26 | Sight&Sound | April 2020
TILDA SWINTONtitans. While many performers gradually inch towards the
defining work of their career, Swinton’s formative roles with
Derek Jarman in Caravaggio (1986), Edward II (1991) and Sally Potter
in Orlando (1992) others feel as enduring as any that have come
since. Indeed, she has taken the camaraderie at the core of Jarman’s
collaborative practice and the unearthly spirit of his heartland of
Dungeness and spread it far, far out into the filmmaking world.
I spoke to her on the eve of her retrospective at BFI Southbank
in London – where she was also set to receive a BFI Fellowship for
her contribution to film culture – and straight after the launch of
the appeal to save Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage (see page 12). As
we leave the hotel after the interview, I’m reminded of her utopian
spirit and her appeal to different generations as she stops to ask a
mass of nine-year-old children thronging the pavements on a school
trip what they have been doing. “She’s in Narnia,” says a voice from
the crowd. Swinton smiles and just before she jumps into the car,
gestures to her young audience and says, “Future Derek Jarman fans.”
ON FORMATIVE INFLUENCES
Isabel Stevens: Let’s start by going back to your formative years, and
what influences played their part in you coming to cinema. David
Bowie’s 1973 album Aladdin Sane was something that you held dear...
Tilda Swinton: Literally. Originally, it was simply the fact he looked so
similar to the way I looked. It was a sense of solidarity and cousin-ship.
IS: You went to boarding school. Did you find it restrictive?
TS: Well, it’s prescriptive. There’s quite a simplistic code. And there are
all sorts of ways people dream up to make other people feel alienated,
and I was easy meat for all of that. So it was helpful to see the Aladdin
Sane cover. I carried it around for a long time before I could play it
because I didn’t have a record player. We weren’t allowed any music
at our school, which was, I think, the worst abuse that we suffered,
really. Relatively banal boarding school experience, but still not great.
Especially when you’re a teenager in the 70s – to be kept away from
what was going on musically at that time. I mean, that was crackers.
IS: You originally wanted to be a poet and studied literature at Cambridge
University. Which films made you think, “Yes, I want to do that”?
TS: Yes, I was a poet and I always assumed that that’s what I
would do. I was at university and I started to meet people I
liked and it so happened that they were making theatre – in
which I was never interested particularly. But I loved the
camaraderie of being around these people and making work.
IS: And you didn’t come from an artistic background?
TS: No, and also at that time in the 80s, there wasn’t the same sense [of
what was possible] that there is now. It’s so difficult to remember, but
this was in the days before DVD extras,
when people – interested filmgoers- didn’t know how films were put
together. I had absolutely no idea of how
one could be a part of making films. To
make films felt like a very... arcane idea.
At that time David Lean was still making films, and Alan Parker
and David Puttnam. They were the sort of ‘international’ filmmakers.
And then there was television, which was accepting the industrial
middle ground, as it were. And then there was the BFI. And [through
it] a constant, steady stream of voices from Peter Greenaway to Derek
[Jarman] to Sally [Potter] to Terence Davies, Ron Peck, people like that.
I used to go and see as much cinema as I could, but it never
occurred to me I could ever work in film. I was not interested
in being a performer, because being a performer in the theatre
was assumed to be the only possible thing. But I did start to
do plays with friends and I performed in lots of them.
IS: And you were in Joanna Hogg’s first short film.
TS: I was. Joanna Hogg and I have known each other since we
were children. Joanna was in London at film school, as you
know having seen The Souvenir. I’m the girl in her first film [The
Rehearsal], which is in The Souvenir. We never finished it – in fact,
we were talking the other day, saying we should finish it. Later
on, I made Caprice [1986] with Joanna. She was a close ally. In a
funny way, the ways in which she was alienated by the landscape
of industrial filmmaking, I was experiencing a similar thing. We
shared a feeling that filmmaking wasn’t possible, that it was sewn
up. And that’s why Derek [Jarman] was so significant for both of
us. He was the one who said, “No, no, no, it can be this personal
thing. It can be this dreamy thing, this completely fantastical
thing that’s related to painting and art. It doesn’t have to be this
three-act structure, highly industrialised thing that you give away
to other people.” But you asked me about earlier influences!
UNDER THE INFLUENCE
(Clockwise from top left) The
Aladdin Sane album; Swinton
on the set of Joanna Hogg’s
short Caprice (1986); I Know
Where I’m Going! (1945); and
Jeanne Dielman (1975)