April 2020 | Sight&Sound | 31TILDA SWINTON: SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY
years, occasionally people would say, “Do you ever think of doing
comedy?” And I was struck because I thought I was always being funny.
I mean, Orlando is very funny. To be fair, there aren’t many laughs in
Edward II, so I suppose I did make it hard for people to know that it
was all a bit of a laugh. Which it just is for me and it always has been.
IS: And when you are playing more, let’s say, naturalistic, emotional
characters – I’m thinking particularly of The Deep End and I Am Love
[2009] – does your approach change? I imagine it would be different
to, say, approaching a character like Mason, though maybe not?
TS: This is very reductive, and of course there are more calibrations
on the scale, but we could say that there are sort of two major
modes – ‘Red Label’, ‘Gold Label’, or ‘Tilda Light’, ‘Tilda Strong’,
whatever. There are two calibrations around realism. That’s the very
first question to figure out with a filmmaker. What are we dealing
with here? Are we dealing with a real naturalism? Are we dealing
with an environment with an atmosphere and a landscape that is
really present in its reflection? And if we are, then that means the
performance needs to be much more fine-toothcombed, much more
reflective, and real. But that also goes for something like Julia [2008],
which is pretty realistic even though she’s quite a flamboyant and
not particularly interior character. But still, that film was made with
that sort of eye for detail and believability, for want of a better word.
And then with the woman in I Am Love, the woman in The Deep
End and to a certain extent the woman in Michael Clayton – they are
quite interior people. I don’t like to use the word ‘character’, because
I think you can talk about character if you’re dealing with someone
like Mason, but with those portraits, I was trying to look like a person
and fade into the background as much as possible. They’re quite
interior, they spend a lot of time on their own figuring stuff out and
they’re not used to being looked at. Even the character in I Am Love,
she’s a sort of trophy wife, but she doesn’t really expect to be seen or
to have anybody ask her any questions about herself, so she has this
internal life constantly running, which I love. I love playing with
that sort of portrait when you have two things going at the same
time: you have this interior life, which you occasionally see when the
person is by themselves, and
then you have this other world
which is the persona that they
play out with other people.
IS: You’ve worked across so many
film styles and genres – from
Jarman to Marvel. But is it really
that different, making a Marvel
film to a Derek Jarman film?
TS: Marvel and Jarman are, in
my experience, really close
together. The studio films
I’ve done, which is only a
handful, are all by filmmakers
who are in a kind of experimental mode. For example,
Constantine [2005], by Francis Lawrence. I remember a lot of very
intelligent cyber-nerds running on to the set saying, “Look at
this amazing thing we’ve just invented that we can use to have
shards of glass coming through the air in the denouement.”
The same was true on the The Curious Case of Benjamin Button [2008].
You had people going, “Look at this stuff we just literally coined where
we can de-age Brad Pitt to make him look 15.” That’s not a million
miles away from working with Derek Jarman on a Pet Shop Boys video.
And that’s even true of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
[2005], which I did with Andrew Adamson. He said, “I’ve only made
animation, and this is going to be my first live-action film. It’s a total
shot in the dark for me. Do you want to be a part of it?” He was being
his own pioneer. To a certain extent, he was a first-time filmmaker.
And I’ve had a lot of experience working with first-time filmmakers.
So, they feel really close together. With Jarman we used to have blue
screens, not green screens, but apart from that, they felt very similar.
IS: So does a drama without those effects, something like Michael Clayton,
with a more traditional, conventional set-up, feel more foreign to you?
TS: I don’t know if it was traditional. It was more industrial,
I suppose, although it felt relatively low-fi. Looking back‘ The studio films
I’ve done are all
by filmmakers in
experimental mode.
De-ageing Brad Pitt
to make him look 15
is not a million miles
from a Derek Jarman
Pet Shop Boys video’
Caravaggio
Derek Jarman, 1986
Caprice
Joanna Hogg, 1986 (short)
Friendship’s Death
Peter Wollen, 1987
The Last of England
Derek Jarman, 1987
War Requiem
Derek Jarman, 1989
The Garden
Derek Jarman, 1990
Edward II
Derek
Jarman, 1991Man to Man
John Maybury, 1992
Orlando
Sally Potter, 1992
Wittgenstein
Derek Jarman, 1993
Blue
Derek Jarman, 1993
(as narrator)
Conceiving Ada
Lynn Hershman-
Leeson, 1997
Love Is the Devil
John Maybury, 1998
The Beach
Danny Boyle, 2000The Deep End
Scott McGehee &
David Siegel, 2001
Vanilla Sky
Cameron Crowe, 2001
Teknolust
Lynn Hershman-
Leeson, 2002
Adaptation
Spike Jonze, 2002
Young Adam
David Mackenzie, 2003
Thumbsucker
Mike Mills, 2005
The Chronicles of
Narnia: The Lion, The
Witch and the Wardrobe
Andrew Adamson, 2005
The Man from London
Béla Tarr & Agnes
Hranitzky, 2007
Michael Clayton
Tony Gilroy, 2007Julia
Erick Zonca, 2008
Burn After Reading
Ethan Coen,
Joel Coen, 2008
The Limits of Control
Jim Jarmusch, 2009
I Am Love
Luca Guadagnino, 2009
We Need to
Talk About Kevin
(pictured) Lynne
Ramsay, 2011
Moonrise Kingdom
Wes Anderson, 2012
David Bowie: The Stars
(Are out Tonight)
Floria Sigismondi,
2013 (music video)
Only Lovers Left Alive
Jim Jarmusch, 2013
Snowpiercer
Bong Joon Ho, 2013The Grand
Budapest Hotel
Wes Anderson, 2014
A Bigger Splash
Luca Guadagnino, 2015
Doctor Strange
Scott Derrickson, 2015
Okja Bong Joon Ho, 2017
Suspiria
Luca Guadagnino, 2018
The Souvenir
Joanna Hogg, 2019
The Personal History
of David Copperfield
Armando Iannucci, 2019AS DIRECTOR:
Will We Wake
1998 (short)
The Seasons In
Quincy: Four Portraits
of John Berger
2016, dir. ‘Harvest’ segmentEdward II
Derek
Jarman, 1 991Love Is the Devil
John Maybury, 1 998
The Beach
Danny Boyle, 2000