Often when I’m creating roles – and obviously in this one because it is so much about the aural experience – your connection to a character will be through a piece of music. It’s something I can’t put words to – and I’m always looking to dispense with words, particularly in films: ‘Do you need to say this, or can we do this with a gesture. Maybe if I just move very quickly here, or move very slowly there, I’ll reveal far more through a gesture than through language?’ Not that I am a dancer, but if I had my time over I would love to dispense with language altogether and just move through space. That’s the point I connected with the conducting experience – it’s often through the way they breathe, the most minuscule gestures, that the orchestra understands – particularly an orchestra who has worked with a conductor many, many times.

‘I think the Rite of Spring is amazing – it’s such a shock to the system, your blood flows differently after listening to it’

I learnt piano as a girl, and whenever I’ve been pregnant I’ve said ‘well, I’m going to finally finish my degree, and I’m going to pick up the piano again …’ But of course one thing happens, and then another thing happens, and tragically it’s not until I get asked to do something for a role – to play Bach in a film – that I feel I can finally indulge. I had to brush up on it. I was in Budapest at the time and there was a wonderful teacher from the Academy. She was so fantastic about the discipline of Bach, and both the freedom that is given to you within each phrase but also the mathematical precision that is absolutely vital. Part of the scene in the film – and it’s a very long scene – is this desperate desire to communicate with a student, and one way that my character tries to communicate with him is to show him that even within what seems to be the rigid structure of Bach, there is this incredible freedom.

I think about Death and the Maiden a lot. The music of Górecki too. During the making of this film – and this was something I hadn’t ever done before – I thought I wanted to have music in my head the whole time, so when people were talking to me I had an earpiece in where I would just have various pieces of music playing. And Todd [Field, Tár’s writer and director] kept referring to a piece of Górecki’s that he called the ‘Tár march’ – a particular rhythm that he wanted her to walk to.

I had a really amazing experience about 10 years ago. Alex Ross gave a lecture series with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Richard Tognetti, and when I went to that I heard Xenakis’s music performed live. And you know that there are moments in one’s listening – and it’s usually the live experience – when everything gets shifted off its axis. And I remember in that moment thinking: ‘I have never heard this before, I have never felt like this before, and I can’t unhear this’.

I think the Rite of Spring is amazing – it’s such a shock to the system, your blood flows differently after listening to it. And I also like anything with a cello solo, because it’s so close to the human voice.

When I was in High School, I had a friend whose uncle was an opera critic, and whenever I’d go to his house, it would be silent. And I said to him ‘it’s interesting, your world is music and you don’t have music on’. And he said ‘I listen to music, it’s not background. I sit, and I listen to it’. And it was quite a new concept to me because that wasn’t the case in my household. Obviously if you go to a concert you attend to the music in a very different way, which is why I find it such a profound experience hearing music live. But I can no longer have music in the background. My world now falls into two zones – it falls into the times when I’m listening to music, and the times when I’m not. It’s quite a different shift to me.

Tár will be in cinemas from January 20 next year

This interview originally appeared in the Awards 2022 issue of Gramophone. Never miss an issue – subscribe today