From the article 'cate modern' by Vicki Woods - Photo by Steven Meisel

Cate Luvs Sam

The Gift intrigued her. She plays a psychic mother of three who lives in rural Georgia. The script is co-written by Billy Bob Thornton. "It just sort of kept following me around. Everywhere I'd turn up. Billy Bob mentioned when we were doing Pushing Tin that I should read it. You have these conversations all the time—'You'd be great in it; you should do this'—dime a dozen. And then I read it. And suddenly Sam was on it, the sublime Sam Raimi. I think the things you're meant to do, you just can't escape them.

"I can't tell you how much I enjoyed working with Sam. I think he's an extraordinary, extraordinary human being. He's so respectful; he wears a suit to work every day, and after a couple of weeks, a lot to the crew members started wearing ties to work. So he has this effect on people. It's really curious to watch him—he sort of inhabits all of the characters. And he'd be in the corner, and I realized after a while that he'd been watching me do an action, and he was parodying the action when he wanted to give me a direction. I watched to him do it with other actors as well. I'd hate to see him doing Xena: Warrior Princess."


 
 Sam Raimi didn't want to make The Gift with anyone else. Annie Wilson, the character Blanchett plays, is in every scene of the movie, he says. "It was essential that the audience believed in this woman." He'd seen Elizabeth and Oscar and Lucinda. "And in both cases, I saw that she was a woman with a soul." He's still editing the movie when I call him in Los Angeles. He laughs gently when I pass on her "sublime Sam" phrase; he refers to her as "Miss Blanchett" with nice old-fashioned formality; and he says his whole crew recognized that her acting is "magical." Different people kept saying how moved they were by scenes she was doing. "Not dramatic scenes, necessarily. Small moments. They recognized that what they were seeing was true. That she experienced something in her life—and she takes that and re-creates it in context." Raimi then brings the magical Miss Blanchett back down to earth pretty briskly: It was a hard schedule, everyone working long days and six-day weeks. "And she was in every shot of the film. She was always ready to perform. She was never 'resting in her trailer." She took not a minute's break. She was tireless. And in great spirits. It's all about the work with her," he says. "Just about the work."

Blanchett visited psychics in L.A. when she was researching the role. She went along unrecognized as "Mary Smith," but she "really felt like [psychics] just read the trades. There's not many people in L.A. who don't work in the film industry. They kept seeing awards popping into my horizon. They were all obsessed with awards."

Is she sympathetic to the existence of psychic power? She says that psychics have told her she must be. "You know, you must be attuned because you're an actor, dah-dah-dah, you're sensitive," she says. "When my father died, I willed and willed, and willed—for years—to see something. Just because you have to have confirmation that this person hasn't disappeared. And nothing happened. So you can't force things."



 Vogue® July 2000


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