TORONTO (AFP) — As the widely-acclaimed "Elizabeth: The Golden Age" premiered at the Toronto film festival Sunday, India-born director Shekhar Kapur mused about making a third installment of the British monarch's life.
Shekhar said he'd been sitting on the script for this sequel for almost a decade, since his Academy Award-winning epic "Elizabeth" was released in 1998.
But Cate Blanchett, star of both pictures, was hesitant, he told reporters.
Blanchett, who won the award for best actress at the Venice film festival on Saturday for her role in Todd Haynes's Bob Dylan biopic "I'm Not There," said: "I didn't feel like enough time had passed" since the first film -- until now.
"Having to be that responsible to drive a film, it was the first time I'd ever done it and I was exercising muscles I'd never exercised before," she explained.
The Australian actress conceded: "There are endless possibilities with Elizabeth ... And I think there will be a lot more Elizabeth (films) because she's endlessly fascinating."
But she remained coy about joining the cast for a possible third film.
"Elizabeth: The Golden Age" picks up several years after the first ended, with Elizabeth I more confident in her rule and facing her greatest challenge: the attempted overthrow of Protestant England in 1585 by the Catholic figurehead of Europe, King Philip II of Spain.
Actor Geoffrey Rush reprises his role as loyal Sir Francis Walsingham in the film, and Clive Owen is introduced as Sir Walter Raleigh, who spearheaded English colonization of North America, beguiling the queen who is preoccupied by her failure to produce an heir.
The film also stars Abbie Cornish, Rhys Ifans, Jordi Molla and Samantha Morton.
"The first one was about power and love, betrayal, survival, separation and disengaging all in the context of power. This one is much more about absolute power ... and being divine ... and what that means," Kapur said.
"The third one (would be) about if you become a model in your life, how would you face mortality ... If you go to the top, and you suddenly are going to die, you become average, ordinary by dying because everybody dies," he said.
On a more intimate level, Blanchett added: "The first film was about denial, a woman denying herself in terms of her role ... this one is about acceptance, a woman having to confront that she is aging."
During the reign of Elizabeth I, known as the Elizabethan era, playwrights such as William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe flourished, Francis Drake became the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe, and Francis Bacon established scientific method to deduce by elimination and inductive reasoning the cause of underlying phenomena.
Blanchett compared the English monarch to Princess Diana, saying both "captured the public's imagination and people felt they could connect to her."
Despite very different personalities, "that she walked often with very little guard, and walked down and shook the hands (of her subjects), I thought a lot about Diana, strangely enough," she said.
Diana, the mother Prince William, of the future king of England, died in a Paris car crash in 1997.
Also relevant in Elizabeth I's story today, said Kapur: "Fundamentalism and tolerance are issues that face us so clearly right now" in a post-9/11 world.
Copyright © 2009 AFP. All rights reserved. More »
