CATE BLANCHETT BECOMES BOB DYLAN

Cate Blanchett portrays one of Bob Dylan’s alter egos in I’m Not There.

Cate Blanchett morphs into a man playing Bob Dylan as the innovator during the height of his folk movement and love/hate relationship with the media in I’m Not There. To study his relationship with the press, Dylan’s manager gave Cate Martin Scorcese’s documentary No Direction Home: Bob Dylan which were the press conferences Dylan gave in Paris, Sweden, Stockholm and England on his 1965 tour of Europe.

Prior to that Cate wasn’t that familiar with Dylan’s music.

“I kind of came relatively late to Dylan I suppose. I mean I grew up sort of with Cat Stevens and my family was big on show tunes and jazz. When you discover Dylan it’s like opening Pandora’s Box and I think that happened to me at University. I think the way to be ultimately liberated and free as an artist which I suppose Dylan absolutely inhabits is to constantly escape the physical definition. If you look at his various incarnations it’s quite schizophrenic.”

What clinched the deal was when Cate met director Todd Haynes the morning of the 2005 Academy Awards which she won Best Supporting Actress for her performance as Katherine Hepburn in The Aviator, but winning was the furthest thing from her mind during their conversation.

“I think I remember meeting Todd more than I do the actual awards ceremony. We sat and it was one of those things where the Oscars seemed to slightly a bit of an inconvenience because it meant I had to leave what was a really intense sort of meeting and that’s the thing about Todd, once you get to talking about stuff with him he’s so engaged and so passionate and so literate about what he’s doing. I mean it’s a magnetic. So I thought this is a really crazy idea and I think I have to do it.”

The stranger thing for Cate was having a man’s voice coming out of her mouth as she lip synchs Maggie’s Farm sung by Stephen Malkmus and The Million Dollar Bashers.