Cate Blanchett

The day Cate did the Hot Ones interview is also the day she visited the Criterion closet with Todd Field earlier this month while they are doing press tour in ...

Blanchett plays it in shifting styles while delivering a monologue, with references to the Peanuts character Schroeder, Glenn Gould and the “humility” of Bach’s compositions. The musicians had to act and I had to conduct, and in the middle we met,” Ms. The technical demands behind the role “gave me a sense of the stakes, of what a musician stands to lose when their instrument is taken away. Blanchett wields a baton in only a handful of scenes in “Tár.” Instead of showing the conductor presiding over her orchestra in concert, Mr. “I wanted to progress the narrative through those scenes, rather than, ‘Here I do a bit of conducting.’” In a scene where Tár leads a conducting seminar at Juilliard, she flays a student (played by Zethphan Smith-Gneist) who rejects Bach as a misogynist symbol of the white-European-male hegemony. Field shot the rehearsals at floor level, in the ranks of the musicians. The live recording represents a crowning moment in a career as calculated as the portrait photo she plans for the album cover. As Tár prepares to launch a memoir and chips away at a new composition on a piano, she’s also preparing the orchestra for a recording of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. The Fifth, created after a near-death experience for the Austrian composer and conductor in 1901, opens with a funeral march. In the bathroom, on a train, in this room,” she said during a video interview from her home office. It’s a portrait of the fictional Lydia Tár, a highflying orchestra leader whose hubris and manipulative ways lead to career meltdown.