Cate Blanchett: Aussie film star reveals Oscar-winning director once labelled her acting ‘s..t’

Academy-award winning film star and respected Hollywood figure Cate Blanchett has revealed her acting was once labelled “s..t” by an A-list Hollywood director.

The actor 57, spoke candidly in an interview at Cannes Film Festival about the Displacement Film Fund she co-founded, which was established to champion displaced filmmakers, and offered insights into her storied acting career.

Recalling a prickly moment on set in 2006 shooting critically acclaimed film Babel, Blanchett said her craft was questioned by Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu in one of her first scenes on the production.

By that point, she had already won a best supporting actress Oscar for her role as legendary actress Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator two years prior.

“My son had an accident in Morocco, so I was quite traumatised anyway. So maybe that was art imitating life. I remember the first day we shot, Brad Pitt and I shot a scene, and we did a couple of takes, and Iñárritu came up and said, ‘This is s..t. What is this s..t?’” Blanchett said, as reported by news.com.au.

“He said, ‘There’s nothing here. This scene has to work or the movie doesn’t work,’ and walked off.

“But that knocks you off your centre. It’s a form of direction. Some say, ‘That’s incredibly disrespectful,’ or ‘That’s upsetting to me.’ But sometimes a director can lead with love, but incredibly tough love.”

Blanchett was then probed to comment on a glance she offers in the film’s final scene, and pondered if “maybe that look was also just me frightened that Iñárritu was gonna come in and say, ‘It’s s..t’ to me again”.

Iñárritu was nominated for an Oscar for directing following his work in Babel.

He later won in consecutive years for Birdman (2015) and The Revenant (2016).

In the wide-ranging interview, Blanchett said she’s no longer able to attack roles with the same physical vigour as she once did.

“As you get older, the palette that you’re playing upon gets perhaps more calcified and less malleable, so there’s a lot of stuff you cannot do,” she said.

“I used to be able to tap dance. I can’t really tap dance anymore. The sad thing is I’ve got a facility for learning things quickly, but then I have a sort of physical dementia and I forget it.”

The Blue Jasmine actress also lamented the apparent phasing out of the #MeToo movement, claiming it got “getting killed very quickly” in Hollywood.

“There are a lot of people with platforms who are able to speak up with relative safety and say ‘this has happened to me’. And the so-called average woman on the street, person on the street, is saying me too. Why does that get shut down?” she said.