Today was Cate Blanchett day at the San Sebastian Film Festival as the two-time Oscar winner cruised into town to receive the Spanish festival’s Donostia Award for career achievement.
The excitement in San Sebastian was strong. The festival even sent an email updating delegates that Blanchett’s arrival at her hotel — one of the main photo ops at this fest — had been pushed back a couple of hours.
Luckily for the gang of fans waiting outside the festival’s main Kursaal Auditorium — a beautiful, brutalist structure — Blanchett didn’t disappoint. The Aussie actor arrived at this evening’s award ceremony with her Disclaimer writer-director Alfonso Cuarón, who opened the ceremony and later handed Blanchett her gong. Cuarón spoke in Spanish for the duration of the ceremony.
Thanking Cuarón, Blanchett described the filmmaker as “one of the world’s greatest cinema artists.”
“To work with you was one of the greatest privileges of my career on Disclaimer, which is really an experimentation. You’re always experimenting. You’re always pushing for how we can bring cinema to the small screen without depleting it.”
Blanchett added: “I want to thank you, not only for being here tonight but for the conversations with you about the industry and the future of the cinematic arts. Your genius has been really inspiring to me.”
Before Blanchett could tuck into her full speech, however, Cuarón instructed her and the packed out crowd inside the Kursaal to check out the large screen behind them. A congratulatory video message had been “sent by a friend,” Cuarón said. It was George Clooney, who said he was calling in from Venice.
Clooney began his message by differentiating between “acting as a profession” and “acting as art.”
“We have a few actors over a period of time that we celebrate: Marlon Brando, Kate Hepburn, Montgomery Clift, and then later Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson, and Robert DeNiro. It’s the rarefied air and Cate you’re part of that,” Clooney said. “I have been lucky enough to direct you and act with you. You always make everyone around you feel lucky that we get a chance to work with someone who is so gifted and kind. I’m proud to call you a friend.”
Clooney ended by joking that he couldn’t be at the ceremony in person because “he’s in Venice drinking” and he’s “wearing no pants.”
“If I wasn’t in Venice and I wasn’t drinking and I was wearing pants I’d be there to raise a glass to toast you on this terrific award,” Clooney said to a hearty round of applause from the San Sebastian crowd.
Blanchett thanked Clooney before moving on to her acceptance speech, which was brief and shaped by her anxieties surrounding what she identified as a unique and contemporary form of ignorance and apathy in the world.
“I have had a very eclectic and strange career that has taken me to many places,” she began. “But perhaps if there’s any connective tissue in my career, it’s the desire to know. It’s the quest to unlock what it means to be human. That strange and fearful, joyful uncertainty that it is to be a human being. And it’s bewildering to me that there seems to be a lot of chest-thumping certainty in the world. A lot of righteousness and a lack of doubt in the world.”
Blanchett added that the “world is a deeply uncertain place and to live a creative life” is to be “fueled with uncertainty and doubt”
“It’s the DNA of any project,” she said. “You have to humble yourself and say, ‘I don’t know, I’m here to find out’ and I worry that we’re trying to find answers too quickly. But it’s this uncertainty that drives me on and it’s a very uncomfortable place to be. And I think it’s something that we all share as humans.”
She concluded by saying there are “only small islands of certainty” and gestured to her Donostia achievement award and added: “Thank you for this small island of certainty. I’m forever grateful to San Sebastian. Gracias.”
Following the Donostia Award celebration, the festival screened Blanchett’s Guy Maddin feature Rumours. Co-directed by Maddin with Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson, the film debuted at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Bleecker Street snapped up rights to the film back in January for release in the U.S., currently set for December. Protagonist Pictures is handling international sales.
Blanchett arrived in San Seb after a fall festival run for Disclaimer, her second buzzy project this year. The 7-part limited series was written and directed by five-time Oscar winner Cuarón. The series debuted at the Venice Film Festival and is based on the bestselling novel of the same name by Renée Knight.
The series follows journalist Catherine Ravenscroft (Blanchett), who built her reputation by revealing the misdeeds and transgressions of others. When she receives a novel from an unknown author, she is horrified to realize she is now the main character in a story that exposes her darkest secrets. Kevin Kline and Kodi Smit-McPhee also star. Disclaimer launches on October 11 on Apple TV+.
Previous San Sebastian Donostia Award winners include David Cronenberg, Juliette Binoche, Francis Ford Coppola, Woody Allen, Oliver Stone, Agnès Varda, Hirokazu Koreeda, and Costa-Gavras.
San Sebastian runs from September 20 — 28.