We all felt very safe, says Cate Blanchett

Academy award winning actress Cate Blanchett has delivered yet another memorable performance in Carol, that releases in India this Friday. 2015 was a busy year for the veteran actress who also did Truth, where she played a CBS journalist who finds herself targeted by the Bush administration. Her role in Carol is very different, where she plays a housewife in her 50s who falls in love with a woman much younger to her. In a candid chat, Cate talks about the film, being in the running for the Oscars, and working with Todd Haynes. Excerpts:

What a year you’ve had with Cinderella and Truth and Carol! Yes, it’s funny. Truth we made really quickly — it was like a freight train. I made Cinderella two or three years ago, and Carol I made shortly after. So it’s sort of everything coming out at once.

You and Rooney Mara are so great together in Carol... She and I gravitate to similar filmmakers. She’s had such a great creative relationship with David Fincher and Steven Soderbergh and Todd (Haynes) and she just worked with Joe Wright. So I felt like we were very simpatico creatively.

Is there any difference between shooting intimate scenes with a man and a woman I think taking your clothes off is taking your clothes off. I mean, you take your clothes off psychologically and emotionally. There was a lot of trust on the set between Rooney and Todd and Todd and I. He was very clear about how he wanted to shoot it and what parts he was going to use. So we all felt very safe.

How is Carol different from other love stories It’s very easy to forget that the love that these two women are experiencing was criminal. Also, it was considered part of female hysteria, as something that could be cured. It was a sickness. That was an interesting period in our history, the early ’50s. What’s interesting about the film that Todd’s made, and also about Patricia Highsmith’s novel, is that in the end it’s about falling in love. And it’s as much about the age gap between the women as it is about the outsider nature of their love.

How long do you have to make a film like this There were times when we barely had time to do one take. Todd is like no other director I’ve ever worked with. He’s a master making a student film — he has that sort of hunger that a student filmmaker has, but this incredible finesse and expertise and insight that an auteur has. And the intersection of those two atmospheres is really unique.

Actors are the only artists who can’t be nominated twice for an Oscar in the same category. You’re a member of the actor's branch of the Academy and you have two great performances this year... I’m not a lobbyist, so I don’t get tied up in those machinations. Perhaps that stuff matters more to producers than it does to me. To simply be in that dialogue is more than enough, and, I mean, it seems a bit hubristic to be having this conversation. The first port of call is that the films find an audience. So that's the bit that I feel a responsibility towards. The rest is outside.