Scottish born Tilda Swinton has had quite a long journey to turn her into the household name we recognise today. She started acting as a student, which included work in the Royal Shakespeare Company. In 1985 she began a professional association with experimental director Derek Jarman, the duo made seven critically acclaimed films over nine years. Recent years have seen Tilda switch to more mainstream Hollywood blockbusters, including 'Constantine' opposite Keanu Reeves, 'The Chronicles Of Narnia', where she scared children everywhere in her portrayl as the White Witch and 'Michael Clayton', for which she won a best actress oscar. Her latest film 'I Am Love' has been in development for 11 years, Tilda visited Dublin recently to promote the film during the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival. Brogen Hayes spoke to the actress.
Q: Glad to see you're ginger again Tilda!
TS: I always was, I was just masquerading! [laughs]
Q: The film was in the works for 11 years. Where did it come from?
TS: Luca and I have known each other for nearly 20 years and, like any great friendships, these theme tunes emerge. We are both big film fans so the majority of what we talk about is cinema related. For about 9 years we have been talking about a kind of cinema that we love and that we recognise a language of cinema that you recognise in great classic masters like Visconti and Alfred Hitchcock that seems to have really fallen off the planet, in terms of modern possibility. We started to, rather gallously - as we say in Scotland - fantasy of trying to pour some new wine into those old bottles, those classic, formulous shapes. Not even, shapes, but look for this tendency, this sensational cinema where you watch Cary Grant running through that maize field in North By Northwest with that Bernard Herrmann music and you are there. It's got everything to do with the camera and it's got everything to do with the music. It's got nothing to do with people talking; it's got everything to do with the language of cinema and that feeling of transportation. That's something that we started to talk about wanting to do. About 7 years ago we started talking about this particular film because we decided that we wanted to make a melodrama. We were thinking particularly about the work of Douglas Cirk and that whole milieu. It is really possible to insult a film, you can say ‘Oh I went to see a film' ‘How was it?' ‘A bit emotional, or a bit melodramatic or a bit operatic' and really it seems so offensive to the language of cinema that those should be ways of dissing a film. So we just decided to try and make an emotional, melodramatic, operatic film that actually passed muster. What we needed was a woman - me - which means a woman of a certain age and a milieu in which she was foreign and we decided that we wanted to make a film about love and the revolution of love, about the way in which the real revolution of love can be a depth charge in the centre of a group - maybe a family - and just rip it apart, and why it might rip it apart. So we just started to slowly patch together this story about this particular kind of family, and why this particular kind of love would be truly an anathema to that kind of family.
Q: How challenging was it to make a film in your non-native tongue?
TS: Well I feel like I am constantly doing that! Whenever I speak in American, I am not speaking in my native tongue. It's always a different voice. I very rarely use my own voice. So it doesn't really feel that much different. I have worked in German. I made a film with a Hungarian film maker which I dubbed into French with a Polish accent not that long ago [laughs]. It's pretty par for the course. It's quite interesting in a way, because it makes you dislocate yourself from the language, the language is not the most important thing.
Q: How do you feel now that 11 years of work on I Am Love are over?
TS: It's really interesting. I was asking myself the same question this morning. Satisfied, I would say. Really satisfied. Luca and I agree that 11 years is great, we would love to have 11 years to develop the next one. It's just that 11 years of struggling is a real bummer. If someone gave us enough money to develop something for 11 years it would be fan-tas-tic! I'd love it! 20 years... It'd be great, but a lot of years of not knowing if you are going to make it, ever is really tough. I have been very fortunate - there were a couple of films that I was developing with Derek Jarman that never got made because he died - but apart from that, so far - touch wood - I have never been involved in developing a film that has not been made and it must be really, really, really hard to develop something to certain point and not make it eventually. Of course, people have to live with that all the time.
Q: How different is it for you to collaborate on a film like you did with Luca on I Am Love, rather than walk onto a film that has already been constructed?
TS: Being handed a script on a film is such a rare experience for me and hasn't happened that often. It's happened recently in a spate of about four films. It wasn't exactly like that with the Coen brothers and it wasn't exactly like that with David Fincher or with any of the films I've made, but I get your point, I mean I didn't have to help Andrew Adamson raise money or develop the script for the Narnia film and I didn't have to help Tony Gilroy raise money or write the script for Michael Clayton. All those American films that I made were already set up and I was there only as an actor. Personally, I prefer growing things myself, partly because I enjoy the work of it and party because I'm an idle person and it means that, as a performer, you can grow your thoughts much slower. Going into something for a few scenes... I mean, making Burn After Reading was very interesting because there was this perfect script, absolutely perfect, all it needed to do was just be read and that was it. We had this fantastic group of people, but most of us hardly saw each other when we were shooting. I worked with George Clooney and John Malkovich, and Fran McDormand and Brad Pitt worked together generally but never the twain did meet. We didn't necessarily know what the others were doing and we had to gauge the pitch - we kept asking the Coens ‘Is it too much?' - we all thought we were too much. That was more stressful in a way, not knowing the other bits of the jigsaw. When you have planned or written something yourself you don't have to guess and you can just hand grow it.
Q: Do you feel that winning an Academy Award - for Michael Clayton - has had an impact on your career?
TS: I really don't know [laughs] I have no idea. The only thing - and this is hypothetical because I don't know what would have happened if I hadn't - maybe we wouldn't have got the money for I Am Love, but I kind of think we would have. Maybe it's helped getting the distributors interested. Maybe it's helping getting the Lynne Ramsey film made. I don't know, I really don't, there is no way of knowing. I don't live in a place where it has any impact at all [laughs]. I don't own a television; I don't even own it [the Oscar] any more so it's lost a lot in translation but I'm not going to knock it because it might be doing all sorts of hidden things that I don't know about, so I am very, very grateful.
Words - Brogen Hayes
I Am Love is in cinemas now