Multiple Oscar winner Cate Blanchett engaged in wide-ranging talk about creative conflict on sets, making big-budget films, and why Carol struggled for years to find funding.

Blanchett, who is at TIFF supporting Alfonso Cuarón’s Apple TV+ show “Disclaimer” and Guy Maddin’s film “Rumours,” was welcomed with standing ovation after fans lined up early to acquire rush tickets to the event.

Blanchett talked about her love for performing theater in front of a live audience, leading her to address the “streamers out there” that don’t release viewership data.

“We want the numbers,” Blanchett said. “Not so we know how much money is being made, but we want to know how many eyeballs have been on things that we have made. That’s greatly important.”

“You look at the seats and you go, ‘OK, that was 70 pflumps.’ The next night, there’s 20 pflumps. And hopefully, by opening night, everyone is riveted,” Blanchett said, prompting laughter from the audience.

Blanchett was asked how she handles creative disagreements with directors on set. While she said there has been “no conflict” with her longtime collaborator Todd Haynes, Blanchett recalled a moment on the set of “Carol” in which the director struggled to find the lighting in a particular scene, so the actors allowed him the space to clear his head while they searched for alternate solutions.

“There is a misconception that making the film, when it’s great, it’s like summer camp, and I’ve been on a couple of those, and the films have been fucking awful,” Blanchett said. “Polite disagreement, respectful disagreement is super important in the creative process.”

In “Carol,” Blanchett plays a middle-aged mother who becomes involved in a romantic affair with a younger woman (Rooney Mara) who works at a department store. While the film came out in 2015, Blanchett said it took five years (and multiple directors) to make it because it was “so hard” to get the project funded.

“At one point, another director was going to do it, and he got sort of taken off the project,” Blanchett said. That prompted her to step away as well, until Todd Haynes expressed interest in the project and got Blanchett back on board. “It was a five-year period, because no one wanted to fund it at that point. No one wanted to see a film with one woman, let alone two women, falling in love?”

Todd Haynes is the subject of my latest book:

Gay Directors, Gay Films? By Emanuel Levy (Columbia University Press, August 2015)

Blanchett remarked that the last several years of film have been “vibrant” because “the voices are less homogenous.”

“It was a risky endeavor at the time, unfortunately,” she said of “Carol.”

“When there’s a sense of risk in those tentpole films, and you can feel it when there is a risk, then they have a chance of being successful,” Blanchett said. “I mean, ‘Barbie’ worked, not only because of the component parts, but because it was a risk. Someone took a risk on that. That’s why it worked — it was so fucking crazy!”

Blanchett, whose credits include “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” to “Thor: Ragnarok” to “Borderlands,” added that large-scale popcorn flicks “make space for people to remind themselves how great it is to go to the cinema.”

“I hate giving advice, but go out in nature. … Anything that gives you the time to think long thoughts and think uncomfortable thoughts, because being an actor, it’s pretty uncomfortable a lot of the time. There will be times where you flow, there will be times when you take off as a group of people and those are the moments you cling onto. But 97% of the time it’s slightly uncomfortable. And being in the rehearsal room … unless you’re slightly uncomfortable, you’re not working from the right place.”