32 | Sight&Sound | April 2020
TILDA SWINTONon it, I realise it was a Hollywood film. It was Warner
Bros and it had George Clooney in it. But we were in New
York, and on location, and it felt quite familial. In fact, I’ve gone
on to work several times with that film’s production designer
Kevin Thompson. I introduced him to Bong Joon Ho.
I’m trying to remember the last time I went completely cold into a
world I didn’t know. I suppose the Marvel film Doctor Strange [2016],
but on the other hand, as I say, I think Doctor Strange is quite a Jarman
film, actually. I was also keenly aware of the fact that David Bowie
was a huge fan of Doctor Strange. We’d have conversations about
Doctor Strange. The wonderful thing about my few experiences of
those big CG films is that they are all so handmade at the end of the
day. It’s all put together by paper and string. You’ve got someone
saying, “This is the Hulk. You’re talking to him.” But, and everyone
knows this now, you’re looking at a tennis ball on a stick. And I love
all that. I love the fakery and the smoke and mirrors and the make-
believe of it. And that brings it closer to the school play. And so it
never feels very far from a children’s dressing-up box either in the
room next door with Bong Joon Ho or in Dungeness with Derek. It
all pretty much, in my experience, tends to feel like a playground.
IS: You often play silent characters, thinking of A Bigger Splash, for
instance. Is that you thinking, “Okay, that’s a big challenge”?
TS: It’s my most comfortable spot. Of course this might explain
something about my attraction to Buster Keaton as well, but I love
watching silent performance. I watched a lot of silent cinema when
I was very young: somebody who was charged with looking after
me was very keen on Rudolph Valentino and Greta Garbo. It just felt
completely correct to me to be filmed and not speaking. And of course
the majority of my work with Jarman was not speaking. Not only in
the Super-8 films blown up to 35, which are pre-eminently not synch
sound, so there is no talking in them, but even in Caravaggio. There’s a
bit of talking, of course, in Marlowe’s Edward II, but War Requiem [1989]
is entirely silent. So I’m very comfortable,
I’m more comfortable, with being silent.
IS: You’ve often played immortal
characters, for example in Orlando,
in [Jim Jarmusch’s 2013] Only
Lovers Left Alive, and also arguably
the superhero characters too. What’s the appeal to that?
TS: It’s tricky to answer it because I have to ask myself chicken-
and-egg questions. Even before I played Orlando, I had played the
extraterrestrial Friendship in [1987] Friendship’s Death. It’s the second
feature I made, by the great Peter Wollen, who died recently. She comes
from another galaxy to work out what it means to be human. And
this film set the plate for me. What is it – how we do this thing? We
have a limited span, and we have to fill it up with human behaviour.
But then that’s why it’s so wonderful to look at those portraits of
individuals who don’t have a limited span – people like Eve in Only
Lovers who’s 2,000 years old and constantly reinventing. Or Orlando.
This question of reinvention... I’m very interested in the concept
of identity. The way in which society peddles the idea that you have
an identity – it will probably be decided for you, but even if you have
a hand in it, OK, you’ve got one shot. You decide what you are, who
you are, what you’re interested in, and that’s it for the rest of time. You
can’t even evolve or morph a little bit, let alone really switch it up. And
I don’t believe it. It’s a terrible con. Even as a child, I was constantly
noticing people suffering under this burden, and was curious as to why
people were so determined to toe the line. And I became interested
in stories in which individuals are up against some predicament
that pushes them on to this precipice where they have to change,
and where their identity, their sense of themselves, has to develop.
So, I’m not just talking about Orlando, who is born a boy and then
realises that to be a man he has to kill and goes to sleep for seven days
and wakes up having turned into a woman. I’m also talking about
Margaret Hall in The Deep End who is doing everything she can to tick
all the boxes but then finds herself – spoiler alert! – burying a body and
dealing with a man with dice tattooed on his neck with whom she
falls in love. And that feeling of her being thrown by circumstances
into this complete rethink of what she is, let alone what she might do.
This was set very early. Even in Caravaggio, the character
transforms – the girl in the hammock turns into this gold-bedecked
courtesan. I’ve always been interested in that, and I don’t think
it’s very exotic. Everybody is up against it all the time. You know,
you become a mother. Which parts of you are going to stay the
same? Very few, by the way. And it’s like being on a roller-coaster.
You just have to hang on, and on it goes. It’s such a truism, but
it’s the only thing we can rely on in life: change. Nothing else.
But if you’re ready for it, then it’s going to be all right.
A Tilda Swinton retrospective screens at BFI Southbank, London, until 18
March. A mini-exhibition in the Mezzanine at BFI Southbank surveys the
actor’s career through objects, costumes, photography and sketchbooks
from the BFI National Archive and her own private collection. A selection
of films starring Swinton is available on BFI Player, alongside a collection
she has curated of her all-time favourite filmsTILDA SWINTON: THE YEAR AHEAD
Tilda Swinton’s impressive
roster of films this year
includes Wes Anderson’s The
French Dispatch, in which she
plays a glamorous writer in
a New Yorker-inspired ode to
journalism. She also reprises the
role of Julie’s anxious mother in
Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir Part
II and is one of the narrators of
Mark Cousins’s forthcoming
documentary Women Make Film.
Meanwhile, Swinton’s
network of internationalarthouse allies expands
to include Thai director
Apichatpong Weerasethakul,
who told Sight & Sound in our
February issue that he wr0te the
Colombia-set Memoria (about
an archaeologist, a fish-scaler
and a woman plagued by
strange sounds) with Swinton
in mind. She will also star
in a short English-language
film Pedro Almodóvar is
making of Jean Cocteau’s
one-act play The Human Voice.ALTERED STATES
Tilda Swinton in (from
left) Luca Guadagnino’s A
Bigger Splash (2015), Derek
Jarman’s Caravaggio (1986)
and Jim Jarmusch’s Only
Lovers Left Alive (2013)