CATE BLANCHETT in conversation with MAGGIE NELSON
Cate Blanchett talks to Maggie Nelson about power, ambiguity, the natural injustice of talent - and her award-winning performance as Lydia Tár
CATE BLANCHETT
I'm an enormous fan. Let's just get that out of the way right now.
MAGGIE NELSON
Stop it. No, I can't believe you want to even be here on the Zoom with me, but that's very nice of you.
I know you've been doing loads of press for Tár and I've heard you say that there are so many nuances you could go into but the forum is never right. So if there's anything of interest that you haven't gone into yet, I'm happy to try to help go there.
Well, it's so interesting to talk to you about this film because you innately understand all the grey areas. I think I struggle with screened narrative sometimes because the idea of narrative often derails the more complicated aspects of the endeavour. It's as if we go into a maze, or a labyrinth, and we are trained to expect a minotaur in there. I'm not the person to judge what I make - as actors we just do what we do and it's for other people to interpret. And there's no right or wrong way to interpret anything, let alone a film. But people have got bound up in the narrative with Tár, which is quite enigmatic and elusive. And Todd [Field, the film's writer and director] has deliberately not given the audience a definitive answer to anything, but it's been fascinating to me that certain adjectives have been levelled at the Lydia Tár character and the situation. I've thought, “Oh wow, OK, I didn't think any of that.” But then it's irrelevant what I think.
What you say about narrative is so interesting - not only with this movie but also more generally - that we're supposed to be taken through all these nuanced places and then receive a message at the end that makes sense of them. We're supposed to find, as you say, the minotaur. It reminds me of how, in writing, you can't really escape narrative - even in experimental, non-narrative writing but there are a lot of options for delivering the sense of having had a worthwhile aesthetic experience that isn't necessarily narratively driven.
But even if you are writing in a fragmentary way, is it just that we're driven as a species to try It's a journey, or a musing, or a poking around, rather than an arriving or landing. There are a lot of opposing ideas that are held within the film simultaneously, which is why it is ambiguous.
