Little Fish (2005)

Cate Blanchett as: Tracy Louise Heart

Directed by: Rowan Woods
Selected Cast: Sam Neill, Hugo Weaving, Martin Henderson & Dustin Nguyen
Written by: Jacquelin Perske
Release Year: 2005
Genre: Crime / Drama / Romance / Thriller
MPAA Rating: R

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In Sydney, Tracey Heart is a thirty-two years old manager of a video shop ex-addicted in heroin and clean for four years. She is trying to raise forty thousand dollars to buy a shop for computer games on the next door of the rental and become partner of her boss, but based on her negative records, the banks deny the loan. Tracey takes care of her junkie stepfather Lionel Dawson, unsuccessfully trying to make him quit his heroin habit. When her former boy-friend Jonny returns from Vancouver, Tracey’s mother Janelle fears a fall of Tracey, while she blames Jonny for the car accident where her son Ray lost one leg. When Ray and Jonny associate to Moss, the assistant of the retired criminal boss Bradley ‘The Jockey’ Thompson, in drug dealing, Tracey is convinced by Jonny to join them and raise the necessary money for her business along the weekend.

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Quotes from Cate Blanchett

On how she came to the project: “I think I probably heard about the project two or three years ago – and all good things take time! The thing I really loved about Rowan [Woods] as a director was that after the huge success of The Boys – one of those Australian films that survive more than a year, people are still watching and talking about it – he wasn’t in any rush to make his second feature. We’d been speaking off and on about working together, and so it was just a matter of finding the right thing. He said that Jacquelin (Perske, writer) had written a script and he sent it me. I was really intrigued by it, I think primarily because of the characters. When you are dealing with supposed working class characters they are often clichéd, but this was a set of characters which didn’t fit into any particular socio-economic group – they are almost a forgotten class of people.”
On the characters in Little Fish: “These are people who have had exciting and hopeful dreams in their twenties, which have all been dashed on the rocks, and now they have to reapprentice themselves to their parents and try and work out who they are in their thirties. This is a whole group of deeply uncool and unfashionable people who never get represented in cinema.”
On working with Rowan Woods: “I loved that about Rowan, he’s meticulous in the way the he fills an actor’s imagination with an entire universe, down to the teacups and napkins that they had at their third birthday party. So when you go into filming – it’s Jacobian almost – you have a whole repertoire of memories and shared imagery.”
On her character, Tracy Heart: “What Rowan and I talked about a lot, as a recovered addict, is that she didn’t fit neatly into the NA model. She hadn’t gone down that sort of ‘person who never recovers’ path who then gets addicted to the group networks. She’s much more isolated and much more shut down than that. She’s recovered with her mother; de-toxed at home. There is a very strong sequence of scenes in the film with Lionel (Hugo Weaving) who is Tracy’s mentor and father figure – the Jesus to Tracy’s Mary Magdalene – the iconography continues! He asks her to score for him, and I decided that was her trigger: the getting on, that was her excitement.”
On the scene with the children’s choir in the film: “The odd thing about the scene with the kids in the choir was that Rowan and Vincent had gone location scouting into a church hall and seen these children rehearsing and thought what a strange moment. A lot of that has happened throughout the course of the film, locations have changed, often for the better, simply by happenstance. The film feels quite blessed in that way – that that moment appeared to Rowan, as it’s such a strange thing for Tracy to walk in on. We filmed that scene just after the reelection of John Howard and a lot of people were feeling very disillusioned with Australia, and its coming to terms with its place in Asia and its moral responsibility in the world. Maybe since having children – but I found it heartbreaking; the kids’ innocence and their hope. It’s an odd choice of song for them to be singing, it has a deep connection with Tracy’s adolescence, which the children don’t have any connection to – it’s just beautiful lyrics and a lovely tune – but it brings something so pure to that dark polluted moment of Tracy’s where she’s about to go and use in the toilets. That connection I found heartbreaking, and I find the excitement and the dedication of those children really, really moving.”

Quotes from Others

Rowan Woods:
— “Cate [Blanchett] is someone who I admire as an actor almost more than anyone on the planet. She’s got this amazing craft and this incredible emotional depth, and she’s smart and down to earth too. She a very industrious actor who spends a lot of time finding the voice of a character… With Little Fish, she’s playing a role that she has never played; a contemporary Australian girl of her age group.”
Dustin Nguyen:
— “She’s [Cate Blanchett] very friendly in the sense she makes you feel comfortable. [But] she’s not the chit-chat type when she’s working.”
Noni Hazlehurst:
— “She’s [Cate Blanchett] very down to earth and she’s got two young kids and all the problems that go with it. When we were on set, we’d go and sit in the make-up van in the morning and chat about the kids, then get on with the work.”
Lisa McCune:
— “The film [Little Fish] itself is lyrical. But I think it’s Cate Blanchett who is quite lyrical actually, she’s like the glue in the piece. Everybody’s like a satellite around her and she really draws everybody into that story.”
Martin Henderson on the film:
— “I think the story itself trascends geograohy. The story is a universal one in that we’re all always striving for progress, to move on. There’s always something, whether it be socioeconomic, financial or emotional, holding us back. Humans go to the moon now, there’s something in our psyche about moving on.”
Hugo Weaving on the film:
— “Everyone in this film is striving for some kind of happiness, but for most of us, that happiness is tied to somebody else. For Tracy, she’s being held back from what she wants by Jonny and her brother and Brad, and I’m being stopped from being who I was to be by Brad and his wife — it’s an endless cycle that just needs one person to break it to set everyone free.”

Trivia & Facts

Filmed in Australia.
Cate Blanchett won Best Lead Actress at the AFI (AACTA) Awards, more accolades here.
First feature film produced under Dirty Films, the production company that Cate Blanchett and her husband Andrew Upton founded.
Cate Blanchett and Hugo Weaving have worked together in TV series, film, and theatre: Bordertown (1995); The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-2003) Little Fish (2005), The Hobbit Trilogy (2012-2014); Hedda Gabler (2004-06), Uncle Vanya (2010-12).
The film premiered at Melbourne Film Festival on 20 July 2005.
Tracy Heart is the film’s working title.