Cate Blanchett attended the UK premieres of DISCLAIMER* (written and directed for the screen by Alfonso Cuarón) and RUMOURS (written and directed by Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson) during the 68th BFI London Film Festival. DISCLAIMER* Chapters I & II of VII is now streaming on Apple TV+.

RUMOURS is out in cinemas in the US and Canada on 18 October, in the UK on 6 December. The film is doing the film festival rounds outside the US:
Vienna International Film Festival screenings on 20 and 25 October. Tickets can be booked here.
Inverness Film Festival screening on 4 November. Tickets here.
Leeds International Film Festival screenings on 3, 5, and 7 November. Tickets here.
Stockholm Film Festival screenings on 9, 12, and 16 November. Tickets here.
Cork International Film Festival screening on 17 November. Tickets here.

Check out interviews and photos below.

DISCLAIMER* Interviews

Beware of spoilers!

Actress Cate Blanchett has said the audience will be “surprised by the way the narrative unfolds” in her new TV series, Disclaimer.

Speaking to the PA news agency at the film festival, the Australian actress said she hoped watchers would “stick with it through to the end”.

She said: “I’m really excited for it to air on Friday, because I’m curious.”

“I mean, the reason why you make these things is for the audience, and I don’t think I’ve ever had a kind of more anticipatory kind of sense of what’s going to happen and what they’re going to make of it, because obviously we know what’s going to happen.”

“But I think they’ll be surprised by the way the narrative unfolds and who they think the characters are.”

Alfonso Cuarón told PA: “The point of departure was Cate, because I wrote the whole script thinking about about Cate Blanchett for the role of Catherine, and it was a big collaboration with Cate to think about the cast, and we wanted something that felt unique for the piece.”

Cate Blanchett‘s Disclaimer role turned out to be much more than an epic performance of a celebrated documentarian watching her life fall apart: She learned to debone a fish and tame cats, too.

It turns out, in Alfonso Cuarón‘s AppleTV+ thriller, the animal friends of Blanchett and Sacha Baron Cohen‘s characters are integral to the show’s layered symbolism.

It is hard not to notice the performances of some secondary, nonhuman characters, too — the Ravenscrofts’ cat, who regularly leaps in and out of shot at the elegant London home of Disclaimer‘s central couple. In one crucial scene, as Blanchett’s character is deboning some sole, we see her trying to wrangle the misbehaved cat who is intent on making her life harder.

It might seem innocuous — but Cuarón was very purposeful about the cat, and Blanchett soon came to understand its importance in the show.

“[I was like], why is the cat there? And then I realized,” Blanchett began. “I think it was in the shot where I had to debone a fish — I was given the deboning fish lessons. My family ate quite a lot of fish during this shoot…. But then, just when I got the deboning right, when we had done a few takes, [Cuarón] is like, ‘Put the cat in.’”

Cuarón half-joked: “It was incredible to see Cate suffering. Taking the cat away, cooking, but never missing a beat in terms of her character to perform the way that the character would be doing it. For me, it was a pleasure.”

He continued: “I have to say, Cate broke the cat. The cat ended up doing whatever Cate wanted. The animal trainer was very upset because he said: ‘It took me three years to teach this cat to go from A to B, and now the cat does do whatever it wants to do.’” Blanchett then clarified she is an animal lover at home, revealing she owns two cats, four dogs and six chickens.

Full article on THR

In Alfonso Cuarón’s seven-part Apple TV+ limited series “Disclaimer,” Cate Blanchett plays Catherine Ravenscroft, an accomplished and award-winning documentary filmmaker whose life is upended when a book is published based on a fictionalized version of a difficult event from her past.

But one of the points of “Disclaimer” is that viewers themselves are also upended, as the Oscar-winning, Mexican-born director of “Children of Men,” “Gravity” and “Roma” juggles present-day scenes with flashbacks, allowing viewers to discover the relationships between characters on their own. The story also shifts between a first person, second person and third person perspective depending on what character is on the screen.

It’s an approach that requires viewers to untangle a lot of narrative threads as they follow Blanchett and Sacha Baron Cohen as the adult Catherine and Robert Ravenscroft, Leila George and Adam El Hagar as their younger versions and Kevin Kline and Lesley Manville as Stephen and Nancy Brigstocke, whose son Jonathan died after encountering Catherine on a holiday decades earlier.

And for Blanchett, who also served as an executive producer on the series, it’s an approach that allows her to be tight-lipped and uncommunicative for much of the six-hour-plus running time. Catherine isn’t very talkative or likable, and Cuarón and Blanchett only spill her secrets reluctantly and slowly.

“If this was a more standardized version of serialized storytelling, you would get to know the character,” Blanchett told TheWrap. “You would build bridges of empathy between the character and the audience.”

“Disclaimer,” though, isn’t terribly interested in empathy, at least not for the woman at the center of the turmoil. “In this, we are thrust into the middle of a crisis that no one fully understands,” she said with a grin. “You don’t get a chance as an audience to understand the character, and as an actor you don’t have to try to be likable.”

“Usually, you would make the character likable from the beginning, and then you’d see the journey,” added Cuarón, who said that Blanchett attacked the script with “a magnifying glass and a sledgehammer” looking for inconsistencies and making suggestions. “Cate had to use her physicality to express so many clues about who the character really is and what’s beneath that. I don’t know how she did it.”

Blanchett isn’t exactly sure, either. “The way the story was being told was quite tricky, but I love a challenge,” she said. “In a way, I had to play a tall glass of water. The tricky thing was to withhold information from the audience about who the person was — not in some manipulative way, but to play someone who had a wealth of hidden experiences buried deep within her. And to allow that to sit there, and sometimes to bubble up.

“It was quite tricky playing a character who didn’t speak her truth, to use that very strange contemporary American expression.”

She shook her head. “Your truth. I always thought, in a very Greek way, that the truth was an immutable thing. But I think what we are coming to realize is that getting to the truth of someone or getting to the truth of an event is a very messy and complicated process that’s made up from a myriad of different perspectives in a way that speaks to the identity of a person.

“And your identity is not a static thing. You are different things to different people,” Blanchett added. “I thought about the character in relation to the circumstance that she found herself in. And with a lot of events that happen to us, we either forget them, or we bury them or ignore them or polish them up and make them into little treasures that very quickly don’t resemble anything at all of the actual event.”

“Disclaimer” circles around the event at the heart of its narrative, returning to it from different perspectives and offering different versions all the way to the finale. “I think there’s a form that tends to calcify around serialized storytelling,” she said. “You have the cliffhangers, you have character arcs developed in a certain way. And Alfonso said, in the best, most open way possible, ‘I don’t know how to make television.’ And I never felt that that’s what we were making. It was a genuine investigation in seeing what would happen.”

Full interview on The Wrap

Cate Blanchett doesn’t need a disclaimer. In an all-black suit, a chin-length, blond bob and the perfect red lipstick, the Hollywood icon is in her power era.

The 55-year-old Blanchett says this stage of her life is about making quick, important calls. She goes with her gut, throwing caution (and sometimes scripts) to the wind.

Take the time, a few years back, when award-winning writer-director Alfonso Cuarón sent Blanchett the script for a new psychological thriller called “Disclaimer.”

“I read it and I threw it across the room! Whenever you throw anything across the room, you realize that you’re confronted and challenged by it,” she says with a laugh.

“Sometimes in life you’ve already made the decision the minute something is presented to you. You know you will embark on whatever that situation is. You just know,” Blanchett observes. “That wisdom is a delightful part of aging.”

She knew that she wanted to star in “Disclaimer,” a new seven-part series on Apple TV+ that also stars Kevin Kline, Lesley Manville and Sacha Baron Cohen.

In the screen adaptation of Renee Knight’s novel, Blanchett portrays Catherine Ravenscroft, an acclaimed journalist who has a reputation for writing about the misdeeds of others.

When she receives a thin novel from an unknown author called “The Perfect Stranger,” she begins to read and later is horrified to realize she is the main character in a story that exposes a dark secret that she has hidden for over 20 years.

“Her life begins to unravel,” Blanchett says. “She finds out that the past always finds a way to come back and haunt you.”

Blanchett — who lives in Sydney and Sussex with her husband, playwright and screenwriter Andrew Upton, and their four children — shares her good life tips:

Just say “yes”

Cuarón insists Blanchett was his first and only choice for “Disclaimer’s” lead role. “I was terrified that she would say no,” says Cuarón, a two-time best director Oscar winner for “Gravity” and “Roma.” “She was so much in my mind from the start.”

Blanchett says she was all-in from the start — even though this series was born years ago. “It was pre-pandemic, and I was told by my agent that Alfonso wanted to call me about something. He was so cryptic. He said, ‘I’ve written a script.’ It was a very loose outline of the first three episodes. He said, ‘I don’t want to talk to you until you’ve read it,’ ” she recalls. “I loved it. He could have said, ‘You are playing a tree or a lamppost.’ I would be there.”

Share a few secrets

The actress says the series is a cautionary tale about keeping secrets. “I had the chance to play a woman who has things that she has buried, traumatic things,” Blanchett shares. “I did have to think about what happens to repressed memories and things that we have avoided rather than dealt with. And I found it fascinating and quite painful to get into that mindset.”

Don’t judge

“We live in a world where we decide very quickly what is the truth of a person. We’re very quick to make judgments,” she says. “This story in ‘Disclaimer’ invites us to make quick judgments, but maybe suspend those judgments right through to the end.”

Support system

“None of us are self made. Our journeys are interlinked. We’ve always been made and unmade by each other,” Blanchett says. “We stand on the shoulders of the women before us, and we have a responsibility to work on our own shoulders so they’re strong for the next generation.”

Turn it off

Blanchett, who has a slew of upcoming projects, says she has found the perfect way to de-stress from a busy day. “Sit quietly and turn your phone off for 20 minutes,” she says. “Your face will relax because you’re not talking. Your mind will relax because you’re not scrolling. Or you could give up social media entirely and take 10 years off you!”

Invest in you

Blanchett says juggling home life and Hollywood isn’t easy. “I will grab a few minutes for myself in the morning and the evening,” she says. “Life is chaos. You need to take those few minutes for you … and enjoy them. … There is so much pressure on women, so I think anything you do to make yourself feel better is a win. Look after your skin, get in a walk, go for a swim, take a quick nap, watch a 250-Kleenex movie … anything that makes you happy, invest in it and invest in you.”

Turn fear into fuel

“I don’t know what to expect when I step onto a new set,” Blanchett says. “But I choose to turn that fear into excitement. You can do that with many things in life. It shifts your perspective.”

How to let go

“As each passing day goes by as one gets older, you can feel like you’re less in control,” Blanchett says. “As women, we often feel like we need to be in control of things. What I know now is the only way forward is to let go of control. There is a saying, ‘You hold on tightly and let go lightly.’ You let go lightly knowing the generations behind you are going to pick it up.”

Celebrate your journey

“My journey has been messy and eclectic,” she says, “But I’m still here. Standing here. Boldly.”

RUMOURS Interviews

The politely wild and surreal new Canadian comedy Rumours isn’t shy about hiding its metaphors in plain sight. Set during a G7 summit held in the forested German village of Dankerode, the film quickly shakes off its carefully choreographed bureaucratic trappings to plunge a handful of world leaders into a waking nightmare.

In one pivotal scene – though describing any sequence in Rumours as something close to vital is to fundamentally misunderstand its loose, farcical composition – the German chancellor Hilda (Cate Blanchett, in full Angela Merkel mode) stumbles upon the supersized cerebrum, inching closer to it as if compelled by unspoken command. Which is about as good an allegory as can be had for the three-headed brain trust actually overseeing Rumours: co-directors Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and brother Galen Johnson, long-time collaborators who also happen to be kings of Winnipeg’s (increasingly growing) film scene.

“There are different questions that you ask directors as an actor,” Blanchett recalls in an interview. “Some are technical, some require specific directions, and then there are the philosopher’s questions that require a different length and frame of an answer. On this film, it was a bit like, how is this all going to work? But the creative process was so enmeshed and cohesive throughout. There was a feeling of a shared vision.”

Rumours, which the filmmakers describe as (deep breath) a “cautionary dramedy cum erotico-ministerial techno-thriller and provisional Götterdämmerung,” was shot over the course of several chilly weeks in a Hungarian forest. Which feels about as far removed as possible from the extravagantly comfortable hotel room that Blanchett and her directors had when they were in town for the documentary’s North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.

“There was a certain amount of Cate calming us down on set – dark nights involving boring stuff like production financing where she was cheering us up from being in the dumps,” recalls Evan.

“It was more like there were no more cheese sticks in the Hungarian craft services,” Blanchett interjects.

“We forgave all of our mistakes. Or at least I forgive myself,” Maddin adds.

“We were very aware this could be frustrating for actors,” Galen slips in.

The foursome bounce off each other with the kind of easy, casually caustic energy that can only be forged by artists who went through the rough and dirty work of independent filmmaking. There is good-natured teasing – a barb about the need to iron clothes for interviews goes round and round – and gentle contradiction, each member of the team eager to finish the other’s sentences. Or simply get the last word in.

“I liked the fact that the brain was screaming out, ‘I’m a metaphor!’ But it actually isn’t,” adds Maddin, who doesn’t note – but perhaps should – that Rumours isn’t his first rodeo when it comes to the human cortex, given his experimental 2006 film Brand Upon the Brain! “When we make a lower-budget movie, all three of us wear every hat: cinematographer, writer, sound designer, colour correction. But here, the actors had so much more experience than we do, so they’re helping each other and we just stand back and watch.”

“We divide labour in a lot of the preproduction, and then it comes together during shooting,” clarifies Galen. “Because you don’t want to give different directions to the actors.”

However Rumours pieced itself together, the result is an assuredly hilarious comic fantasy that is also – self-pleasuring zombies and all – Maddin’s most accessible work since his 2003 comic drama The Saddest Music in the World, if not his most mainstream effort ever. The film certainly boasts the highest-wattage cast of the filmmaker’s career. Alongside Blanchett, the internationally assembled cast boasts Alicia Vikander (playing the Secretary-General of the European Commission), Charles Dance (as the bizarrely British-accented U.S. President), Denis Ménochet (the President of France), and Roy Dupuis (performing his own smouldering Quebecois spin on Justin Trudeau, complete with man-bun).

“We were in a forest with movie stars for a few weeks – there are certainly worse jobs,” recalls Galen.

“I want to know from Cate whether she minded sitting around a lot and waiting as an actor,” Evan says. “We were, too, on a production of this size.”

“We did sit in silence in the dark a lot, and then invariably Roy would say, ‘Would anyone like a cup of coffee?’” Blanchett says, adopting Dupuis’ gravelly seductive tenor. “It was a long, strange adventure. After a while, we couldn’t tell if we were there for three minutes or three weeks.”

Making the festival rounds with Rumours – the troupe’s TIFF stop comes a few months after debuting the film at Cannes this past spring – is not unlike orchestrating a mini G7 summit all its own. The dialogues overlap, the schedules are carefully orchestrated, and the cameras are always rolling.

“I watched a lot of the G7 tapes to prepare, and it’s some of the most supremely awkward bad theatre,” Blanchett says with a laugh.

“What’s so strange to me is the awkward nature of everyone’s body language. It’s as if they had forgotten how to talk. There’s a cliché that when you go to drama school, you walk like this,” she says, pantomiming a normal gait, before shifting into a robotic stride, “and you walk out like that.”

“I loved watching Boris Johnson do the Frankenstein,” Maddin says.

“I could connect to it on one level, although what I do for a living is silly and inconsequential, and they’re talking about climate change,” Blanchett says.

Ultimately, though, Blanchett did walk away – in some form – from Rumours with the air of disappointment.

“I only signed because I thought we were going to go to Winnipeg!” she says. “I haven’t been invited yet.”

“Oh, well,” Maddin responds. “Next time.”

Screen Rant: What was it about Rumours that made you want to be a part of it?

Cate Blanchett: Well, obviously I’m a huge fan of Guy’s ouvre. I had seen all his films and I particularly loved The Green Fog, which he’d made with Evan and Galen Johnson. And then I found out that Ari Aster was producing. That’s how it came to me and how it came to you. So as soon as I read the script, I laughed out loud. I think all good scripts have the sense that they have to be filmed to make sense. And so, the chance to work with them and with an international cast, it was unturndownable. I knew it was funny. It was awkward. And the way they assemble their films is so unique in particular. So I wanted to be part of that.

Screen Rant: How would you describe this movie to someone who wants to check it out?

Cate Blanchett: Go see it. I mean, you use the word punk, but I use the word Scooby-Doo. It’s this sort of awkward cross between a Mexican soap opera and an episode of Scooby-Doo and a zombie chase movie.??

Denis Ménochete: And Dr. Strangelove.

Cate Blanchett: It feels like a documentary at times because the leadership, the global leadership is so profoundly inept that, and we play such inept world leaders who don’t know who they are without their aids, their mobile phones and their podiums. But yet the world is ending, so it feels strange. It’s a political satire on some levels, but it leans into the utter stupidity of our global leadership at the moment.

Screen Rant: If you were in this situation, how do you think you would handle it?

Denis Ménochete: I would just go, Cate, what do we do?

Cate Blanchett: I would probably eat you all.

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A post shared by Mary Greenwell (@marygreenwell)

Cate Blanchett and Guy Maddin before the UK premiere of Rumours. Photo from Mary Greenwell’s instagram story.

On the show this week: Dissecting the deluge of disinformation shaping America’s election, Cate Blanchet and @alfonsocuaronon’s new psychological thriller, Disclaimer* and @MarziehHamidi‘s fight against the Taliban’s misogyny.#TheAmanpourHour this Saturday at 11aET @CNN pic.twitter.com/SJzLo3W0Rv

— Christiane Amanpour (@amanpour) October 12, 2024

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