TILDA SWINTON AT AFI 2008:
The 2008 AFI fest organized a tribute to this great actress with clips, discussion and a screening of her upcoming film Julia. Here are excerpts from that discussion
On the upcoming Derek Jarman collection:
We made a portrait of Derek Jarman, me, Isaac Julien, a producer we worked when we were with Derek doing independent film in BritainIsaac Julien is a filmmaker and artist who makes video installations and is doing extraordinary work now.
Isaac and I were both Jarman children. We were sick of going around the world talking to film students who would say how hard it was to find Jarman's films.
On her beginning with Jarman:
I met him because he was doing a film of Caravaggio and I went along to meet him for a part in it. It was unorthodox...and we just sort of fell in.
On being an actress, an artist early on:
I've never considered myself an actress. At that point, I was a political science graduate who was trying not to notice that I was a writer who had stopped writing and should have gone to art school. I was also trying, at that stage, not to mind too much that people were perceiving me as a performer.
On being a "silent actress'', and avante-garde beginnings:
I'm a tourist in the world of industrial cinema, but it's not my home. My home ground is the world of art and the cinema within the context of art. I can't imagine that I would be working in cinema as a performer if I hadn't met Derek, because at the time, Caravaggio was the first film I had ever made and he was the first filmmaker I had ever met. When I started working with Derek, at that time, there really wasn't a cinema in the U.K. that I felt like I could aspire to being a part of. There was a sort of international filmmaking that came out of England that was basically people like Richard Attenborough and Alan Parker.
On early forays into theater:
I was never really interested in the theater, I was just slumming it in the theater really. I wanted to work in film. I was film obsessed and if things had gone right for me I would have been a film writer rather than a performer. When I was at university there was no film studies course. It was a sort of bittersweet job last year, helping to inaugurate a film studies course at Cambridge. It was bittersweet because if it had been there earlier, I would have been part of it.
I arrived at Cambridge and stopped writing. I had gone there as a writer and I stopped which was a bit of a shock and then I started to perform and I do fee it's one or the other. I started working in the theater but really decided to look for a camera. Then when I met Derek, he offered me this extraordinary opportunity which was basically to just sort of smooch about and find out what I could possibly do in front of the camera. I knew I didn't want to be an industrial actress, I knew I wasn't interested in learning lines and playing characters and building a career as an industrial actress and anyway at that time it didn't really feel legitimate to call yourself a film actress in the U.K. So I just did like a lab, not only for me but for all of us who worked with Derek.
Derek Jarman's Warholian family:
We were a very tight family and not just the actors. Sandy Powell, the extraordinary costume designer who works now with Martin Scorcese, she and I both started working in the first film together. Simon Fisher Turner did all the music for all of the films. All of us were like this...kindergarten. We just worked it out. Derek did this extraordinary thing. He was absolutely an auteur. He would take all the credit of course but he would hand over responsibility to us.
I think what he would say is that he was very much a child of his time. He'd become a working artist and his sensibility had been forged by the 60s and 70s and we were lucky enough to be born that much later to benefit from that. We're supposed to be Thatcher's children but we sort of snuck under the fence and hung out with Derek instead.
The War Requiem:
I have to say that off all the clips, War Requiem is the thing I've seen most recently and it's possible that most of you have never seen it. The reason I've seen it most recently is because they're bringing it out on DVD and they're doing a limited release in the UK now. I would love it to be released here because, apart from anything else, it couldn't be more modern now. We made it 20 years ago, 1988. It's a silent visualization to the score of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem and it's extraordinary, I was blown away seeing it again. We made it before we were actually at war, so to see it now...and there's an extraordinary collage section in it which is really quite brutal.
On Sir Laurence Olivier's role:
It was his last film. He was very ill. He played the unknown solider, he's the very old soldier at the beginning of the film. He was very frail but he was focused on why he was there and he gave an extraordinary presence, to be a representative of that generation.
Working with other people (besides Jarman):
It's never really became time to start working with other people. I feel like I'm working with Derek all the time. He's kind of left the building but apart from that...
There was this moment when he died in 1994, when I did feel like I lost my day job because we were always working together. It was a very particular working experience.
We would sit around the kitchen table, and we would talk and out of that conversation would come somewhere a suggestion that we look at an issue that we were dealing with at the time, for example, Clause 28. Clause 28 was oppressive clause that was brought in by the Thatcher government to suppress the lives and culture of gay life. We decided the film we needed to make next was Edward II and on we would go. What's that material that we put together over the last year, let's look at it, and let's put it together in a film and let's maybe call itThe Last of England. It was like, in that sense a very small "f' factory, it was a sort of kitchen factory.
On Orlando :
That's a very precious film for me. All the films I had made up until then had been with Derek Jarman and they were always difficult to make, at the same time they never cost that much and if we didn't get the money for one, we would just make another.
Sally and I started out together in a cafe with Virginia Woolf's novel in between us on a table and five years later, we got to shoot it. And that five years was filled with such a sisyphean task of convincing anybody to give us any money. People would say 'a costume film'? Then they would say to us, 'Well what's it about?' And we would say, immortality, androgyny and life and death and the universe and gender, and they would say, 'and what's it about?'
The success of Orlando:
Well I'll tell you a sad thing, I hated that film so much because the one problem with making a film over 5 years is that you have to fantasize so fantastically to keep yourself from screaming with boredom. So the film in your head grows and grows and grows and becomes a 36 hour epic. When eventually we wound up with this 92 minute, rather concise structured piece, I was very disappointed. I think both Sally and I were. I've come to love it but I did have 10 years of alienation from it so I'm in a bit of denial about the success.
Coming to America with Scott and David:
Scott McGee and David Segal asked me to do The Deep End. The hard fact is that Derek died in 1994 and that was really a moment for me to think seriously about what I was going to do because with him I had created this possibility for myself which is frankly really tricky to find elsewhere. I found it with Lynn Herschman who made Technolust and I had it in Orlando to a certain extent with Sally Potter.
So I started to work in a different way and to prove to myself that it was possible to do it. I've really enjoyed it but it's coincided with having very small children, so I've limited the amount of time I'm away. I haven't really been able to be developing project in the way that I had. I'm starting to do that again now.
Choosing directors:
I choose the conversation I can have with a director or the filmmaker which somehow gets me going and makes me want to just do it, try it, see.
Very often it's a question of me developing something that we talk about, for example, with my friend Luca Guadagnino (I am Love). We've been talking about making a film for 7 years and finally, we've done it. That's more my process.
The Coens:
They came to ask me to do their project. I don't have to help the Coens raise money for their project, I don't have to hold their hands while they write it or anything. That's a luxury, to work with people who you feel that happy with and yet not have to do any of the leg work.
On Michael Clayton and Francis Lawrence:
I've had this very fortunate thing, the few big Hollywood studio pictures that I've been a part of have all felt relatively familiar to me because they've all been with these pioneering people like Andrew Adamson who was a total nerd. Francis Lawrence is another. And David Fincher, which you'll see in Benjamin Button. There may be 200 million dollars at stake but the atmosphere, I find it really similar to working experimentally with Derek Jarmin when we were working with super 8 and blowing it up to 35. There's a formal experiment going on. I love that techno stuff. It feels really familiar to me.
In Narnia, a piece of production design?
I'm always...well I think, that's actually...thank you for that, that's what I am if I'm not an actor. I'm a piece of production design. I'm going to put that in my IMDB.
On Michael Powell (The Red Shoes):
When Sally and I were making Orlando, we were lucky enough to have the great Michael Powell as the godfather of our project. He was so sweet and so supportive when we were going to see him and he would say kind things like 'it will happen.' He'd said that he'd once wanted to make a film of Orlando himself so that was a very encouraging thing for us. I remember once seeing him in New York and I'd just come off the plane and he asked me what I'd seen on the plan and I said a bad film. He said you're wrong, it's not a bad film, it's a good film. He said because it creates a world of it's own.
Post Academy Award:
For me reassuring but maybe disappointing fact for someone who follows all this stuff is that my life really hasn't felt like it's changed. Everything I've done since, I was going to do anyway. I made this film in Italy with Luca which as I say we've been planning for 7 years. That was as it was always going to be. I still hang out with people who don't have televisions and they treat me exactly the same. And I haven't been in America since, this is my first time.
On the new film Julia:
I'm so grateful to the AFI for showing Julia, it's a film I'm really proud of. It's by Erick Zonker, a french filmmaker and it's only his second film. He made a film about 10 years ago called The Dream Life of Angels that was quite extraordinary. He made another film that wasn't shown in cinemas called Le Petit Voleur (The Little Thief) and now Julia and we're really proud of it and it's going to be distributed next year by Magnolia.
On the script:
There's nothing like a great script. It's an amazing phenomenon when one is born but there aren't that many around. Since I'm from an art background that has inured me to working without a great script. So I don't look for my energetic center in the script. As far as I'm concerned you can have a fantastic script here and you and me and 15 people in this room could all make films of that script. And you know one could be a masterpiece and the rest could be crap. The script is not eventually going to, I don't believe, design and really force the spirit of the piece. The spirit of the piece resides in the person who is going to be guiding the project so that's where I look. Re: George's performance
On George Clooney:
I think that (Michael Clayton) is a truly cinematic performance.
After doing Burn After Reading there was this one moment at the end when he said, 'maybe one day we can make a film together when we say one nice thing to each other'. We were supposed to be lovers in this film but we were vile to each other. It was fun. He's a really bright person to be around.
On the Soderburgh and Clooney production team:
You don't have to look very far back to see that they have created a new kind of film.
I think about when I came to start working in America I was aware then and am aware now how blessed I was to be a part of a generation of filmmakers. It was so rocking to be at the Oscars last year...to sit there with those people: the Coens and with Paul Anderson and Julien Schnabel and Tony and George...that was the class of '80...it made me realize that we're of a generation that generally speaking aren't all film educated...in synch.
On Eric Zonker and the making of Julia:
He's a really exceptional artist, I think he might even be ahead of his time. I call it zoological (the process). Eric Zonker, his attitude is so deeply amorally compassionate. He'll take a person, like the person in Le Petit Voleur who is a baker and who is sick of being a baker and decides to go to Marseille and embark on a life of crime. He goes there to become a criminal and you see the learning curve. Then you take Julia who is an alcoholic and an absent parent...you're going on a rollercoaster...there are moments when you couldn't possibly love anything about this person.
It's zoological because it's like when David Attenborough decides to show you the life of the dung beetle...this is where it lives, this is what it eats and we're not going to edit any of this out. And he does that with these people, he does that with Julia. Re: writing
On the film festival:
This is what happened and it actually relates to the Oscars. In between, actually a week before the Oscars I was in my little home town of Nan in the far northeast of Scotland and I was walking down the street. There's this old bingo hall that's been boarded up for awhile and in comes...I rang the number and a guy came down and I found myself shaking hands with the guy saying I will rent this bingo hall from you in order to start a cinema.
I didn't have any money or anything. And the next week I went to L.A. and I got the Oscar and then the studio I worked with very very kindly gave me exactly the same amount of money as the rental of the bingo hall.
Anyway this last summer, my friend Mark Cousins who is an extraordinary film writer who used to be the director of the film festival in Edinburgh, have inaugurated the "8.5 Foundation. " We want to make a website where children can log on and they can either see little clips or they can see blogs or they can see images of world classic cinema that we will curate.
Wonderful films like this amazing Iranian film called The Boot by Mohammed El Taleghi which we showed at the festival which is really hard to find. The Red Balloon, The Red Shoes...all the films that we want children to see when they can only go to the Arclight and see Pixar which we also love.
And it became this international phenomenon. People came from everywhere. People came from Finland, they read about it one day and they got on a plane. People came from Papua, New Guinea. We turned away 6 times the people we could house. There are 140 seats. When I say seats we had beanbags and deck chairs. We showed everything including The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, and all these old ladies from Nan watched it and they didn't leave. And the next day they came back.
I was recently in Paris to talk to Alberto Luna who runs the world cinema foundation and they want to be partners. They're going to actually help us do this thing.
Look for Tilda Swinton in: Julia in 2009.
