Tilda Swinton interview

Tilda Swinton tells Dave Calhoun that British cinema is suffering a identity crisis

Oct 18 2005

Blink, and you'll miss Tilda Swinton in Jim Jarmusch's 'Broken Flowers'. It doesn't help that the 44-year-old British actress is dressed up as American trailer trash, complete with scraggy black hair, tatty lumberjack shirt and a growl that would make weaker souls run a mile. She's easier to spot in 'Thumbsucker', the debut feature of music promo-maker Mike Mills, in which she plays a suburban American mother whose mid-life crisis is having a damaging effect on her teenage son (Lou Pucci).

When we meet in Edinburgh to talk about 'Thumbsucker' and 'Broken Flowers', our interview turns into a lament – a constructive lament – for times past: a lament for Derek Jarman, the filmmaker with whom Swinton made nine features between 1986 and his death in 1994; a lament for imaginative filmmaking in Britain; a lament for a culture based on ideas not profit. Swinton is a superb conversationalist, a brilliant mind. But don't take my word for it. In her own words…

Tilda on how filmmaking compares to farming:
'I'm always talking to filmmakers, having ongoing conversations. It's like farming: you plant a crop and you know it's going to take a couple of years. That's the bulk of my work. Then, occasionally, there's a bit of a treat and we do some shooting, which doesn't take long in terms of the whole process. It's delightful, but not the whole story.'

On how filmmaking compares to aerial bombing:
'I've experimented a couple of times recently, by working like an opera singer being flown in for one aria and then flown out again. Funnily enough, of all the surgical strikes, "Broken Flowers" was the most surgical in that Jim Jarmusch and I met backstage at a Darkness concert and he later wrote to me and asked me to be in his film, which was already funded and ready to go. I'm only there for 20, 30 seconds – two days' work. But it was Jim Jarmusch and he is as pre-industrial as it gets. In fact, it felt like working with Derek Jarman. And I know Jim's work so well. I'm a Jarmuschian, as opposed to a Jarmanian!'

On working with Derek Jarman:
'My conversation with Derek Jarman was literally endless. I realise more and more – it's taking a long time – how exceptional that experience was. It felt so natural and suited me so well; when you get lucky you think it's all terribly normal, don't you? It's only since that whole circus folded that slowly it's dawning on me. As I get more and more aware of how films tend to get made, I see how rare that is, if not unique.

'It's a tough act to follow. There was a moment when I had to get real about the fact that I wouldn't find the exact same family. But I am doing very well for families actually – and the extended family goes on. I'm being thrown people like Mike Mills, for example.

'It was a different era back then, there was so much that was so different. I have virtual laughs with Derek the whole time about the capacity in me to be nostalgic for the '80s! We all thought it was so difficult then. We were so lucky but we didn't know it. We had the BFI Production Board! We had Peter Sainsbury! We had people giving us the capacity to make films like "The Last of England".'

On struggles of British filmmakers:
'Of course, people will go on working in a cultural way; that's what artists do. But the distribution network is such a closed shop. And there's that whole idea of profit and success. Doesn't the UK Film Council say a project has to have the promise of success? The word 'success' is actually used! The BFI Production Board was about the development of the voices of particular artists, not even particular films. It was about giving Derek Jarman or Peter Greenaway or Sally Potter no more than £200,000 on the basis that they would be there for the next one and the next one so that they had the opportunity to develop.

'It's a complicated issue and I don't know the answer… I just know that it's a fascinating conversation and it's much more important than being just about cinema or whether a film should be cultural or industrial. It's about art, it's about class, it's about patronage.'

On how to survive as an artist:
'English culture really loves to punish artists… But having said that, I think that the way to survive – I learnt this very early with Derek Jarman – is to ignore national boundaries and to realise that cultural boundaries are much more important.

'Cultural sensibility is an international thing, an intergalactic thing. One may not be able to find much support or comradeship in one's own town but someone in Tokyo or New York or Belgium might be right up your street and feel like family. That's what we discovered and that's continued to be the case for me.

'Even the idea that you can make money out of film is a bit gulp-worthy really. More sinister is the idea that you can use film as a sort of tourist board tool, that a government can use film to peddle some sinister kind of cultural identity. That's really worrying, and that's what sort of happened in the last ten years.'

'Broken Flowers' opens on Friday, October 21 and 'Thumbsucker' opens on October 28.

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