rewrite this title Cate Blanchett & Guy Maddin On The Experience of Artistic Flow, The Late David Lynch’s ‘Eraserhead’ & Their Paths Into The Film Industry — Rotterdam

Actress-producer Cate Blanchett and director Guy Maddin shared about their paths into the film industry as well as their experiences of “flow” in making art, while at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR). They took the stage in front of more than 800 guests at the Oude Luxor Theater, shortly after a festival screening of their film Rumours.

“I never, ever thought I could work in the film industry,” said Blanchett. “I was resigned happily to having a career in the theater. I didn’t think that I was that girl, and at the time, there was certainly a sense that women had a certain shelf life in the film industry, and a certain type of woman got to parade on screen. But I loved watching films, and I had such an eclectic taste. I think it’s the benefit of growing up with four Australian terrestrial channels.”

The two-time Oscar-winner said that it was a film excursion for a French class in high school that first made her think about pursuing film.

“I was hypnotized by the cinematic storytelling, and it felt like quite an adult experience. Our teacher treated us like adults. She talked about cinema in a certain way that made me think, although I think I’ve learned more about cinema than I did French, unfortunately, from that teacher,” said Blanchett.

She also cited the work of Jane Campion as a huge inspiration for her.

Maddin shared about his initial ambition to become a writer, some of his misadventures in attempting acting and how both the death of his father — and becoming a father himself — nudged him toward a career in filmmaking. Among some of his films are My Winnipeg, The Saddest Music in the World and The Green Fog.

“I fancied in my early twenties being a writer, but I was a good enough reader to know I could never be a good enough writer that I would want to read,” said Maddin. “I wrote, but then I discovered these kind of primitively human movies that really moved me.”

Maddin highlighted Eraserhead as a formative film in defining for him what cinema could be — in both a professional and personal way.

“Eraserhead was a real eye opener — rest in peace, David. I couldn’t sleep after seeing it, not just because of the incredible vibrations I took home with me from the sound design and the shocking images, but I couldn’t believe that David Lynch had made a movie about me 10 years earlier,” said Maddin.

Maddin’s father’s death while Maddin was 21 was also a profoundly life-changing experience that made Maddin reconsider the lines between dreams and reality.

“My father had died when I was 21. I found out that I was going to be a father eight hours before my dad died and so it was kind of this really defamiliarizing of the world that happened all at once. A few months later, I started having dreams that my father hadn’t died, that he had just abandoned the family. I totally forgot sometimes that these were dreams, and that he’d gone to live with a better family,” said Maddin.

“I had a dream that he came home because he forgot his razor or his glass eye, and I had one minute to convince him to come back to his original family. So I was talking and I had these recurring dreams for years, and so my father’s actual death receded in time enough that I couldn’t quite remember his voice properly while I was awake.”

Maddin shared that he also drew inspiration from Greek tragedies in his work — singling out “Electra” by Euripides as one that left a particularly sharp impression on him.

“I just started reading Greek tragedies, because those things have been entrenched for 2500 years. There’s got to be something I can steal,” said Maddin.

Launching off Maddin’s point about drawing from existing work or “stealing”, Blanchett said that she wants artists to reconsider what it means to “be original.”

“We’re told as developing artists that somehow you have to find your own voice, whereas I will beg, borrow or steal from anyone and anything,” said Blanchett. “I think partly it’s a homage, but also partly it’s a way to connect with someone, through recognition of a frame, trope or a star. If somehow you’re in dialogue with that filmmaker, actor or that cinematographer, sometimes that reference will be recognizable, or you might end up throwing it out somewhere else. But I think it’s often in trying to replicate, in a strange way that you find something unique.”

Maddin shared that he calls the state of flow he sometimes feels in making art a kind of “narcotic tingle,” referring to some of Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabokov’s writings in this line of thought.

“I know that in some of the experiences that I’ve had as a filmmaker, sometimes art produces those tingles for example, a certain few shots in a row, or when the music actually matches an image. Or even before I was interested in film, when I played team sports, sometimes it was just a great feeling that you had,” said Maddin.

However, Blanchett said that for her, it has worked better for her growth as an artist when she learned to let such feelings go.

“I’d never dwell on that feeling. You have to let it go,” said Blanchett. “It’s like a love affair. It’s sort of like, ‘Oh, that was amazing.’ And then it’s out the door, and I think you learn a lot more from your embarrassing failures when you do that. You have to be so grateful that you’ve had that experience of flow.”