A long and belated 16 years after his last film (“Little Children,” 2006), filmmaker Todd Field has returned with something of a masterpiece with “TÁR,” starring Cate Blanchett. A bold, audacious, uncompromising work, “TÁR” centers on power and all its forms, its transactional nature, and the way it’s seemingly granted and taken away with lighting speed in our modern world. The film focuses on conductor Lydia Tár (Blanchett), a composer at the very apex of her field, a polymath, genius, conductor, and EGOT who has got more than a few skeletons in her closet. The movie is a portrait of an unraveling as much as it is a study of power in the post #MeToo, post-cancel culture world (our review).
The film is out in limited release, and we spoke to Field recently and Blanchett, and to celebrate the occasion of this Haley’s Comet filmmaker coming back down to earth, we also wrote one our patented The Lost & Unmade Projects features, this time, of course, about Todd Field and all the projects he once attempted to make over the years, but never came to pass.
On that list, in passing, because a lot of details were never made, is a political thriller that Field was co-writing with author and essayist Joan Didion in 2012 called, “As It Happens.” Jennifer Fox (“The Bourne Legacy,” “We Need To Talk About Kevin,” “Michael Clayton“) was one of the producers on the project with Field, but details beyond that were never made public. Didion only ever wrote a handful of screenplays in the 1970s (“The Panic In Needle Park,” “A Star Is Born” and an adaptation of her own novel “Play It As It Lays“), and her last produced screenplay was in 1996’s “Up Close and Personal.”
Anyhow, during one of the many talks Field and Blanchett participated in during the film’s recent New York Film Festival premiere, the filmmaker revealed that Blanchett was meant to start in the project some ten years ago, and their work on the project, while not ultimately fruitful in terms of the project getting made, it did lay the groundwork for Blanchett to star in “TÁR.”
“I wrote the entire [‘TÁR’] script with her mind; she didn’t know that,” Field explained. “And if you’re thinking about [writing for an] actor, it’s probably reductive from something you’ve seen them do before, but Cate and I had talked about doing a script with Joan Didion many, many years ago, ten years ago, and we met here in New York.”
“And that was a very meaningful meeting, for me, personally, because of Cate’s intellect and her soul and her heart, and the way that she looks at narrative, that’s very holistic and complete,” he continued. “And I really wanted to collaborate with her and for so whatever reason—I knew it was her , and so I put a Post-It note on my desk that said “Cate,” and I would show up at my desk every day and say, ‘Good morning, Cate,’ and get to work.”
“TÁR” is currently playing at the New York Film Festival. The drama opens in limited release on October 7 and then starts expanding in theaters nationwide on October 14.
