Cate Blanchett developing film, TV projects with her production company

Los Angeles : Australian actress Cate Blanchett, who was recently seen in ‘Don’t Look Up’ and ‘Nightmare Alley’, has taken the onus for developing film and TV projects as she’s changing the landscape of audio-visual content through the Dirty Films banner she co-founded with her husband, Andrew Upton, reports ‘Variety’.

‘A Manual for Cleaning Women’, her first collaboration with Pedro Almodovar in his English-language debut; Indigenous Australian filmmaker Warwick Thornton’s ‘The New Boy’ and the Apple TV Plus series ‘Disclaimer’ from Alfonso Cuaron are some of the projects that are there in the pipeline of Dirty Films.

As per ‘Variety’, Blanchett will star in each in addition to producing, building on her resume of dual credits that includes ‘Carol’, ‘Stateless’ and ‘Mrs. America’. Similar to how she chooses acting roles, the Dirty Films team (which also includes Coco Francini and Georgie Pym) takes a “filmmaker-driven” approach.

Chalking up the company’s “incredibly eclectic” selections to its principals’ Australian heritage, the actress told ‘Variety’, “No matter the budget or the genre, films are born out of interesting conversations, so that’s where we begin,”

She explains, alluding to Australia’s birth by colonial invasion, “It’s a small country in terms of population, but we individually punch above our cultural weight, because we have such a mix of cultural influences, in a great way – also in a painful way. We have a very interesting perspective on the world.”

For her, having a creative stake in the project is a bigger aspiration than just finding a role for herself, “People often assume that when you have a production company, you are simply trying to develop materials for yourself. Sometimes that’s the case, and you do need to be in something.”

The two-time Oscar-winner appeared in all six episodes of the miniseries that ultimately landed at Netflix. “I knew that I had to be in it in some way because of the material. No one wanted to make a project that was ostensibly about refugees and asylum seekers”, she concluded.