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26-6-2000CATE PROJECTS
i everybody!! Hope you didn’t miss us TOO much! We’ve been away on holiday, as it were, for just a bit: Linny left Oz for a stay in the States. Lance has been in the process of a never-ending move, and Dean has been busy pounding the books to obtain that desired film degree. But, we’re back. And, we’ve brought along a sign to help all of our fellow Blanchetteers find their way home.
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FASHIONABLE CATE
here's a first-rate article and photo spread on Cate just out in the July 2000 issue of the US version of VOGUE. You can check out the pictures in our photo gallery @ VOGUE 2000, and we've tried to cover some of the editorial content both here and in our Lord of the Rings NEWS companion page.
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As many of you know, our Cate is also doing a stint as guest fashion editor for Harper’s Bazaar, and who better to kick the coverage off than a snotty Brit journalist, in this case COLIN McDOWELL of The Sunday Times UK:
It wasn't quite a question of coming to scoff and staying to praise, but when I agreed to attend Sydney fashion week, I was certainly unsure of what it would have to offer. Twelve years ago, in the bicentenary year, I visited Australia for an international fashion show and the standards were not encouraging. This time I was more hopeful. After all, Joan Burstein, Britain's keenest fashion intelligence and owner of the prestigious West End store Browns - the woman who first brought Armani, Lauren and the Japanese to London - buys fashion lines from Sydney, so I knew there would be something wonderful here. But even so, I wasn't prepared for how much.
There is no doubt in my mind that Sydney fashion week is, on this season's showing, now ready and worthy to be considered a paid-up member of the international fashion club, which already includes Milan, New York, London and Paris - the very cities Australian fashion has been accused of copying for years. Of course, it is still largely derivative, as it's almost bound to be, with its season nearly six months behind the rest. Now, however, it has the confidence, as well as the copycat techniques, to do something really strong and individual. More importantly, it has the breadth of vision and lively variety that a fashion capital must have in these days of multinational global style.
Collette Dinnigan, possibly the best-known Australian designer - she recently opened a store in London - gave Sydney fashion a glamour and sophistication that others were certainly ready to emulate, and even try to surpass. For many, her presence bestowed the seal of international approval that the city feels it deserves. After all, it's doing everything right, even down to the obligatory sprinkling of celebs, the current cachet curse of high fashion. The nice twist is that in Sydney they are made to work, rather than just sit feeling glamorous in the front row. The star of the week was local girl Cate Blanchett, guest editing for Harper's Bazaar, who scribbled away and took pictures as if to the manner born - a filmic ideal of the top fashion editor, immaculate from the top of her soignée blonde head to the tips of her perfectly pointed Manolos.
The reality of front-row fashion editors, here and elsewhere, being somewhat less than perfect made her stand out even more. Eva Herzigova and Jerry Hall were modelling - the latter being paid about £40,000, so rumour insisted. Swinging along to her former husband's Brown Sugar, she was as camp as Danny La Rue in what I hope was a send-up (let's be kind) of 1970s model glamour - all coy looks over the shoulder and tossed golden tresses, like an afghan hound on mescaline. Either way, it was outrageously saucy from a woman who, by modelling standards, is now a very old lady indeed. But the audience loved her, as everyone knew they would. To top the showbiz quota, at the end of one show, Macy Gray popped up on stage and sang “I Try”.
This is a fashion city to watch.For a complete photo recap of all this fashion madness, check out our Image Gallery display @ FASHION WEEK.
THE GIFT IN THE CAN?
n a rather weird move, The Hollywood Reporter reported last week that “Lakeshore Entertainment has just wrapped shooting on the "The Gift”. This is rather odd news in that principal photography down in Georgia wrapped a couple of months ago.
I We’re not sure if this story refers to re-shoots that were necessary and/or voice looping that just was completed, and this story is contrary to the VOGUE piece which states Sam is currently editing the film. A fall release seems rushed, but one would hope Christmas is feasible, at least to qualify for the next Oscars, as we’re sure Cate will.
One thing that works in favor in favor of a fast post-production would appear to be the entanglements Sam has run into in pre-production on Spider-Man. Originally, that shoot was going to be interfering with the post on The Gift, but, at this rate, The Gift may be in theatres before S-M ever gets in front of the camera.
A recent report in The Hollywood Reporter states that three actors brought in to do screen-tests for the lead role were Scott Speedman, “Ben” from the WB network's Felicity, Jay Rodan, who just finished up his work on Caveman's Valentine which stars also Samuel L. Jackson, and James Franco the James Dean type from the late-great NBC series Freaks & Geeks, and, if a little obvious, a forthcoming TV movie, “ James Dean: An Invented Life.” THR also mentions Tobey Maguire’s (Pleasantville, Cider House Rules) interest in the project.
Cate had a few things to say about The Gift and Sam in the new VOGUE:
“It (the script) just sort of kept following me around. Everywhere I’d turn up. Billy Bob mentioned it 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 of 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 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 direction. I watched 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 Cate plays, is in every scene in the movie, he says. “It was essential that audiences believed 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 goes on to state that the whole crew recognized that her acting is “magical”. Different people kept saying how moved they were by scenes that she was doing. “Not dramatic scenes, necessarily. Small moments. They recognized that what they were seeing was true. That she’s experienced something in her life and she takes that and recreates it in context.”
Sam notes that it was a hard schedule with 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 sprits. It’s all about the work with her”, he says. “Just about the work”.
CATE ACTION FIGURE? YEAH, BABY!
oy Biz, a division of Marvel Enterprises, Inc., has landed one of the most coveted licenses in Hollywood as New Line Cinema today named the toy company the master toy licensee for the studio's eagerly awaited fantasy epic The Lord of the Rings.
T The multi-year agreement provides Toy Biz with extensive worldwide product rights to all three films based on J.R.R. Tolkien's world-renowned literary phenomenon. The broad range of categories covered include: action figures and accessories, dolls, radio control, remote control and infrared toy products, collectible marbles and accessories, electronic and non-electronic plush, flying toys and LCD watches. The initial products will hit stores coinciding with the release of the first film in the trilogy - The Fellowship of the Ring - scheduled to hit theaters Holiday 2001.
Well I, for one, can hardly wait to get my very own Galadriel action figure. First the Cate paper doll, the Cate stamp, and now this! Where will it end?
For all the latest in LOTR News, check out our companion news page LOTR News, which this issue features some great advance promo artwork along with Cate’s comments from Vogue regarding the shoot.
GIOVANNI REDEUX
oiler Room and Saving Private Ryan star Giovanni Ribisi is set to star opposite Cate Blanchett in the Miramax drama Heaven, the first in the trilogy of “Heaven”, “Hell” and “Purgatory”. The $11m movie is based on the final screenplay of highly acclaimed Polish film-maker Krzysztof Kieslowski (Trois Coleurs, The Decalogue), which he wrote with writing partner Krzysztof Piesiewicz.
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Heaven tells the story of a woman who takes the law into her own hands when her husband is murdered and police refuse to arrest the killer. Cate finds herself not only under arrest for murder but falling in love with an officer (Ribisi). Giovanni and Cate also worked together recently in Sam Raimi’s The Gift
WHO’S WHO
ate joins fellows actors Jennifer Ehle (yea!), Rupert Graves, Joseph Fiennes and Ben Affleck as well as American boxing promoter Don King and Ricky Martin, the pop singer, as new entrants to the latest edition of International Who's Who.
C According to the UK Telegraph, the 2001 edition, to be published next month, has more than 1,000 new entrants, of which 14 per cent are British. Way to go Cate!
BITS N PIECES
The Guardian UK reports that in a deal that signals its intention to raise its profile and move into larger scale production, FilmFour has entered a co-production alliance with Warner Brothers. The arrangement will reap its first harvest with Gillian Armstrong's adaptation of the Sebastian Faulks novel Charlotte Gray, which stars our Cate as a Scottish woman who becomes an undercover agent in Nazi-occupied France.
Regarding the delayed Minority Report, which we’ll keep plugging away here until our Cate announces her involvement , iFUSE spoke with Cate's Ripley co-star Matt Damon who revealed that he has agreed to take a supporting role in the film, adding that Stephen Spielberg and Tom Cruise "are two confident dudes. There's no way I wouldn't want to do that film…It's such a great concept, and I'd love to see that dynamic there."
The Hollywood Reporter is quoted as saying that acclaimed Aussie director Bruce Beresford, whom Cate worked with on Paradise Road, is planning on filming “Beatrice Potter” next, and that he is actively pursuing Cate for the film. Hmmm.
U.S. Blancheteers will want to be alert come Tuesday when the video and DVD of The Talented Mr. Ripley hit the streets! As usual, DVD looks like the way to go. Not only is it discounted to around $20, it contains multiple theatrical trailers, an “Inside The Talented Mr. Ripley” - Behind-the-Scene Featurette, exclusive cast and crew interviews, a featurette on “The Making of the Soundtrack”, audio commentary by director Anthony Minghella, the "Tu Vuo Fa L'Americano" music video, the "My Funny Valentine" music video, and, as always, may be viewed in its glorious original widescreen anamorphic format. Compared with the $104 no-features pan-and-scan video, the DVD seems like a steal!
When Cate was in Oz for fashionweek she participated in the Reconciliation Walk across the Sydney Harbour Bridge joining her theatrical alma mater, B Company and carrying the B Company banner proudly.
During fashionweek, Cate joined the thousand people who each day made a donation to the Smith Family Winter Coat appeal by buying cups of fruit juices mixed with herbs at the "In Style" juice bar. Her choice was a wheatgrass shot, which owner Andy Ruwald said "tastes like lawn mower clippings".
We would remind you that, should you be in the area, the Polly Borland photo exhibition continues at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Borland’s exhibit, “Australians”, features 56 portraits, including our Cate, who is described thusly by the TimesUK: “Cate Blanchett, who assimilated herself into her adopted country by playing Elizabeth I in the recent film, stares out of the frame, hands clasped protectively round her own shoulders in an athletic embrace. The look is intense and serious, not at all the bright, bland and matey look of a native from the "Lucky Country".
So check it out if you are able.Alright gang, that concludes our first exciting “return” issue. Hope to see you all next time, Blanchetteers, when we continue our merry examination of all the Cate News we can rightfully assemble, for your reading pleasure, of course.
Until then, we trust it hasn’t been too long since you last had occasion to bellow out, in your most regal voice, “PLAY A VOLTA!”. Cheers for now!
