Inter­view: Cate Blanchett and Mat­ty Sidle

There is sure­ly noth­ing fin­er than see­ing one of the world’s great­est actors of stage and screen par­lay­ing her ener­gies into roles that sit clean­ly out­side of the main­stream com­fort zone. And so it is with Mat­ty Sidle’s mis­chie­vous short work, Bozo Over Ros­es, in which Cate Blanchett stars as part of an ensem­ble of what appears to be a freak-fried Benet­ton ad that’s been beamed back from a not-so-bright future. 

Sidle was thrown togeth­er with Blanchett on the set of 2024’s Bor­der­lands, con­nect­ed by the enthu­si­asms of her son Dash who was assist­ing Sidle in his work as a video­g­ra­ph­er. Shot on loca­tion in the rur­al wilds of sub­ur­ban Budapest, the film com­pris­es sur­re­al agit-prop decla­ma­tions and warped word­play, with Blanchett as a track­ie-sport­ing god­head whose body con­torts amid the lay­ers of post-pro­duc­tion glitch­work. It’s a film which dis­man­tles and recon­structs lan­guage, but also sub­tly satiris­es the uncan­ny aes­thet­ic and coun­ter­in­tu­itive ​“thought” process­es of gen­er­a­tive AI. LWLies met the pair at the 2025 Rot­ter­dam Film Festival.

LWLies: I’ve read a lit­tle bit about how the project was con­ceived, but I’d love to know a bit more detail on how all the dots end­ed up connecting.

Sidle: I found an old note­book of mine that had a lot of jokes in it; strange, sur­re­al­ist lit­tle writ­ings that I had done. I thought there would be poten­tial for these lit­tle exper­i­ments, where friends and fam­i­ly would read out the words and get into the rhythms of the dia­logue. Lat­er I start­ed to find all these dystopi­an loca­tions in Los Ange­les that I got into. And then I got more and more into it and end­ed up cre­at­ing this weird language. 

I was for­tu­nate enough to be on a project with Cate and her son, Dash, and they saw some of my footage and they just got into it. We shot a lit­tle bit more and did some voice record­ing. And then just start­ed to shape a lot of it, almost like a doc­u­men­tary. I had so much con­tent and found much of the film in the edit­ing. We just tried out a lot of dif­fer­ent char­ac­ter ideas and dialects and put things togeth­er in dif­fer­ent sec­tions. And then it was pret­ty much just a fun voice record­ing session. 

I under­stand you were watch­ing lots of exam­ples of actu­al people’s voic­es and peo­ple talk­ing, like famous actors from clas­sic Hollywood. 

Sidle: Yeah, def­i­nite­ly. I love old Hol­ly­wood films. I’m real­ly into Elaine May, Frank Capra films, things like that. And we just had fun using those as touch­stones and start­ing points for some of the dia­logue and char­ac­ters that we developed. 

Blanchett: ​“Char­ac­ters” in invert­ed comments. 

Why do you say that? Do you see your sort of per­sona in this film as not nec­es­sar­i­ly a char­ac­ter in the strict dra­mat­ic sense? 

Blanchett: It was almost like the words were psy­chol­o­gy neu­tral. There was no… the char­ac­ter hov­ers above itself. There was the body that was filmed. And then the notion of char­ac­ter was real­ly just like pix­ie dust across the frame. The way you were treat­ing the text was real­ly flu­id and spon­ta­neous. I mean, obvi­ous­ly it had been per­co­lat­ing for a long time, but you would often throw it in silent movie style, you know, as if it were just occur­ring to you. 

Sidle: Yeah, definitely. 

Blanchett: You were chan­nel­ing these things from some oth­er realm. 

Sidle: There was cer­tain­ly a lit­tle bit of dis­cov­ery dur­ing the ses­sions as well. Like in the first half of it was more like my friends and fam­i­ly. A lot of the dia­logue and the char­ac­ter are done even by the same per­son. It’s a lit­tle more like this out­ra­geous kind of Felli­ni approach. Then with Cate’s sequences, a lot of it was all your voices. 

Blanchett: I found that real­ly inter­est­ing in the way you were going to treat the voice and flip the frame. Because I’ve always been… you know that Lau­rie Ander­son doc­u­men­tary I loved about the face [the 1991 BBC Are­na doc­u­men­tary, The Human Face]. And she does that thing where she flips it both ways and mir­rors it. You’ve got a fam­i­ly asso­ci­a­tion rather than it being the same per­son. The like­ness is real­ly played with. But I didn’t remote­ly try to make any sort of log­i­cal sense out of what we were doing. I think it was much more free association. 

Sidle: Yes, definitely. 

Blanchett: And it’s wild­ly and apolo­get­i­cal­ly that, which I real­ly love. 

In an instance like this where you’re hav­ing your fea­tures and body kind of manip­u­lat­ed in post-pro­duc­tion by some­one else… 

Blanchett: Wel­come to the Mar­vel Universe! 

Well, indeed! But what say are you hav­ing in that? Are there lines that can’t be crossed or are you kind of giv­ing your body and fea­tures over to the project? 

Blanchett: Body and soul. Well, no, Mat­ty, you’d shown me lit­tle tasters of the tone and approach, so I knew what the world would look and feel like. I think that always helps when you’re enter­ing the frame. You have to know what the bound­aries are, or indeed if there are any bound­aries, and what might hap­pen in post. That real­ly helps because then you don’t embell­ish or you start curat­ing your ges­tures accord­ing to the things that you shot. Because this has been, as I said, per­co­lat­ing for a real­ly long time. So yes, I wasn’t fly­ing blind. But the loca­tion that you and Dash found in Budapest was amaz­ing. It was so per­fect. As soon as they entered into that space and the light was quite harsh and the shad­ows were very intense, it just became quite the­atri­cal in the sense. There was a prosce­ni­um if you stood at a cer­tain point, and it gives the film this unique res­o­nance. Down­stage left is dif­fer­ent to upstage right or cen­ter stage. And so those old school dra­mat­ic prin­ci­ples sud­den­ly came very much into play. And I guess you’ve got the bru­tal­ism as well. 

Bru­tal­ism is very in at the moment. 

Sidle: Ha ha, yes! And there’s an inter­mis­sion in my piece too. I won­der who got there first?

Yeah, lawyer up, Brady.

Sidle: I think my whole film could fit in his inter­mis­sion. There’s an idea…

I have a young daugh­ter who’s in the process of learn­ing to read. And the process by which she’s learn­ing is called phon­ics. It’s learn­ing via rep­e­ti­tion of sounds like they say, ​“cup of tea by the sea”. And it was real­ly mov­ing to see you using that very pri­mal, prim­i­tive way of learn­ing lan­guage in the writing. 

Sidle: That is inter­est­ing. Yeah, well a lot of it was based on my daughter’s lin­go. And some of the lines are inter­pre­ta­tions of what she said. Some of the things you over­hear and peo­ple say things on set, or in the mar­ket or some­where like that. Or like an old movie, I might flip it. Like a line from an old Pre­ston Sturges film. I’ll give it a lit­tle bit of a twist and build on top of it. But there was no real super focus on how to go about it. Some­body else thought it might be based on the ​‘Oulipo’, the French word play exer­cis­es that you can do. 

What was it like, Cate, to intone those words and try to cap­ture what the writ­ing was attempt­ing to transmit? 

Blanchett: I think it was about find­ing the right res­o­nance for them. But it was incred­i­bly play­ful. I felt very at peace. 

Would you ever do some­thing like that in rehearsal? Like doing games and lim­ber­ing up exer­cis­es before a scene?

Blanchett: Yeah, I’m work­ing with Thomas Oster­meier [on a pro­duc­tion of Chekov’s ​‘The Seag­ull’ with Tom Burke] at the moment and we all warm up every day. It’s not dis­sim­i­lar to what we did on this. But I think there’s a real­ly strong hyp­not­ic qual­i­ty to it. So I hyp­no­tized or pos­sessed myself while we were shooting. 

Sidle: It went pret­ty fast. It was like we did it all in about an hour. Did we not? 

Blanchett: No, no… I think you might have been in the zone. I think it went on a bit longer than that. But it’s inter­est­ing you talk­ing about read­ing those things into it. I think some­times when a film is so spe­cif­ic, it can actu­al­ly speak to a wider uni­ver­sal expe­ri­ence. It’s a strange thing because it’s so par­tic­u­lar the film you’ve made. 

Sidle: Yeah, I felt like there’s… some des­per­ate long­ings in it. When I lis­tened to it in the end, I start­ed to fig­ure out what it was after it was done, fig­ur­ing out if some­body thought they could go to the greater San Diego area to improve them­selves. Or some of its advice and char­ac­ters offer­ing strange lit­tle isms. 

Blanchett: They’ll find them­selves here and they’d, how did I get here?

I total­ly agree. I love the fact that there’s just not enough con­text to be able to place it as a kind of, you know, for it to become didac­tic or to be sort of like forc­ing an issue. You can kind of, you know, I feel that’s one of those films that any­one can come away from with any­thing real­ly. Maybe that was, that’s a win. 

Sidle: I think so, I hope so. And it was fun to do the action as well, like the hacky sack and the skate­board­ing. I love it. 

Was that your first skate­board­ing on film? 

Blanchett: Yes, and pos­si­bly my last. I’d nev­er done all these child­hood games or tricks before. I love all of those lit­tle play­ful bits. They’re out of your past and out of your whim­sy. But yeah, there’s a strange alien nos­tal­gia to it, I think. And it was a very par­tic­u­lar atmos­phere because we were doing it under lock­down. And so we were all in a bub­ble togeth­er because we were mak­ing a fea­ture. And so then you go off at the week­end and loca­tion scout and it was just us, there was no one else around. So to be out play­ing with four peo­ple in the open air and dur­ing COVID it was bliss.

Sidle: Yeah, def­i­nite­ly. I was also try­ing to put togeth­er these small­er shoots. There’d just be a cou­ple of us and we’d go down to the LA Riv­er, do some lip-sync­ing, shoot for like an hour. I shot it myself and it’s an inter­est­ing way to work with­out hav­ing such a big team. 

Blanchett: It’s much more nim­ble. And it doesn’t, you’re not then pres­sured by, you know, when obvi­ous­ly it’s nice to get a bit of mon­ey to make some­thing, but you know, in terms of the dead­lines and the over-opinionating. 

I imag­ine doing some­thing like [Guy Maddin’s] Rumors was a bit more nim­ble as well than a kind of mega production… 

Blanchett: It was a very strange fever dream. I hon­est­ly thought it was going to be in Guy’s garage in Win­nipeg. And I was pack­ing my bag and he was like, ​‘No, we’re going to Hun­gary and it’s six weeks of night shoots’. It was like an episode of Scooby-Doo. 

It’s inter­est­ing to hear though that you were sort of shoot­ing out in the land­scape and in real places because it was maybe done with effects and green screens and… 

Sidle: Some peo­ple thought there’s an Unre­al Engine qual­i­ty. But every­thing was filmed tra­di­tion­al­ly. We did some com­posit­ing and some roto­scop­ing, and then we dou­bled the back­ground and played with some aspects of oth­er shots, like iso­lat­ing cer­tain pock­ets of light and plac­ing them in the frame. But every­thing that you see on frame is what we cap­tured, even though it has this sort of Uncan­ny Val­ley aspect to it.

Do you see the film as sat­i­riz­ing the aes­thet­ic and the lan­guage of AI? Is it play­ing on that dis­con­nect from what we per­ceive as being human?

Blanchett: Yeah. And even the split­ting of the human into becom­ing its own mir­ror. So even though there’s such par­tic­u­lar nos­tal­gic word choic­es that they’re some­how dis­as­so­ci­at­ed from the human that is deliv­er­ing those words. 

Sidle: And it def­i­nite­ly struck me when I had this real tran­scen­den­tal style, like med­i­ta­tive imagery in these almost cult-like char­ac­ters. And then that com­bined with this incred­i­bly sil­ly tone and dia­logue, that is kind of an unapolo­getic and just free form. That’s when I think they start­ed to work and I liked how those things col­lid­ed with each oth­er in a cer­tain way. I liked the idea of it being this sort of future trans­mis­sion, like a kind of weird time cap­sule that you might find one day. And it con­tains all the last bits of human­i­ty that’s left, the last sem­blances that were col­lect­ed. And since I get to write it, it could be what I find funny. 

Blanchett: But can you explain the title? 

Sidle: It’s sort of a per­ver­sion of some­thing I heard once. It’s just more like you just get real­ly into some­thing. ​‘I’m going bozo over ros­es you sent me last year.’ So it’s sort of using ​‘bozo’ as a verb. Like I’m going nuts for it. 

I love the word ​‘bozo’. We don’t real­ly say it in the UK. So it’s love­ly to have an oppor­tu­ni­ty to say it. 

Blanchett: Good name for a dog. 

Sidle: I think it’s a col­lab­o­ra­tion with peo­ple that are into it as well. It was just a lit­tle treat. And that’s what it was about real­ly, just to try to make some­thing a lit­tle dif­fer­ent and fun. 

Blanchett: Dash had seen the footage and he said to me, ​‘You’ve got to see this.’ 

What area of the indus­try do you think Dash is going to move into? 

Blanchett: Yeah, he was one of the cohorts who got into Tisch Film School in New York when COVID hap­pened. And it took a real­ly long time for most uni­ver­si­ties – NYU includ­ed – to piv­ot. And so he made the real­ly dif­fi­cult deci­sion after a year and said, ​‘I’m just going to go and step into the indus­try.’ So he’s learn­ing. I think, ulti­mate­ly, he’d like to direct. And he’s writ­ing. I mean, he’s the per­son I always speak to about films and roles. It’s real­ly inspir­ing. Yeah. And he’s always say­ing, ​‘Oh, you’ve got to see this.’ He’s got a real­ly great eye.

Sidle: Yeah. Dash is one of the smartest peo­ple I know, talk­ing about ideas and movies all the time. He’s like a young old soul.

Blanchett: Yeah, he is an old soul. 

So you think he’ll do his first short soon, you reckon? 

Sidle: I know he’s play­ing around with all sorts of ideas. I think he likes long­form. I think there’s a lot of things he’s inter­est­ed in.

I want to final­ly piv­ot to talk about David Lynch. I feel it’s per­mis­si­ble to ask you because I think this film does have a Lynchi­an qual­i­ty to it.

Sidle: Oh my God. He’s def­i­nite­ly a hero. Like, there are very few film­mak­ers or artists that I look up to quite like that. Lynch though… he’s absolute­ly… man, it’s such a big loss. He just astound­ed on every lev­el. And I saw Eraser­head at a real­ly young age. And I thought that was amaz­ing. I’ve read so many of his inter­views. I love the way that he talks about film­mak­ing, the detail and the sto­ries that he tells, like the whole idea of how he made The Ele­phant Man with Mel Brooks was so incred­i­ble. His weath­er reports were so fun­ny, but also made Los Ange­les sound kin­da haunting.

Bla­chett: I don’t even know where to begin… I loved the way he talked about being alive. To what I was say­ing before about the notion of speci­fici­ty cre­at­ing uni­ver­sal­i­ty, I think that defines all of his ref­er­ence points. And they’re not shal­low. They’re deep. So deep. To the point that they bypass our con­ven­tion­al log­ic and go to a much deep­er place. And so of course it makes sense, you know, that he was into tran­scen­den­tal med­i­ta­tion, because his free asso­ci­a­tions make an impact with an audi­ence on a cel­lu­lar lev­el; like, a cul­tur­al­ly cel­lu­lar lev­el. It’s like every­one who ever encoun­tered him recalls and remem­bers and was nat­u­ral­ly influ­enced by his imagery and his sto­ry­telling. And that in itself is extraordinary.

Mat­ty Sidle’s Bozo Over Ros­es played in the Pop, fizz shorts pro­gramme at the 2025 Rot­ter­dam Film Festival