Cate Blanchett and the Thing That Makes People Interesting
It makes fictional characters interesting too.
Not long ago, I saw this TikTok video of the actress Cate Blanchett repeatedly going off in various interviews on her long-standing hatred for leaf-blowers.
Yes, leaf-blowers.
In the various interviews, she says:
“You blow leaves from one side of the pavement to the other only for them to be blown back again? I hate [leaf-blowers] so much!”
“What happened to the broom?”
“It’s all that’s wrong with the human race.”
This is clearly not an act: Cate Blanchett truly hates leaf-blowers. And she has a good point! But that’s not why I’m so enamored with this clip.
It’s partly that she’s going on about this random, obscure topic that I’ve never given much thought to. But it’s mostly that she feels so passionate about it.
It reminds me of the random, obscure passions of my friends.
One couple I know is so obsessed with Turner Classic Movies that they’ve taken to regularly attending festivals and book events to meet fellow fans and old stars.
Meanwhile, another friend is fascinated by construction cranes, which she loves.
But darker passions, like Cate Blanchett’s hatred of leaf-blowers, are interesting too. One friend has a deathly fear of escalators and moving walkways in airports, going far out of her way to avoid them. And one hates dirt so much that she can’t even watch TV shows or movies where the characters are dirty.
Then there’s my husband Michael who’s obsessed with, well, almost everything.
And then we come to my own random, obscure passions.
For example, water features.
When I was a very small boy, three or four years old, I was completely captivated by the little pond in my grandmother’s backyard. Every time we visited her, I couldn’t wait to go out back and explore that pond.
I’ve been obsessed with water features ever since.
In fact, a few years later, at age seven or eight, I collected a bucket full of dozens of tiny frogs — what we neighborhood kids used to call “fingernail frogs,” because they were so small — from the swamp below our house, intending to keep them in a bucket in our garage.
The next morning, the frogs were all dead, and I felt absolutely terrible. These days, there are no frogs left in that swamp, fingernail or otherwise — mostly due to climate change, probably, but I’ve still always felt personally responsible.
I’ve felt so bad that I’ve never told another soul that I gathered and killed all those frogs, not until just now.
Even so, by age ten, I owned multiple aquariums, and I once caught a sunfish in the little lake beyond that swamp to keep in one of my aquariums.
Under the light of my aquarium, the fish was a stunning shimmering blue. But as beautiful as it was, it also looked so sad to me, all alone, away from its lake. I remembered all those fingernail frogs I had killed, and I felt so guilty that I scooped the fish up in a baggie and pedaled it back to the little lake to set it free again.
I’ve never told anyone that story either, even though I think it makes me look a lot better than the frog one. As a kid, I thought being sad about a lonely fish made me look like a soft-hearted sissy, and back then, more than anything in the world, I didn’t want anyone thinking I might be gay.
But looking back as an adult, I love that soft-hearted little boy. Maybe those fingernail frogs didn’t die in vain after all.
As an adult, I always kept at least one aquarium (but with fish bred in captivity). I also collected various indoor water features, along with my beloved lava lamp. At one point, I built a dry riverbed in the backyard of Michael’s and my house, but it didn’t turn out to be nearly as impressive as the one on my head.
Seven years ago, Michael and I left America to become digital nomads. As excited as I was, I was bummed I had to leave all my various water features behind.
So imagine my joy when I quickly discovered that our travels meant exploring fantastic water features all over the world.
When Michael and I were living in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 2019, we went for a walk near our apartment and in a nearby park, we happened to stumble upon something called the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier — a fantastic Soviet-era monument to the soldiers who fought in World War II for the Red Army.
The monument is barely maintained now, cracked and crumbling, and most of its water features are dry. But in the photo below, those “steps” you see leading up to the tomb itself? They’re each about a meter high, and it was all once a massive, gushing cascade.
Can you imagine?
Naturally, we climbed up to the tomb itself.
We hadn’t meant to be taking a long walk, but enchanted by our unexpected discovery of the memorial, Michael and I kept climbing up the hill, on unmarked trails, until we eventually came to a lovely little lake with a fantastic view of the city.
A few years later, in Italy, my imagination was captured by an online picture I saw of some fountains in a Renaissance garden at something called Villa d’Este on the outskirts of Rome. So Michael and I took the train out to see what it was all about.
The villa was built in the 16th century by one Cardinal Ippolito II d'Este, as a way to impress the other Catholic cardinals; he was determined that they name him pope, and he was considered for the position five separate times.
But d'Este was never elected pope, which is a great thing, because he was actually a horrible human being. He stole land from his neighbors to build his precious garden, and then buried them in expensive lawsuits; he diverted the local river to power all the fountains in his garden; and he even pilfered marble and statues from nearby Hadrian’s Villa, a priceless remnant of the Roman Empire.
In a happy bit of karma, d'Este died frustrated and nearly broke from the financing of his expensive villa.
But credit where credit is due: d'Este created an absolutely fantastic engineering and artistic feat: a sprawling garden with an utterly insane collection of more than a hundred separate water features, some absolutely massive and utterly complicated, many designed by the leading artists of his day. The entire garden includes thousands of jets and cascades and waterfalls, in a seemingly endless number of grottos and plazas — all of it powered only by water and gravity from the river d'Este had diverted. There’s even a water-powered organ!
Rome’s Trevi Fountain and the Fountain of the Four Rivers are wonderful — if over-touristed — but these incredible water features at Villa d’Este have inspired and influenced fountains all over the world for almost five hundred years.
In a very real way, the journey that began with my fascination with my grandmother’s little pond ended that afternoon at the Villa d’Este.
But my passion continues.
I’m not saying you should be as interested in seeking out water features as I am — although it sure beats doom-scrolling on TikTok or Twitter/X.
But I am saying that people having passions is pretty damn interesting.
I’m a novelist and screenwriter. And we writers of fiction think a lot about exactly how to make our characters interesting.
Over the years, I’ve learned that one great way to do it is to make a character want something — passionately. Audiences like characters with passion because we like people with passion.
Most of us are passionate about passion.
And if you didn’t already consciously know this, now that I’ve pointed it out, you’ll see it in almost every book you read, and every TV show or movie you watch.
Brent Hartinger is a screenwriter and author. Check out his other newsletter about his travels at BrentAndMichaelAreGoingPlaces.com.
Thanks for the newsletter. Your story makes me want to hear more, and to write, myself.
Some of the links don't work, tho. I use FireFox, in case that makes a difference.