Tilda Swinton on pushing boundaries through her roles

Brut America

"Not knowing the answers is not necessarily the problem. It can be an opportunity."  Tilda Swinton on living in limbo, staying flexible, and what she would be doing if she weren't acting.

Transcript

00:00I think anybody who says they don't know what it is to feel like an alien, or to feel like a stranger,

00:05or to feel shy, or to feel strange, or a freak, I don't believe people who say that they never felt

00:12like a freak. I think they are in denial. Dressing up and playing is definitely an opportunity to

00:20remind oneself that one is, you know, one has all the tools in the box available to one at all time.

00:26I think it is. For me, you know, I had this sense of myself, as always, writing poetry,

00:32and I went to university in order to write poetry. I mean, I was actually given my place

00:37on the grounds that I would, and then I stopped when I got there. And when I started to perform,

00:43it was a way of accessing that kind of negotiation with inarticulacy, which I really value.

00:50And maybe if I stopped performing, I would become a poet again. I would write more poetry.

00:55I think we need any opportunity to be reminded that inarticulacy is a power for good,

01:02and that being articulate is not necessarily the holy grail, and that not knowing the answers

01:08is not necessarily a problem. It can be an opportunity. I mean, that's something that I

01:13think we've all, we are all acknowledging about this last few months, that this feeling of limbo,

01:20this feeling of uncertainty, this feeling of disconnection from knowing exactly what we're

01:26going to do in three months' time, is an opportunity. I mean, it's painful, and it can

01:31really bring all sorts of problems for people. But if it's possible to get beyond those problems,

01:39and sometimes those problems are insurmountable, it is an opportunity to just not know, and to be

01:45more present, and to notice that one might want to make a different plan.

01:50But following the plan that you set out for yourself a year ago, or 15 or 25 years ago,

01:56is not necessarily the way to live your life. And poetry can help you to do that.

02:00Yes, because poetry is about response. It's not actually about being creative,

02:04it's about being responsive. And I think we're all being encouraged by the circumstances of

02:10the world now to be more responsive, and that is a good thing.

02:13Memoria is very much about shared memories, memories of the earth, memories of the world,

02:18memories of others. How is that precisely your job, as an actor, to share memories?

02:24I wonder, I don't know. I mean, to be honest, I'm not really clear what an actor's job is.

02:29But I think a filmmaker's job is, let's say it's the filmmaker's opportunity,

02:34and the filmmaker's blessing, is to be able to just contact the audience, make some kind

02:41of contact with at least the unconscious, if not the consciousness, of every person who sees the

02:47film. So I suppose performers are the kind of conduit, they're the paint that the painter

02:55paints with.

02:56So it requires a lot of empathy, right?

02:59Yes, it's not a bad thing for anybody to be in the empathy business,

03:02but I think that filmmaking is all about, I mean, cinema is an empathy machine.

03:07It's about tickling up that sense of complicity.

03:11Do you remember your roles, your past characters?

03:14Do they matter when you compose another character?

03:16My filmography is, like anybody who's in this really blessed situation of making several films,

03:23it's like a family album. If I ever see any of my films, it's, oh, I remember this location,

03:30I remember just after this shot, when we were having a laugh about this.

03:35It's very much a kind of family reverie.

03:40But the film, the roles I'm not so clear about, I'm really clear that they exist within the frame

03:47of the film, and then when it's over, they don't exist anymore.

03:51So they don't change you?

03:52I don't know, that's a really good question.

03:55They give you an opportunity to play, just like four-year-olds dressing up as monkeys or whatever.

04:02It's an opportunity to sort of make new shapes.

04:07So I don't know, maybe one would be changed if one didn't have the opportunity to be flexible like that.

04:13I like the word flexible, actually, because we spectators do remember your past characters,

04:18from the White Fairy of Narnia to the Guilty Mother of We Need to Talk About Kevin,

04:22or the Vampire or the Ninja in the Jim Jarmusch's movies.

04:25And I noticed you even multiply yourself as a twin in Ogja,

04:29as a man and woman in Suspiria, as a double in Hail, Caesar.

04:33To what extent acting is also to multiply oneself precisely for you?

04:37Well, I think it is. I mean, it's just to play with the material of oneself.

04:41It's never occurred to me that one should feel a resistance to trying anything,

04:47you know, to play someone of a hundred or to play someone who,

04:50you know, might have a very different experience to you.

04:53I mean, that's part of the fun.

04:57Yeah, of course, it's all about fun.

04:59So you still believe it's like a game, a four-year-old game?

05:02It is. It's not just that I believe it, you know, it actually is.

05:06I've been very, very lucky that it continues to be fun.

05:09If it wasn't fun, I would not do it.

05:11Tilda, I'm thinking of Orlando, of course,

05:13which had you transformed and transported through the ages,

05:16through genders, through multiple stories,

05:19as though acting was about challenging limits.

05:21Is there something of that?

05:22Yes, I agree with you.

05:24There's not so much challenging limits as it's this opportunity to pretend

05:29that there are no limits.

05:30So, for example, Orlando, which is, you know,

05:33this extraordinary phenomenon written by Virginia Woolf,

05:37is a spirit who doesn't recognize any boundaries.

05:41And my fantasy about Orlando is that if it had gone off,

05:44the book had gone on for another thousand pages,

05:46maybe in the next chapter Orlando would have become a donkey

05:49or a chicken or a tree or gone back to being male.

05:53Or this feeling of freedom and the feeling of boundarylessness,

05:57not recognizing obstacles.

05:59I think that's the opportunity that an image like Orlando can kind of remind us of.

06:04Of course, it's beautiful and very important today,

06:06this fluidity, this multiplying.

06:09Is it also a political statement?

06:10Can it be a political statement?

06:12Well, I mean, in that it's an existential statement,

06:15in that it is actually reminding people that all that flexibility is theirs.

06:20They don't have to look for it.

06:21It's theirs.

06:23The obstacles are the things that they take on

06:27and may hold on to against their will or against their happiness.

06:31But that feeling of flexibility, you know,

06:33you look at a child of six months, it's all there.

06:36We don't have to invent it in ourselves.

06:39We can lose it or we can lose sight of it.

06:42But we never lose the capacity to be that flexible and that free, I don't think.

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