Touch of Diana in Blanchett’s second Elizabeth

As the widely acclaimedElizabeth The Golden Age premiered at Toronto Film Festival yesterday, Indian born director Shekhar Kapur mused about making a third instalment of the British monarch’s life.

Kapur 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.

Cate Blanchett, star of both pictures, conceded there were “endless possibilities with Elizabeth … and I think there will be a lot more Elizabeth (films) because she’s endlessly fascinating”. But the Australian actor – who on Saturday won the award for best actress at the Venice film festival for her role in Todd Haynes’s Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There – was hesitant about joining another sequel.

Before signing up to do the latest film, she said she did not “feel like enough time had passed” since the first outing.

“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 said.

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.

Australian 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 colonisation of North America, beguiling the queen who is preoccupied by her failure to produce an heir. The film also stars Australian actor Abbie Cornish, Rhys Ifans, Jordi Molla and Samantha Morton.

“The first one was about power and love, betrayal, survival, separation and disengaging all inthe context of power,” Kapur said.

“This one is much more about absolute power … and being divine … and what that means.

“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.”

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, playwrights such as William Shakespeare flourished, Francis Drake circumnavigated the globe, and Francis Bacon established the scientific method for deducing 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”, she said.

Kapur said another theme in Elizabeth I’s story was also relevant in a post-9/11 world. “Fundamentalism and tolerance are issues that face us so clearly right now,” he said