TILDA SWINTON, A HEROINE FOR TODAY
More than just an actress, Tilda Swinton has embodied an enigmatic, androgynous screen icon for over three decades now. Present in five titles at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the Scottish star seems as unique and relevant as ever in the movie pantheon of today. Numéro caught up with a performing artist who is as exceptional as she is inspiring.
During her three decades in front of the camera, Tilda Swinton has developed a radical style like few other actresses, even if she doesn’t approve of being labelled an actor, since she considers the term too technical. Likewise, when she discusses moviemaking, she doesn’t always talk about “shooting” a film but sometimes about “growing” it. Swinton developed her concept of the craft and cosmology of cinema through working with filmmakers as diverse as Sally Potter, David Fincher and Jim Jarmusch, and by oscillating between blockbusters and films so underground they were almost contraband. At this year’s Cannes Film
Festival she was present in no less than five titles, including Wes Anderson’s much anticipated The French Dispatch and the wonderfully experimental Memoria. Numéro sat down with her to talk about the meandering image as an instrument for sharing the world of sensibility, her ideal of friendship in art, and why she feels so good in the body of an extra-terrestrial.
NUMÉRO: Your new film Memoria is a dreamlike voyage to Colombia, crafted by the Thai film director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who won the Palme d’or in 2010 at Cannes. It embodies your taste for travel and atypical adventure. TILDA SWINTON: So Joe [Weerasethakul’s nickname] and I first met when I was in the jury that awarded a prize to [his film] Tropical Malady, a few years before he won the Palme d’or. We kept in touch, and very soon the idea of doing a movie came up. As has often been the case, friendship preceded working together. The premise was to shoot in a country that neither of us knew. The film tells the story of a woman who’s in a trance, almost in limbo, during a trip to Colombia. We worked hard to make her state implicit. You might imagine she’s in mourning, because she talks about her husband. But above all there’s a noise she hears in her head – a strange bang that wakes her up in the morning. Joe and I had a pact: everything that might happen to us between the initial idea for the film and the shoot had to find its way onto the screen. Which it did, but in an underground, peripheral way. Both my parents died during that period, and Joe was suffering from noises in his head, what doctors call the exploding-head syndrome. All of that went into Memoria, because it’s life that has to inform art.
To work on this production, you had to get into the director’s head. What was that like?
If 15 years ago someone had said that an artist would build their work around themes like fire, intermediary zones or sleep, I would have immediately said, “That person is for me.” In Joe’s work there’s an interest in the inarticulate which suits me perfectly. I feel connected to him. That another person can literally touch what’s inside your head is something I find very beautiful. It’s a metaphor for the power of cinema, at once strange and joyous.
Now that movie houses have reopened, after what seemed like an eternity, you must be very happy to be able to watch films on the big screen once again.
If today we still haven’t understood how much we need the open-air collective unconscious offered by cinema, we’ll never understand it! Through film, we can share dreams and experiences. Cinema not only connects us to each other but also to nature, to the rocks, to history. I find that earth shattering. How can I express how much I missed it?
What was the pandemic like for you? How did you survive life under lockdown?
I was lucky enough to be at home, in Scotland. My children, who are 24 and 22, were there too. We watched a lot of old films: Hitchcock, Miyazaki, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger – The Red Shoes in particular. One of the first things I did during lockdown was to get hold of a copy of Michael Powell’s enormous biography, which I wanted to read because Powell’s story is the story of cinema. He started out in the silent era, and then sound came along and caused a disaster. But cinema picked itself up and carried on. Then there was a second crisis when colour arrived, and another when television got going. Cinema has always progressed, it’s robust. That was my intuition, and the book confirmed that. Right now we’re going through another revolutionary period with the digital age and streaming platforms – but I don’t believe those prophets of doom who say film will become extinct. In just one year, I shot with Pedro Almodóvar, Joanna Hogg, and then in Australia with George Miller, the director of the Mad Max series, a real master. Filmmaking isn’t in danger, even if film distribution is in trouble.
Do you make films because they live longer than we do?
Film is also greater than us: it’s a total art. At the beginning of my career, when I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with my life, I read that Chris Marker made films so that he could travel. That got rid of my complexes – I saw myself in those words. My first feature film was shown at the Berlin Film Festival, and I felt very much at home there. The following
week someone asked me to shoot an experimental film in Fiji. Fabulous!
The French Dispatch, which, like Memoria, was shown at Cannes this year, is a truly choral work. Did you accept the part out of loyalty to Wes Anderson?
The film is a love letter to the American tradition of international journalism, to the passion of certain
American intellectuals, like James Baldwin, for France. It’s about a magazine that’s reminiscent of The Paris Review or The New Yorker. We shot it in Angoulême, and I loved being there with Wes and all the other great artists [the film’s many stars include Bill Murray and Léa Seydoux]. Wes is a friend, and, as I already told you, I love working with friends – adorable people who are compatible with each other. Spending time dreaming up films with them is really my greatest pleasure. We’ve been talking about the character I play in The French Dispatch ever since we made The Grand Budapest Hotel.
You played an alien in one of your first films, Peter Wollen’s Friendship’s Death [1987], of which a restored copy was shown at Cannes this year. That makes sense – you seem to have come from outer space!
It’s something I realized early on. I was lucky because I began my career with Derek Jarman [the cult British director of “New Queer Cinema,” who died in 1994]. If I’m an alien, I landed in the best possible place on Earth. As a meteorite, you’re better off not landing where loneliness will engulf you. I fell into the right garden. All the people we’ve been talking about today are travellers in the wider sense of the term. Supersonic voyagers. They’re also freaks. What’s great about freaks is that they’re never lonely – there’s a real community of people who recognize each other. Derek was very conscious of being a link between the old generations and the new with respect to both queer culture and art in general. I was barely 20, and his approach was something of a shock. He would talk about William Burroughs and Stan Brakhage, all the way back to William Blake; he talked about sensibility, queer fraternity and friendship among freaks. Some young people are on the lookout for examples to follow, and if you talk to them about Derek or Leigh Bowery they’re often pretty amazed. I still hope that the emerging generations will improve who we are – I feel more and more buoyed by young people, some of them younger than my children, 15-year-old kids who’ve got past the fascination for technology. I’ve even met some who’ve gone back to handwriting!
In Todd Haynes’s documentary about The Velvet Underground, which was recently shown on Apple TV+, we see how the band went beyond the world of music to become a nexus of music, art and cinema. You also move between several different spheres – movies, art, fashion… The Velvet Underground represented perpetual movement, which is also what I seek. Right from the early years, I was initiated into all kinds of practices without establishing a hierarchy. To be honest, it was kind of “Open sesame,” because the real treasures of life opened up before me, like a breath of fresh air I could drink in. In the 80s, indie cinema didn’t yet have the economic clout it does today – we were more underground than indie. When people complained that we weren’t mainstream enough, we always retorted, “We’re mainstream to us.” The value of an artistic gesture is primarily what you give it, even if some think that what you do is dirty. In that optic, why stop at a sole form or activity? For me it’s also the definition of luxury. I’ve shot a lot of films recently, but I also spent a few days in Rome with Olivier Saillard for a very unusual project about Pasolini and the costumes used in his films. It’s called Embodying Pasolini. In his own way, Olivier, is a real freak.
It seems to me that the term actress isn’t quite right for you. What would you use?
I never liked being called an actress, because it makes me uneasy with respect to real actors. I prefer to say performer, which seems more accurate. In film, I began working in a very intimate context, something I still do today. Most of the nine pictures I did with Derek Jarman were almost silent and resembled performances – they were neither narrative nor interpretive. I was first and foremost myself. What resonates most with me in cinema comes from people in documentaries and animal films – as a spectator I’m very attracted by seeing something appear for the first time before a camera. It might seem strange to seek that after 30 years of making films, but I’m always looking for that frisson.
So the classic tradition of British acting is foreign to you – you won’t be performing Shakespeare any time soon?
I honestly don’t understand anything when people talk about that kind of performing. I have enormous respect for those who dedicate their lives to the craft of acting, but I really don’t think I belong to the same sphere of show business.
You have worked with Peter Wollen, Laura Mulvey’s former husband and co-director, whose theory about the male gaze imprisoning female characters is making rather a comeback. What’s your position with respect to questions of gender in contemporary cinema?
When I was shooting in Madrid last year, there was a super exhibition about Delphine Seyrig, whose work I hugely admire and who I knew briefly. Visiting the show I kept wondering, without really finding an answer, how I’d managed to magically escape the male gaze and why the question of whether a female gaze needed to be identified seemed to me uncertain. In my experience, cinema is ungendered. Art in general is ungendered. Once again, I had the luck to meet a director like Derek Jarman with whom I took a long bath of ungendered artistic gestures and developed antibodies, as though I were inoculated. There are projects I refuse almost as a physical reaction. But all of that was made possible, no doubt unconsciously, by the work of creators and thinkers like Laura Mulvey, Delphine Seyrig or Marguerite Duras, all these women who formed a block.
If cinema doesn’t have a gender, does it have a geography?
The idea of a national cinema is foreign to me. I’ve worked with very few Scottish filmmakers, but I’ve travelled with cinema, with Wes Anderson, Bong Joon-ho, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Jim Jarmusch… I spent a memorable time with Pedro Almodóvar last year. In the short film we made, I had to play an actress who behaves extravagantly, and I didn’t always get it. Pedro said, “It’s cultural, you’re from the north, but here we do things like that.” I replied that my culture was cinema. And from that moment on we talked about films, and only films, like Antonioni’s La Notte. Our nationalities were of no importance anymore. For me, cinema embodies this space without borders. On one side there’s James Bond, on the other little films from little countries, but they all belong to the same screen. It’s a very democratic art.
Wes Anderson, The French Dispatch, out on 27 October.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Memoria, out this November.
“I never liked being called an actress, because it makes me uneasy with respect to real actors. I prefer to say performer, which seems more accurate. In film, I began working in a very intimate context, something I still do today. Most of the nine pictures I did with Derek Jarman were almost silent and resembled performances – they were neither narrative nor interpretive. I was first and foremost myself.”