was never that girl,” she stressed, adding that she never thought of herself the way she held up Faye Dunaway for her beauty.

Her decision to become an actress was forged in theater. “The funny thing is, when you see people on stage, you always feel like they are taller and more charismatic and beautiful than they are.” When she pronounced words like “taller” with natural panache as “tallah,” with a graceful forward stretch of her arms for emphasis, Cate herself was the embodiment of these “beautiful” actors she was rhapsodizing about.

Elastic sense of beauty

But she clarified, “I have a very elastic sense of what’s beautiful. It’s not only purely about the surface—that fades very quickly. But yes, when I went to drama school, that’s when I thought perhaps I would give it a go. I knew a lot of really talented actresses in the theater, and a few in film, who didn’t work a lot. I thought, you need to be very strong to deal with that level of rejection. I didn’t know if I had the courage.”

Cate credited “a director when [she] was in third year at drama school” who encouraged her the most about pursuing acting. Nick Enright, who was also a writer, passed away in 2003.

The Melbourne native stressed that, while her identity was not dependent on the trophies she has been picking up, she appreciated the critical recognition.

“When you are proud of something you have done and you have made a film that you feel has merit, it has found an audience and it’s critically well-received, that’s a pretty pleasurable place to be. You don’t want that stuff to end up gathering dust at the bottom of someone’s DVD collection.”

Fluid identity

She said of her acting career, “I am enjoying it immensely —probably disproportionately and indecently so.”

She pointed out: “But my identity—it’s a very fluid thing. I tend to look out, rather than in, at how your actions affect other people, and your job as an actor, without wanting to be too wordy about it—it has to be a compassionate, generous thing. So it does keep you passionately engaged in other people’s experience.”

In the George Clooney-directed “The Monuments Men,” about a World War II platoon whose mission was to rescue art masterpieces from Nazi thieves, Cate plays Claire Simone. The part was inspired by Rose Valland, a French museum worker who risked her life and espied on the Nazi looting of art.

Teased about her character Claire aggressively seducing Matt Damon’s James Granger, Cate quipped with a sly smile, “We are just bound together by a mutual love of art.” Asked if she has been in a similar seduction situation in real life, Cate quipped, “No,” and then added with a grin, “Not that I can remember.”

Did she wish Matt’s character had surrendered to hers? Cate cracked, “Maybe that’s going to be the sequel.”

Comparing notes

On whether she compared notes about raising kids with Matt, who has three daughters and one stepdaughter, Cate, who has three sons with playwright and screenwriter Andrew Upton, joked, “There are several arranged marriages waiting to be done.”

She added, “I hadn’t worked with Matt since ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley’ (1999). That’s quite a long time of not having worked with him. We talked a lot about the intervening years. I have great admiration for the choices that he’s made. I am really looking forward to when he eventually gets around to directing a film.”

Raconteur

In working with Clooney and his buddies Matt, Bill Murray and John Goodman, didn’t Cate feel like Grace Kelly in a Rat Pack movie? “With those sensible shoes and that hairdo?,” she answered with a laugh. “No. I didn’t—not once. George and I worked together on ‘The Good German,’ a movie which I was very proud of and not many people saw. My husband said, ‘What is it with you and George and the Second World War?’”

She continued: “It was great to work with George again. He’s an incredible raconteur. I think that translated into the way he tells stories. The way he told me the story about what he wanted to tell, I really think that spirit has come across in the film. That it’s at once horrific, painfully hilarious and deeply human. I am not the raconteur that George is.”

CATE jests about marrying off her sons to Matt Damon’s daughters. After 15 years, they share the screen again in “The Monuments Men.”

Asked to comment on the subject of risking human lives to save art, Cate replied: “You never want to be placed in the position where, if I had to run into a fire, I would be saving my family, before I saved any object. I think what the film deals with is that these men, and this woman, wanted to save these objects not for themselves, not because they had a great love of either ‘degenerate art’ or the masters, but because they knew that if these perished, then Europe’s connection to its history would become increasingly fragile. They were doing it for noble reasons, for generations to come. What I find is that culture doesn’t reside in just an object—it resides in society’s connections to that object.”

Courage

Does she share Rose Valland’s courage? “I don’t know,” she admitted. “Sometimes it feels like it takes great courage to get out of bed in the morning but no, when you look at the actions of so many in war-torn countries, especially Rose Valland’s, it’s incredibly humbling. Our job as an actor is to try and make that person live and breathe so then it will encourage people to go and investigate what they thought were previously understood pockets of history, from a different perspective.”

If she had a choice of any of the great painters alive to paint her portrait, who would she choose? “Oh dear, that’s a very hard question to answer, because it’s all about the relationship, isn’t it?” she asked aloud. “Lucian Freud was incredible but he has passed away. Probably it would be Gerhard Richter because he influenced so many painters and photographers. If I throw it out there, maybe Gerhard Richter might read this, and who knows?” she asked with a glimmer in her eyes. “I should be so lucky.” Paging Mr. Richter then!

(E-mail the columnist at [email protected]. Follow him at www.twitter.com/nepalesruben).