Cate Blanchett & Rooney Mara on Carol | Film4 Interview Special

what's your name TZ terz bant Carol tell me you know what you're doing I never did and then it changed she's still my wife I love her it shouldn't be like this I know [Music] I love High Smith's writing um I encountered it uh when I was first working on uh the talent of Mr Ripley with um the late great mingela and and so I knew how rich a territory it was to create characters because the Subterranean nature that she writes about the sort of unpalatable dark mysterious sides of Being Human um she Minds so beautifully and so it's fantastic Source material for an actor but you can love a screenplay but it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to make a great film unless you've got a great director so it wasn't really until Todd Haynes came on board that it became possible uh I first received the phyllis's adaptation of price of salt as Carol this the film The Script and the and and read the novel all at the same time this was in May of 2013 and at that time Kate was already attached to the project so I'm reading this extraordinary book and I'm reading phyllis's beautiful script and of course I'm seeing Kate so it's indelible to me that she would play Carol it's a tricky book because it's basically um the unreliable point of view of one character who is the character who's falling in love responding to the world around her which includes all the people in Carol's life and Carol herself who is shadowy in the novel necessarily um so that we the reader can project whoever we'd like into that it's actually quite brilliant stroke but you can't do that in a film well I suppose you could but be a very different kind of film But ultimately that novel uh affected me it was it was really a revelation I didn't know that that piece of work by Patricia heith it stands outside her crime mure basically um and yet the parallels to the Criminal Minds that are usually the subjects of her movies was so pronounced but in this case it was the mind of somebody falling in love and it sort of showed a similar kind of almost pathology where every a situation in which you're reading every sign and every gesture and every tiny event for its meaning and interpreting every everything as a sign um just like the criminal does uh sort of anticipating their fate or guilt and the outcome of their status and in this case it's the status of how you stand in relationship to the person you're falling in love with so there's something really beautiful about that and really Universal I think that was what drew me to it I wonder if you might help me find this doll for my daughter bright Betsy oh she cries and wets herself but I'm afraid we're all out of stock left it too long well we have plenty of other dolls and all kinds AC right what was your favorite doll when you were four me I never not many to be honest I'm sorry you're not allowed to smoke on the sales floor of all forgive me shopping makes me nervous that's all right working here makes me nervous it's just such a beautiful love story at its core the fact that it's two women was also very interesting to me but um at the end of the day I just thought it captured so beautifully sort of falling in love and and you know it was a Coming of Age story for my character and also Kate's character Carol is also coming of age in a way in a different sort of she's moving into a sort of new phase of her life and so and the two of us how the two of us helped each other do that um I just thought it was really beautiful the power of the the film for me um which I didn't really know um until I saw the finished product was it's a film about falling in love I mean yes the um it's an important impediment to the consumation of relationship with the fact that they're both the protagonists of the same gender and it's ins said in the 50s when of course that sort of love was illegal um but it's also this incredible age gap between the women and the the the vast difference of their experience um in the difference in class was keeping them uh apart but I did um I I love the you could feel the chemistry come come off phyllis's uh screenplay and she created which Todd enhanced these beautiful moments of suspension the silence between the characters which she could cut with a knife which you know the subtext that you can fill um you know those moments with as an actor I found really exciting and you can feel that off the page it's a rumination on the many different phases of a deep intense love and I think that's all that all of us could have hoped to achieve is to somehow make an audience re experience that or well hopefully re experience it I hope everyone who sees it has at least had that experience once desire need something to fight against and to push back against and there's restraints that we see the characters experiencing there's restraints that we feel from their different sort of economic Realms that they live in ages power dynamic between the two of them and there's inequality there's imbalance and and it separates the women and there's a lot going on in each separate woman's story um and I think you keep wanting to cross those boundaries as a viewer and so the chemistry is maybe something the viewer is bringing to the movie I'm Stu B A PE what do you do on Sundays nothing in particular what do you do nothing lately I mean if be' like to come visit me sometime you're welcome to at least there's some pretty country around where I live would you like to come visit me this Sunday yes what a strange girl you are why flung out of space it's great when you're surprised or ambushed by something and it comes off the other actor you know you can do all the homework in the world which of course an audience is deeply disinterested in um but it but it if it character or an actor does something that you you respond to it it's acting reacting that's what it is and maybe that's just comes from doing the theater I sort of even in a closeup even if you can't actually look because of the position of the camera you can't look into another actor's eyes you have to remember what they gave you because the scene exists between you it's it's not an act of will of one actor it I think acting happens in the in a bit like dance it's that that suspended moment between two people in the restaurant certainly you say you know she takes in her how that is interpreted is entirely up to the um the actors and and the director and Todd could have chosen to shoot that in any number of ways he could have shot their backs or in in in in in weird long shots which you know would have been a different thing but I think because everyone was so aligned in sensibility um and aesthetic uh rigor of a certain sort that there was never any question this this is the way it's has to be this looks the way it has to be and I hope in the final version of it there's a sense of yes wow yeah I can't imagine this being any other way it was a beautifully um written script and I think the changes that she made in the story and in some of the characters and their uh occupations and so forth were were so thoughtful um there were there were a couple things in the book some tensions between the the two women that I I I started to talk to Phyllis about and about putting back into the script and she was like yeah yes thank you thank you because I think in the process of trying to get this thing made you know you're trying to appeal to the various interests out there and some of those tensions or anxieties uh may may have lost a little bit of their of their um you know Force and she was really excited that we were going to go back to the book in some places when Todd came aboard he uh he was basically very interested in uh the point of view and um suggested that we might best start with a framing device Allah um Brief Encounter primarily but I think there others that we talked about um and so our process became I would go away and uh come up with something and that would be good or I'd work on it a little more but it was very quick because by that time the script was primarily there save for what the particular um obsessions of the director are and I knew the material so well that I could work quickly and boy did I want to because it' been already so many years let's just get this let's get this going one great thing we T you many great things but he he does fight you absolutely in a very collaborative way into the visual world of the film so you realize before you even set foot on set the kind of atmosphere that you're going to be operating in uh because it's not just the words you say it's not just what you wear it's this it's the environments that you're going to be performing init a bit like the misiz on senen for a theater production and we filmed in Cincinnati and there's a lot of untouched period homes which have almost feel like they've been boarded up and so the air is really still and quite tomlike in some of these environments and so we we did um we we toured all the locations we were going to be filming in and so he and Rooney and I or whoever was in the scene Sarah Polson K Kyle Chandler wonderful actors who are in the film we we spent time in these environments and sort of rehearsed in those environments so we embibe the atmosphere cuz something I love about the film visually is the austerity comes out of the World War II austerity we think about the ' 50s as being an explosion of materialism but in fact it was quite AER compared to how materialistic most of our and populated and busy our environments are today and it mirrored the emotional um uh fer that I think that the the that environment that the 50s are in you you didn't express your feelings it was inappropriate to talk about how you felt particularly the love that these women were experiencing so the the locations often were onetoone with what was going on in the interior of the women so I found that very useful we looked at a lot of um you know photojournalism and art photography from the time and Saul lighter was a clear jumping off point as a visual artist photo color photographer mid-century uh New York City based um because he shot through windows and glass and precipitation and and elements of weather which would diffuse the image and obstru the frame but it it almost makes the desire uh uh more pronounced because there's obstacles between where you are and what you want to see so you're you feel the the the boundaries and the things in the way of what you want um so I think that became a useful way of sort of externalizing or visualizing what's going on inside this subjectivities that feeling of falling in love how do you how do you let that come across how do you describe that it's not a tangible thing and I think that's the other thing Todd did visually that was so brilliant is he got that feeling across just from you know little things like there's a scene with me and Carol driving and and it it feels almost dream like you're seeing all these close-ups and details of of her face and her clothes that you know TZ would be honing in on and then you hear sort of her muffled muffled sound of her voice mixed in with the music and he evokes that feeling of falling in love through his visuals and and um I think he was able to do that more than you'd be able to sort of act it there are moments though of such um acute uh and sort of universal um expression of feelings that we've all had when they're when they're in the novel when they're driving through the tunnel for the first time the Lincoln Tunnel to go to New Jersey TZ says or the the the writer says uh she she wished the tunnel would collapse on top of the two of them killing them both so their bodies could be dragged out one after the next and it was just like that is the feeling of being in love like you want time to stop right there and you want a kind of fatal melodramatic end and to sort of reveal this coupling you know for the world to see it's so simple but so incredibly astute so many people fall in love in different ways and it's not always easy um but if it's real it's certainly exciting but I I I think it's it's interesting you talking about facial gestes I think deep love real love you actually lose a sense of yourself that's what it's described as falling in love you know it happens between you and you know the the physical boundaries the the sense of the you know your own skin is is is shed you know there's a there's a naked quality whether or not you're in bed with one another or not I you're emotionally naked in front of that person with that person I always get kind of obsessed with my my image books that I put together for for my films and although those are really meant first as sort of um Communications to my directors of Photography and then the production designer and the costume designer and all the visual um Partners they become really useful to the actors and so those uh visual references are they inform them in ways you might not expect um they really give you a specific sense of place and history and and even temperature like you can sort of feel how the clothes and the skin and the bodies uh might respond to being in these specific settings if you look at the book now it looks exactly like the film um and on top of that just you know having all that and then you know all these film references that he had me watch and um the costumes you really knew sort of what world you were stepping on to before you got there which is you know really helpful because you you want to make sure that as actors that you're in the same movie that you're in the same world and he made that very easy for [Music] us phis had a really difficult job at at adapting something like that because how can you you know unless you have voice over throughout the entire film it's hard to be in someone's head like that and so she brilliantly changed T in the book TZ is a stage designer and in the film she's a photographer and so that really sort of added this way into her mind because you get to you know she sees the world uh in a very visual way as a photographer and and also you know it it the script did have sort of all these like flashes of details and you could tell that was that that the way they were going to shoot it that was the way they were going to get sort of into her POV and into her mind and um you know Todd did did that brilliantly you know some directors speak to um actors in dependently whereas it felt that there was no as if somehow giving a note to an actor is a moment of Shame like they're doing something wrong whereas he would speak very freely in in in front of everybody so we're all doing this thing together there was no wrong there was just let's try it like this and so it felt from take to take and we didn't have very many takes because of the time restrictions but it felt like we were building on things so um yeah he he it's like he's just subtly moving the rudder but very very interested in what everyone has to bring to the table everything is the result of a lot of planning and Advan preparation uh as much communication as possible between the creative departments and the actors but in the end you're subject to the um the the sort of panics of the day and the limitations of a lowbudget shoooting schedule and things that you really wish were not um you know actors in your your creative process but they always are and uh so there's some Serendipity there's some unexpected events that sort of propel we have to get this now you know and so it's hard to look back and go oh yes I you know sat back with my you know pipe and pointed to that moment and was so uh thoughtful about sometimes it's just like a hysterical um you know crazy effort to to get what you need to complete your cut it's bad form to cry at your own movie but you can't help it there's just a life of its own without sounding so um Airy I don't mean it in any kind of weird um new Agy way but the the the way those women look at each other without doing anything really I think that's what makes me um get emotionally and in everyone around us and the actors too it's such a labor of love and it it was um it took a long time to be realized but now that it's come together it feels like it couldn't have happened with any other group of people in any other way at any other time and that in itself is is special and you know I'm really excited for an audience to see it I think Todd has made a very beautiful beautiful film

Channel: Film4

Views: 418,677

Keywords: film4, film4 interview, cate blanchett interview, rooney mara interview, carol film, todd haynes interview, phyllis nagy interview, patricia highsmith, carol, lesbian film, lesbian romance, lgbtq film, making of carol, carol scene, carol cinematography, cate blanchett, rooney mara, sarah paulson, kyle chandler

Id: E68Y6yvpD5M

Length: 19min 24sec (1164 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 19 2015