Tilda Swinton: ‘My ambition was always about having a house by the sea and some dogs’
Tilda Swinton is waiting for me when I land at Inverness airport. She’s smiling, and says she’s got a surprise. We head off towards her car, Swinton marching ahead imperiously. In the car there are four springer spaniels in the back and a fifth, the eldest, Rosy, is in the front passenger seat.
Last time I interviewed Swinton at home in the Scottish Highlands it was 2008, Rosy was a puppy and she spent the whole time sitting on my knee. Swinton lifts her out of the front passenger seat of the Volvo to make way for me – then plonks her on my knee.
In the 14 years since, quite a lot has changed. Rosy has had puppies of her own and become an award-winning film star – at Cannes, she and her sister Dora and grandson Snowbear (both of them sitting in the back with two of
Rosy’s puppis, Louie and Dot), won the Palm Dog for their appearances in The Souvenir Part II, the follow-up to Joanna Hogg’s semi-autobiographical coming-of-age drama.
As for Swinton, at 61 she is freakishly unchanged – still gorgeous and unearthly; a doppelganger for David
Bowie circa 1976. In The Souvenir films, she is the privileged mother of Julie, an aspiring film-maker (Swinton’s daughter Honor Swinton Byrne, giving a lovely guileless performance). In the first film, Julie falls in love with Anthony, a mysterious older man who proves to be a heroin addict and compulsive liar. In the sequel, Julie investigates her former relationship with Anthony while grieving for her lost love. Swinton’s supportive but emotionally repressed mother looks old enough to be Julie’s grandmother. In real life, she could pass as Honor’s rebellious older sister.
We’re here to talk about the films, but Swinton doesn’t like interviews and rarely does them. She’d rather chat with journalists than talk at them so she’s planned a road trip to Loch Ness (she lives on the other side of Inverness, in Nairn). It’s weird, she says, how people assume that you have something profound to say just because you’ve been in a few movies. “I don’t have anything to say. I don’t know anything. One thing I do know is I don’t want to even pretend I know anything. So let’s go for a walk with the dogs instead.”
Swinton is an extraordinary shapeshifter – smouldering in A Bigger Splash, drab in We Need to Talk About Kevin, ancient in The Grand Budapest
Hotel, grotesque in Snowpiercer. As the eponymous Orlando, in Sally Potter’s film, she shifts between sexes and centuries. Perhaps most audacious of all is the distinguished elderly Dr Klemperer in Suspira. She occupies a unique place in cinema, sprinkling mainstream films with indie credibility, and indie films with mainstream viability. Swinton is the queen of indie-stream.
Her films tend to come in batches, often labours of love that take an eter