

It’s not working.’ ” Blanchett doesn’t like to talk about her how she prepares for a role. “We don’t know what she talking about, but she’ll say, ‘I need to take an acting pill today. “There are days when she’s frustrated by her own work,” Haynes says. That trait evidently still persists some 50 movies later. He recalls how a young Blanchett would beat herself up after takes, saying that she hadn’t quite landed a scene. “Cate Blanchett was destined to break upon the international screen, and I was her conduit,” Kapur says. And certainly when we’ve screened it, we’ve found young and old, male and female, straight and gay, have all responded.”īlanchett was a celebrated Australian stage actress before she was cast in Shekhar Kapur’s 1998 drama “Elizabeth.” Kapur recalls interest from a variety of A-list actresses - including Gwyneth Paltrow and Kidman - in playing the virgin queen, but from the moment he saw a clip of Blanchett, he knew she was fated to assume the throne. They require external forces that keep the lovers apart.” Elizabeth Karlsen, who produced “Carol,” adds: “I hope it’s a film for everyone. “But I think love stories are hard to pull off, period. “In some ways, the event of a gay love story is less surprising every day,” Haynes says. Haynes, who directed Dennis Quaid’s closeted husband character in “Far From Heaven,” says the focus on gay stories has shifted more to TV. Even the past summer’s enthusiastically reviewed “Love Is Strange,” starring Alfred Molina and John Lithgow as a couple, eked out only $2.3 million at the domestic box office. “Brokeback Mountain” debuted 10 years ago, and there have been few breakthrough gay romances since. These are very different times, but Hollywood still hasn’t caught up. When Highsmith first published “The Price of Salt,” she used a pseudonym to protect herself from public outcry. But if it stumbles, it may be perceived as yet another example of the curse of the gay love story. If “Carol” works, it could earn Blanchett a seventh Oscar nomination (she’s already won two Academy Awards, for 2004’s “The Aviator” and 2013’s “Blue Jasmine”).

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“The atmosphere of the city really added to the atmosphere of the film.” But after various cuts were shown to test audiences, the movie (scheduled for a late 2015 release from the Weinstein Co.) went into hibernation. “We shot in these old homes that felt like tombs,” Blanchett says. The indie production, which was financed by Film4 and Goldcrest Films, and was filmed in a Cincinnati outfitted to look like 1950s New York, wrapped in only 35 days in April 2014. The drama centers on a charismatic New Yorker (Blanchett) who embarks on a passionate love affair with a younger department store clerk, Therese (Mara).
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“But it needs to be discussed.”īlanchett was delighted when she received a call in 2013 from her old pal Haynes (“I’m Not There”), telling her he wanted to make “Carol,” after a series of directors had dropped out.

“I want it to not be discussed anymore,” Blanchett notes. “I think there’s been a critical mass of women who have reached a certain place in the industry,” she says, citing Meryl Streep, Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman, as well as producer Allison Shearmur, who made the Disney fairy tale about a magical glass slipper a reality. There are a lot of people laboring under the misapprehension that people don’t want to see them, which isn’t true.” And while the franchise-obsessed movie industry covets young male audiences above all else, it can no longer ignore female moviegoers - who account for at least half of ticket sales each year.īlanchett believes there is some hope. “Midrange films with women at the center are tricky to finance. On a recent afternoon in Manhattan, lounging outside the Crosby Street Hotel with her hair in a ponytail and a shawl draped over her shoulders, Blanchett says she wasn’t convinced that “Carol” would ever make it to theaters.
