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Oct 9, 2022
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TÁR Premiere at 60th New York Film Festival and Promotion

Hi, folks! Cate Blanchett fans certainly got the best this past week.

This is going to be a long post. We have compiled interviews and other TÁR related news. The movie is now out in select theatres and will have wide release on October 28th in the US.

Cate, Todd Field, Nina Hoss, Sophie Kauer, and Hildur Guðnadóttir were all present at the 60th New York Film Festival. There was a press conference earlier in the day, then the premiere which was followed by a Q&A moderated by Film at Lincoln Center’s director of programming, Dennis Lim.

Cate was also a guest at The Late Show with Stephen Colbert last Thursday. Throughout first week of October she has attended Q&As in New York and Los Angeles after screenings for TÁR.

Like we always remind, beware of spoilers.

Day 1 – SAG Screening (NY) and Press Junket

Press Junket and SAG Screening – Outside

Day 2 – GMA Guesting and NYFF Premiere

Good Morning America
GMA – Outside

NYFF Press Conference

NYFF Press Conference
NYFF Press Conference – Outside

NYFF Premiere

NYFF Highlights

NYFF Premiere
NYFF Premiere Q&A

Day 3 – BAFTA and NYFF Screening

BAFTA Q&A

NYFF Screening

On the second screening of TÁR at New York Film Festival, Cate with Nina Hoss and Todd Field introduced the movie to the audience.

Day 4 – Museum of Moving Image Screening

The post screening discussion was moderated by Laurie Anderson.

Day 5 – The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and Academy Screening

Cate was already in Los Angeles for another leg of TÁR press tour when her episode with The Late Show with Stephen Colbert aired. It was taped on October 4th.

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert Candids

There has been a screening at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures for members of the recording academy, the Q&A was moderated by Jonathan Franzen.

TÁR Screening at Academy Museum of Motion Pictures – Candids
TÁR Screening at Academy Museum of Motion Pictures

Day 6 – SAG, BAFTA, and AMC Special Screening

On Friday, Cate attended three different post screening Q&As — SAG LA screening was moderated by Jenelle Riley, AMC special screening moderated by David Canfield, BAFTA LA screening moderated by Jazz Tangcay.

SAG LA Screening

AMC Special Screening

https://www.instagram.com/p/CjdYQitLOe-/

BAFTA LA Screening

Day 7 – Academy Screening

Last day of US promo tour, Cate, Nina, Sophie, with production designer – Marco Bittner Rosser, costume designer – Bina Daigeler, and editor – Monika Willi attended The Academy screening. Cate and Nina are wearing matching attire, the blazer is from the 1993 collection of Moschino.

Interviews

Twitter Movies

ET Canada – NYFF

ET Canada

Yahoo Entertainment
WHYY – PBS

How Cate Blanchett got the role of a lifetime in ‘TÁR’

“‘Tár’ takes on the devastating spectacle of ‘cancellation,'” reads The Atlantic’s review of her new film, while The Telegraph calls it the “the first cancel-culture thriller.” Written and directed by Todd Field (“In the Bedroom”), the chilling drama traces the gradual downfall of a world-famous classical music conductor named Lydia Tár (Blanchett) amid sexual misconduct allegations. But the movie can’t be boiled down to a single hot-button issue, the actress says.

“This has been the hardest film for me to reduce to some digestible sound bite,” Blanchett says, sipping tea in a Midtown hotel suite with co-star Nina Hoss. “It’s an examination of the corruptive nature of power in all its forms, but it’s also about so many other things,” both psychological and existential.

“You sound wanky talking about that, but it’s rare to see a film that has genuinely big questions. And it respects the audience enough to ask them.”

Despite the movie’s timely premise, Lydia is a fictional character who “I’d been thinking about for quite a while,” Field says. He wrote the character specifically for Blanchett, after meeting the actress years ago and discussing the possibility of collaborating.

“That meeting left an impression I couldn’t shake, as if someone had permanently scalded me with a branding iron,” Field recalls. “A true genius. So, who better to play a genius?”

Blanchett, 53, says she had never read anything like “Tár” before. She was compelled by its themes of legacy and the “tragic nature” of time, as Lydia faces turning 50 and wonders what’s left – if anything – for her to still accomplish.

“I had a seismic response to it that I still don’t quite understand,” Blanchett says. “It spoke to a lot of things I had been thinking about for a long time: not only in relation to power structures, but also for me personally, the creative process. When you get to a certain point in your career and you’ve done a few things – some of them have worked, some of them haven’t – at what point do you risk throwing it all away? Is that the bravest thing you could possibly do?”

She was also drawn to how the movie “doesn’t allow the audience to sit in easy judgment of the characters.” Lydia brutally castigates students whose tastes she deems too “woke.” She has no qualms about promoting a pretty young cellist (Sophie Kauer) over a more experienced one, or hacking her assistant’s (Noémie Merlant) laptop in an effort to erase incriminating emails.

“It’s very rare that women get portrayed like that,” Hoss says. “If female characters are powerful, or they’re slightly more complicated than normal, you usually get an explanation why that happened: a certain motivation or a trauma from childhood. That does not necessarily happen if you’re male.”

The character’s prickly demeanor hasn’t tempered critics’ enthusiasm for the film, which has 98% positive reviews on aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes. Blanchett is widely expected to earn her eighth Oscar nomination for her towering turn, after two wins, for best actress (2013’s “Blue Jasmine”) and best supporting actress (2004’s “The Aviator”).

Last month, Blanchett received the Volpi Cup for best actress at Venice Film Festival for “Tár.” Her 7-year-old daughter, Edith, and mother, June, were both on hand to watch her accept the prize.

“It was really nice for my mom to be there,” Blanchett says. “(The Volpi Cup) is such an honor, of course, but everyone seems to talk about performances as if they exist without an ensemble. People go and see ‘Hamlet,’ but they don’t really feel the play unless there’s an incredible Gertrude.”

“That’s very kind,” Hoss says. “But take the compliment. Take the compliment!”

Together, Blanchett and Hoss embarked on a “crash course in absolutely everything to do with classical music.”

The German actress (“Phoenix”) trained in violin, while Blanchett learned how to conduct and play piano. She also learned German, although Hoss insists that she didn’t give her co-star any pointers on her native language.

“I didn’t need to,” Hoss says, glancing at Blanchett with a grin. “She was perfect.”

Full article on USA Today

Cate Blanchett and Todd Field grapple with power, process in ‘TÁR’

Cate Blanchett has heard the line before. “I wrote this part for you” is a director-actor pickup line, she said. It is not usually to be believed.

But what she didn’t know when Todd Field sent her his script for “Tár,” a modern-day parable about an extraordinary conductor and composer at the height of her career whose status begins to crumble amid misconduct allegations, was that he wouldn’t have done it without her. The production company and distributor Focus Features didn’t know this either. And he was dragging his feet a bit in sending it off to Blanchett. Not only would it be his first film in over 15 years, but it was the first wholly original screenplay he’d written since 1995. It was, he said, a scary moment.

Blanchett laughs about it now. Of course she was going to say yes. She was rapt by Field, the actor, writer and director who she’d met years earlier about a project he was working on with Joan Didion that never came to be, and by the complex story of “Tár” and the challenge of it. In the process of preparing for “Tár,” she’d learn to play piano, to speak German and conduct an orchestra, all of which she does really does in the film.

“I am still processing the experience, not only because it spoke to a lot of things that I had been thinking about, but I feel so expanded by having been in Todd’s orbit,” Blanchett said in an interview with Field earlier this week. “It was a very, very fluid, dangerous, alive process making the film.”

“Tár,” which is currently playing in limited release and expands nationwide on Oct. 28, was born out of a desire to scratch at questions about power that Field had thinking about for the past few years — the abuses of power, the structures of power and why those pyramids exist in the first place. And what better place to set that than the world of classical music?

The film lets us into Lydia’s rarefied, first-class world and invites us to meet and ponder those around her, from her partner Sharon (Nina Hoss), the lead violinist in the orchestra, to her assistant Francesca (Noémie Merlant) and wonder about their own complicities.

“I really hope that people are not put off by thinking this is an elitist film or an elitist topic. You don’t at all have to be a connoisseur. It’s about so many other things,” Hoss said. “It makes you think, hopefully, about who are the people supporting people in power positions to do certain things and do you sometimes do that because you actually profit from it. It’s also about being creative: Does leading such an institution as this big orchestra hinder you in doing what you actually want to do?”

Merlant, in her first English-language role, is still asking herself questions about Francesca, who wants to be a conductor like Tár but is at the moment is mainly fetching coffee, booking flights, managing schedules and other administrative tasks under the guise of mentorship. And she has to consider her role in the Tár machine as the allegations intensify.

“She would do anything for her, up to a certain point,” Merlant said. “That I found very interesting.”

The egos stayed in front of the camera, though. Behind the scenes of “Tár,” she said, Field and Blanchett fostered an atmosphere of respect and openness.

“Sometimes we have this sensation that in order to create an amazing piece of art, you have to struggle,” Merlant. “But it is possible to do great things in a nice environment.”

The production took pains to make the world of “Tár” to feel authentic, not like a “toy town” version of the classical music world. They enlisted the help of the Dresden Philharmonic, casting some of its members in speaking roles like Dorothea Plans Casal and Fabian Dirr, and looking to Concertmaster Wolfgang Hentrich for his expertise. Hildur Guðnadóttir, the Oscar-winning Icelandic composer, crafted the score. Hoss played the violin too. That Blanchett would conduct, Field said, was just a given.

“I didn’t even have to ask her,” Field said. “If I said, okay, this is about somebody that builds a skyscraper, I knew that she was going to build the skyscraper with no question that she would become Howard Roark.”

Still, it was a tense moment the first time Blanchett took the podium at the Dresden Hall to conduct a rehearsal scene. Then, Field said, someone “clammed.” Everyone laughed and the ice was broken.

It was a powerful moment when it came together, though. Hoss, who was sitting in the orchestra when Blanchett raised her arm for the first time and everyone started playing together, said that “all of us were on the verge of tears.” Merlant too would often sit and watch her co-star in awe.

They cast a first-time actor in the key role of Olga, a talented Russian cellist who Tár takes an interest in. Sophie Kauer, who is currently studying classical cello performance at the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo, beat out hundreds of cellists for the part.

“The first time I met Cate it was actually a conducting rehearsal, so I had to play for her,” Kauer said. “That was just mildly terrifying. But, you know, you got to do what you got to do. I think the thing about musicians is we’re very workman like we just always get the job done.”

This summer, Blanchett, Guðnadóttir, Kauer, and Field even met up again at Abbey Road Studios to record a Tár concept album that will be available to the public.

But Field’s biggest hope is that “Tár” is a film that audiences seek out in theaters. It was made as an aural and visual experience for the big screen.

“It’s not something to sit at home and watch,” Field said.

The reception for “Tár” has been roundly rapturous since its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, where Blanchett was awarded the top acting prize — which could be the first of many for the already decorated actor. But Field bristles at the mention of awards.

“Sincerely that’s not why the two of us made this film. We want people to go in and we want them to come out and hopefully be talking to each other in a lively manner in the parking lot on the way to their cars or to the subway or wherever they’re off to, you know?” Field said. “It’s a film that begs a conversation.”

Full article on AP News

TÁR Photo Session
 

Cate’s glam team during US press tour:

Make-up by Mary Greenwell
Hair by Robert Vetica
Styling by Elizabeth Stewart

Sources: USA Today, AP

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