SMOKE AND MIRRORS
AND MAKE-BELIEVE
Tilda Swinton’s remarkable screen presence has been the engine behind a dizzying variety of
films, from early collaborations with Derek Jarman to new work by Pedro Almodóvar and Wes
Anderson. On the eve of a BFI retrospective, she talks to Isabel Stevens about Buster Keaton,
sharing Tarkovsky’s dreams and why the greatest performance in cinema history is by a donkey
Photography by Katerina Jebbs there any other icon of cinema today as singular
and curious as Tilda Swinton? Her gender-jumping
roles, that ghostly complexion and those green eyes
that love to pierce the fourth wall, marked her out early as an
otherworldly creature. The sheer number and assortment of
characters she has inhabited is perhaps unprecedented. Her
furious prolificacy means she has at least one feature to her
name for each of her (nearly) 60 years. Her career stretches
from the homespun punk universes of Derek Jarman via
the worlds of the most venerable arthouse filmmakers
working today to Hollywood superhero extravaganzas – not
to mention her own directorial projects (from a home-movie
of her dogs that went viral, to a film tribute to John Berger),
film festivals she’s curated, her many music videos, various
fashion collaborations and her unannounced appearance in
pieces of performance art (in 2013 she slept for eight hours in
New York’s Museum of Modern Art while gallery-goers lookedon). All of which confirm the degree to which she relishes
surprise and possesses a surrealist’s zeal for shape-shifting.
There is sometimes a sense that Tilda Swinton is omnipresent.
Just cast an eye over her credits for the last year: a cameo in the TV
series of What We Do in the Shadows, a turn as a samurai mortician
in Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die, and roles as a concerned
mother in Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir and David Copperfield’s
wealthy, eccentric aunt in Armando Iannucci’s Dickens adaptation.
Listen closely to Uncut Gems and you’ll also hear her on the phone
talking to Adam Sandler’s jeweller Howard Ratner. It’s a varied
list that testifies to her carnival troupe spirit and her place as
an animating force for and enabler of cinema of all stripes and
creeds. She is a Boudicca-like figure, leading a rebellion against
conformity and fighting to put art and experimentation at the top
of cinema’s agenda. But she is equally happy to spot and collaborate
with first-time filmmakers (such as Luca Guadagnino
with The Protagonists in 1999) as she is with establishedI
April 2020 | Sight&Sound | 25