Kapur encouraged Blanchett to debate his approach to every scene, every line, treating her more as a collaborator than a star. She even weighed in on the final edit, at one point advising Kapur to make clearer the connection between Elizabeth and her devious chief counselor, Sir Francis Walsingham (played by Rush). ''Shekhar and I would thrash things out,'' she says cheerfully. ''Often what happens is through trying two different ways, a third and better way is found. So he's very open. But that doesn't mean he doesn't know what he's doing.'' As an actress, however, she clearly felt his shake-up-everything-all-the-time approach wasn't always the way to go. ''He's addicted to surprise,'' she says. ''Sometimes I'd have to say to him, 'I can get there without being tricked into it.'''
One of Blanchett and Kapur's most frequent points of discussion was how much to fictionalize Elizabethan details. ''We temper one another,'' says Blanchett. ''I'm very engaged in adhering to the actual events, whereas he's kind of playing loose and fast with history.'' Indeed, Kapur used the facts of Elizabeth's life merely for inspiration. Sample flight of invention: Golden Age has Owen's Raleigh steering a burning ship directly into the Spanish Armada, but historians believe Raleigh only supervised from shore. (Not nearly as visually exciting, of course.) The first Elizabeth took considerable flak from reviewers for its factual liberties — one of the boldest being the idea that the queen in fact romped in bed with any number of men before officially reinventing herself as a virgin. This time, Kapur could get slammed for portraying King Philip II of Spain as a far more megalomaniacal religious crusader than records suggest — which plays into the movie's pointed contemporary overtones about the dangers of intolerance in an age of jihad.
Blanchett worries less about fine points of history in the film than whether the general public wants to see more Tudor happenings at all, following Helen Mirren's award-winning turns in 2006's The Queen and HBO's miniseries Elizabeth I. ''You hope that people don't tire of it,'' she says. ''Or think, 'Oh, here it comes again.''' But Kapur feels emboldened by early positive feedback, and he's anxious to plan yet a third Elizabeth movie. ''At first you just hope people won't laugh at your film, or boo it out of the theater,'' he says. ''Then you hear people are liking it, and you get greedy.'' Will he wait another nine years to tackle Elizabeth's final days as a ruler in her 60s, when she'd outlived all her advisers and felt, in his view, completely isolated and alone and perhaps regretful? No way, he says. He wants to do it sooner rather than later, and Blanchett better not hold him up, or it might be off with her head and on to some other actress. ''If Cate so much as hesitates,'' he says playfully, ''she's had it.''
Additional reporting by Jeff Labreque
You Might Also Like
- DVD Review Elizabeth: The Golden Age (Feb 05, 2008) | Jeff Labrecque
- Movie Review Elizabeth: the Golden Age (Oct 12, 2007) | Lisa Schwarzbaum
- Spotlight Cate Blanchett on being the Queen (Oct 12, 2007) | Carrie Bell
- All About Elizabeth: The Golden Age
- Movie News This season's most memorable movie dresses (Nov 26, 2008) | Lindsay Soll
- Movie News Holiday box office forecast (Dec 12, 2008) | Christine Spines
