WHILE Quentin Tarantino was talking recently about his forthcoming western, The Hateful Eight, conversation turned to the staying power of movies. Somewhat startlingly in a business where talking about peers in anything less than flattering terms is about as frowned upon as voting Republican, the Reservoir Dogs director reached for an example.

“Half of these Cate Blanchett movies – they’re all just like these arty things,” he told New York magazine. “I’m not saying they’re bad movies, but I don’t think most of them have a shelf life. But The Fighter or American Hustle – those will be watched in 30 years.”

To which one response, having met the lady, is: “Say it to her face, Quentin. I dare you.”

It is not that Blanchett, star of Carol, the new Todd Haynes-directed drama about an affair between two women, is scary. But her looks and bearing call to mind the stars from Hollywood’s Golden Age – Hepburn, Davis, Crawford, Bacall, Bergman, Hayworth (ever Marilyn, despite the similarity in hair colour). She is, in short, a proper movie star, a dame not to be messed with.

The Herald:

Cate Blanchett has some of the glamour of Hollywood's golden age

One could see this at first hand at the London Film Festival press conference for Carol in October. The film goes on general release next week. These events are usually tame affairs; with Blanchett, however, it was as if someone had brought a leopard to a village cat show.

Was this film with two strong female leads a breakthrough for the industry, someone asked. “Every time there are interesting, complex roles played by actresses on screen someone says do you think this is a breakthrough, does this mean there is going to be more of the same,” purred Blanchett. “We seem to every year find ourselves in the same conversation that somehow it’s remarkable. There’s a swathe of great roles for women and certainly a swathe of wonderful female performers. I think it’s just time to get on with it.”

O-kay. Your character Carol, a mother, says having a child is a wonderful gift. As a mother yourself, the next questioner asked, did that come straight from the heart?

“Yes.” Silence.

This has been called a festival of strong women … “What does that mean?”

That last question caused such a storm of heated musing the (male) interviewer finally whimpered: “I’m sorry I asked.”

The Herald:

Cate Blanchett in The Aviator

So off I set the next day for a one to one with the lady herself, fully expecting a wrestling match of an interview, full of knockdowns and no submissions. As it turns out, she is a good egg, smart and engaging. And she only swipes me with her paw once.

Carol, adapted from the Patricia Highsmith novel The Price of Salt, tells the story of rich, suburban housewife and mother Carol (Blanchett) who falls in love with a Manhattan shop assistant, Therese (Rooney Mara). It is 1950s America, where such a love hardly dared write its name much less speak it. Carol is a gorgeous film, looking for all the world as if a 1955 copy of American Vogue had come to life. Despite Blanchett’s mild protestations about breakthroughs, it is also a remarkable piece both in having two female leads, and in treating lesbianism as if it is an everyday part of life’s sexual tapestry rather than, as Queen Victoria held, something so fantastic as to be wholly unbelievable, like leprechauns.

This is Blanchett’s second time around with Haynes. Complete with whispy perm and well scrubbed face, she was one of his Bob Dylans, alongside Heath Ledger and Christian Bale, in I’m Not There.

In theatre you get to work with people over and over again, she says, but it is rare in film. “DiCaprio has worked with Scorsese a lot and Jennifer Lawrence has worked with David O Russell many times. The work just gets deeper and deeper.”

Blanchett, 46, worked with DiCaprio and Scorsese in The Aviator (2004), in which she played Katharine Hepburn to DiCaprio’s Howard Hughes. The picture won her the first of two Oscars, the other arriving after her starring turn as the fragile heroine of Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine (2013). If one had to choose, Hepburn the Hollywood rebel, the unconventional beauty, is the closest fit to Blanchett. While she does not make the kind of waves Hepburn did, scooting home to Australia after every picture has given Blanchett the air of an outsider.

“There’s always a nervousness,” she replies when I ask what the first day on set was like with Scorsese, Allen, Haynes, Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit), Ridley Scott (Robin Hood), David Fincher (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), Spielberg (Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull), Soderbergh (The Good German), Hallstrom (The Shipping News) – just some of the titans of modern cinema whose call went out to Cate.

As soon as you start working together a lot of the trepidation gets dispelled, she says. “You just have to take a deep breath and say, if I screw up I screw up and they’ll tell me. You can’t be expected to know everything on day one, they have to be forgiving.”

She admits to being “very, very nervous” joining The Aviator because filming had been going on for a while, and she was playing Hepburn. But Scorsese was great, she says. “He said you don’t have to look anything like her, don’t worry about it, you can have blonde hair, you look great blonde. What he was doing was saying whatever you do will be fine. So that gave me licence.”

 

Carol finds her with a couple of lines that could have come straight out of a Hollywood picture of old. Did female actors have it better then? “I hazard a guess that the studio system, while people talk about how strangulating it was, there was also a degree of development of people’s careers, and protection. Whereas I feel now people are welcomed into that and spat out when they don’t have any use. Maybe that went on then but you feel like women were written for, and now I feel that women need to develop production companies in order to develop work. It’s just reinventing the system. The system has gone on for quite a number of decades unthinkingly and so women have kind of got left out in the cold and made to feel grateful for any work they get.”

Blanchett is an executive producer on Carol and on Truth, a based-on-a-true-story television news drama out next year in which she plays the TV journalist Mary Mapes. She seems almost reluctant to say this gives her power beyond that normally exercised by an actor. “It just means I’ve been attached to it for a long time and was helping to try to get it made. Being consulted and having the conversations about casting and locations I found really fascinating, but once the elements are put together I have a deep respect for allowing all those elements to work. It’s not like I’m in the editing room trying to shape the piece.”

But she had a say in casting, right? “Yes, but I’ve a deep respect for Todd. It’s his film and I’m a part of it. I was in constant conversation with Todd because he is a great collaborator but I wasn’t sitting over anyone’s shoulder. In the end I had a big job to do playing Carol.”

I bring up the press conference and her apparent dismissal of the strong women theory. “Look, I think it’s really fantastic that the London Film Festival has put women front and centre,” she interjects. While the industry should still be pursuing the subject, she says, the same conversation seems to happen every year around this time. “It’s a great conversation to have but it does feel like Groundhog Day.

“The interesting thing now is there seems to be an intergenerational push by women to provoke change. It’s coming from a lot of different angles which I find really positive; maybe we can finally achieve equality of pay, equality of access. Sometimes quotas are needed, not permanently but in order to just shift the thinking. They take a chance on first-time male directors with big films but they won’t do the same for women. It’s just lazy thinking.”

 

Blanchett, one of three children, was born in Melbourne to a teacher mother and an advertising executive father, who died when she was ten. Before meeting her, I had been trawling the net and came across a snatched photo of her sailing through an airport with her new baby daughter strapped to her chest, an adopted sister to her three sons with writer Andrew Upton. It would never have happened in the golden age, when access to stars was strictly rationed and phone cameras had not yet been imagined. Does she envy that kind of detachment?

“Part of the reason why they talk about the golden age of cinema is because people went to the cinema to dream, to revel in the mystery and the unattainability of what went on on screen. It was a true realm of fantasy.”

Today it’s like Oz, we want to look behind the curtain. Not her, though. “I’m interested in that dream-space. I don’t want to know anything about the actors I see on screen. Or how the film was put together. It’s not just actors. There is very little privacy in all of our lives, which I find bewildering.”

But being pictured with your baby, that must take some getting used to? “I don’t get bothered very much. I don’t hand my life over. Maybe I’m not in the types of films where I get pursued in that way, for which I’m incredibly grateful. But it has incrementally changed over time. There are far more outlets, we monitor ourselves. You can’t move through central London without being photographed by CCTV cameras. We are constantly recording each other, monitoring each other. But that has shifted in the time that I’ve made films. The casualties I’m most aware of, and most protective of, are the people close to me. My children, my husband, my family, because they didn’t enter into this contract. But I don’t live my life in order to act in films. They are quite mutually exclusive in a way.”

I would probably never ask a male actor how he copes with having four children, but I am genuinely curious as to how she makes her private life work. Although the family has now moved to the States, for a long time she commuted between worlds thousands of miles apart.

“Since having children I’ve had to work with a greater economy. And also they are not interested whether I’ve had a difficult day at work. But that would be the same if I worked in the banking system or was a diplomat or whatever it was I did.”

Before and during her film career, Blanchett has worked solidly on stage. For a long time, she and Upton ran the Sydney Theatre Company. She reckons the stage has made her less fearful about taking on big projects. “You get the brutal understanding of whether an audience is with you or not, so you just have to keep going.”

The time is nearly up, so like the Cowardly Lion in Oz I turn to my awkward question. To set the scene, earlier this year she did an interview with Variety. This was the reported exchange: “Pressed for details about whether she’s had past relationships with women, she responds: ‘Yes. Many times,’ but doesn’t elaborate.” The piece was headlined, “Cate Blanchett opens the closet door with lesbian romance Carol.”

Cue media tornado in a teacup.

Let us talk about the whole lesbian quote controversy, I say. Here comes the paw. She looks me straight in the eye. “What’s the lesbian quote controversy?”

I explain.

She was misunderstood, she says. “Facetiousness obviously doesn’t come across. I think it says more about the media than it does about me. Nobody asked how many outlets I’d written for when I played the journalist Mary Mapes. If I’d played someone who had had an affair I think they would think twice about asking me that. Somehow, if you play someone who is sleeping with someone of the same gender it’s up for grabs – are you gay, how many gay sexual relationships … “It’s an act of imagination. An act of empathy playing somebody else. So it’s a very bizarre question to ask. Who cares what my sexual … Who cares what my politics are? Perhaps if I was making a documentary or this was an agitprop political piece the question might be relevant but it’s clearly not, so it’s a very odd question to ask.”

We turn to the untitled Terrence Malick film in which she has been cast. Another titan. “I’ve done all the filming but I don’t know whether I’m in the final product.” I give her a come-off-it look. I can’t imagine any instance in which she has not made the final cut of a picture.

“Oh, yeah, I have,” she says, unleashing a long, gloriously hearty laugh. “Many times.”

More fool them.

Carol (15) opens in cinemas on Friday.