Cate & Creativity

The double Oscar winner is soon to appear in a movie as a self-centred runaway mum suffering a creative crisis. It’s a role, Phoebe Watt discovers, that resonated deeply for the mother of four

- Phoebe Watt

If you are scandalised by the notion of an unfaithful-to-the-book film adaptation, you might not get along with Cate Blanchett.

“Why even bother?” she said recently, of films that take little to no creative liberties. “The only reason to turn something from a book to the screen is if you’ve got something more to say.” The actress was being asked about her starring role in Where’d You Go, Bernadette? Based on Maria Semple’s best-selling book of the same name, and in theatres this month, it tells the story of an agoraphobic architect wrestling with her own wasted potential as her daughter, for whom she put her career ambitions aside, prepares to leave home for university. The restrictions of the medium mean the film’s plot necessarily diverges from that of the novel. “But it’s tangentially fascinating,” reasons Cate, whose true-blue Aussie background mitigates the pretentiousness of her frequently over-the-top turns of phrase. “It’s not a replication because the novel exists!”

Cate, it’s fair to say, doesn’t do replicas. Having shot to fame playing Queen Elizabeth I in 1997’s Elizabeth and fearful of being typecast, the now 50-year-old actress turned down a number of period films in the years that followed, explaining that in rehashing “pre-masticated versions” of previous roles, “there was no potential for discovering anything new. There was no risk.”