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.
Comments