Tilda Swinton: 'I Think You've Got the Wrong Person'

After seeing Tilda Swinton in nearly a year and a half of mainstream Hollywood fare (including an Oscar win for her panicked corporate cutthroat in Michael Clayton), American audiences have exactly two chances to watch the mercurial star in action in 2009. And each will require a trip to the art house this month: First, her long cameo in Jim Jarmusch's The Limits of Control (opening today) features Swinton as a film-obsessed cipher in a droll web of intrigue. But the real show unfolds in Julia (opening May 8), director Erick Zonca's acerbic tale of one woman's alcoholism, desperation and ravaged quest for redemption.

Swinton's versatility and self-sacrifice are generally old news, but Julia presents her in few harrowing new extremes. A voracious drunk whose benders tend to conclude with her awaking next to strange men (and ultimately cost her her job), the title character trades drying out for the more immediate, lucrative gratification of crime. Or at least one crime, depicted with unyielding force by the actress and her director. Julia's cravings deteriorate into a sharper paranoia, neglect and, finally, responsibility, though at 138 minutes, neither Swinton nor Zonca are in any hurry to get there.

By the time Swinton's dervish subsides somewhere in rural Mexico, she's lived and survived a spectrum of nightmares in a few days' time. And yet the viewer stays with her. Such is Swinton's unimpeachable craft, about which she spoke this week with Movieline.

So I saw your Stephanie Daley co-star Denis O'Hare on the subway coming over here.

Did you talk to him? You should have told him you were coming to see me!

I really wanted to see what great gossip I could mine before running over here. Oh well.

Yes! You really should have.

But it got me thinking: You've done over 50 film or TV projects in less than 25 years--

Is it 50? I think you've got the wrong person. A) I have no TV projects, and B) --

I don't know. IMDB can be unreliable, but not that unreliable.

Let me see that. [Browses list] God! That's amazing! The last time I looked it was like 30 or something. Interesting.

Seeing Denis got me thinking that maybe we could introduce the Six Degrees of Tilda Swinton parlor game or something.

It depends what country you're in. You could probably do third [degree] if you're in Scotland. Very good! 54 films! Amazing.

So. Julia! This is a fun movie.

Can we put that on the poster?

Sure, anything you want. But first: Tell me what appealed to you about this role.

Two things: Erick Zonca and Julia. I'd always thought -- ironically or serendipitously -- how much I would like to look at a woman like this. Because it had always occurred to me that there were drunks I know and love who I've never really seen in a film. It's just how full of energy and resourcefulness and courage and what fun they are. And the attraction of life. Drunks tend to be portrayed as losers, and they tend to be also portrayed with a sort of dying fall, which seems to me more accurate about a kind of opium addiction. Smack addicts have a sort of passivity attraction there. Whereas in my opinion, there's a sort of power issue for alcoholics. They need to be powerful, and that's why they really throw themselves down the neck of a bottle.

Your character definitely has a power issue. There's some extraordinary violence directed toward a child, several adults and especially yourself. That must have inspired some apprehensions.

That was the project, really, for both Zonca and I: How far to push the audience. Because when you place the audience in front of a protagonist who's in every single frame of the film, what you're ultimately doing is presenting them with some sort of avatar that they're going into. And they live as this person for the two hours of the film. You push them into the position where their avatar is putting the muzzle of a gun against the head of a small child and running over people and tying up the child and putting it behind a sofa -- let alone self-medicating to the point of black-out. That's the experiment. How far will an audience be pushed and still be rooting for the character. There's a point where Julia, having perpetrated all of this, is on the verge of being discovered by a maid in a hotel room. And in every screening I've been in, the audience gasps. They don't want her to be discovered. And you know for some reason -- I don't know why it is -- at a certain point they say, "I'm in. I'm with her." There's a point where the saturation is such that they want her to survive, and they're happy to identify with her. I love that.

Zonca is known for doing a lot of takes, though, and this is a long movie. What was the physical toll that takes on you as an actor?

Well, the whole film was physically grueling for me for a couple of reasons. Firstly because we had our budget cut before we started shooting, so we had to shoot faster, longer, and with less days off than would have been comfortable. I imagine even if you're shooting a romantic love story, that would be grueling. The other reason for me, personally, is that I was physically uncomfortable for most of the time. Which was essential. In order to be Julia, I had to build a body that was uncomfortable to live inside. I had to throw myself around a lot. I had to chain smoke. And I wasn't physically very well through all of that. The work, though -- the actual playing of it -- was pretty graceful. I didn't feel that that was grueling. We set ourselves a very high bar in the sense that Zonca always would set himself a very high bar. Which is part of the reason I wanted to work with him, and still want to work with him. He is not interested in something being fake. And neither am I. The need for all of us to rub and rub and rub until there was no paint left was really important.

Going back to what you mentioned about your budget, a lot of your films might not get made without your participation. Julia seems like a perfect example--

I don't think that's true, to be honest with you. I think in France -- its made with French money -- Erick Zonca is a power. So I don't think that's true. Having said that -- and by the way, we'd made it before I'd won any prizes, and maybe the prizes will help from now on. I don't know. I hope so, because they've got to be good for something.

Of course nobody chooses or makes films in the same chronology as they're released theatrically. Still, in America, your studio films of 2008 and your more indie stuff from 2009 draws the variety of your choices into incredibly sharp relief.

Well, because I'm European, I'm also realizing I made a film with Béla Tarr [The Man From London] I made an Italian film with Luca Guadagnino [Io sono l'amore]. Then Julia with the French. I think that it's really handy for Julia, I suppose. I'm feeling it today. There are some journalists who are happy to talk to me about Julia. The people I spoke to on the radio this morning made no secret of the fact that they haven't seen the film or most certainly won't see it, but were happy to talk to me because they called me "Academy Award-winner" and never called me anything other. And that's great for Julia. That's really good. They almost certainly wouldn't be doing a feature on Julia if I hadn't won a prize for Michael Clayton. And it was probably good for Michael Clayton that I did Narnia the year before, etc. etc.

For me it's all good; I'm not complaining about a thing. But it's true that one of the reasons I was able to do a few of those studio-backed pictures over the last couple of years is because I've been developing independent films that have taken a very long time to develop, and I've been available to do those studio films. And they've fitted my life very well, because I have small children and I don't have to be away from them for very long. Being in a small section of Benjamin Button doesn't take a great deal of my time. But during those two weeks on Benjamin Button, I was working on Julia.

You alluded to the shift in others' perception of you that follows winning an Oscar. People do talk about your private life. You're a paparazzi subject. You're an icon for a lot of women who aspire to your independence and success. How are you navigating that terrain?

I have to tell you: This morning I was speaking to two journalists who let me know, quite by chance, that I have a completely unwarranted reputation. And I feel a bit embarrassed to set the record straight, but there are all sort of stories that are not true! But what's new? And that's all fine by me; I don't get to read them. But things may be simpler than they sound. That's nothing to do with Julia, or my work with Derek Jarman, or my work in Europe. That's almost certainly to do with being in a Disney film and winning an Oscar, isn't it?

Maybe it's about how rare it is that these worlds coexist in one career?

Or in one life.

In both Julia and The Limits of Control, your latest film with Jim Jarmusch, your wardrobe is typically singular and evocative. To what extent do you develop your costumes, and how do they inform your characters?

Well, as far as I'm concerned, it's all the work I do. All I really do is put together the look, and then we start shooting, and then I play. The "work" part of it is putting together the look, which I do with extremely talented people like April Napier, my friend who designed the costumes for Julia. And the extraordinary Bina Daigeler, who worked with Jim Jarmusch. It's everything. As my children know, it's dressing up and playing -- that's all it is. Of course, in something like Julia, it's quite involved. It means growing a different body and chain-smoking and kind of wrecking my face and making myself physically ill and all the rest of it. But it's still dressing up and playing. Its not me. It's me disguised as someone else. And in Jim's film, there I am disguised as God knows what.

Your character in Control has a great line about cinema: "Movies are like dreams you're never really sure you've had; sometimes my favorite films are the ones where people sit there and don't say anything." Which basically describes The Limits of Control itself. Where did that come from?

That was sort of taken, at Jim's request, pretty well entirely from a piece of writing of mine. It was a piece called the "State of Cinema Address," which I delivered at the San Francisco Film Festival a few years ago. I wrote it as a letter to my son, which started with a question that my son -- who was 8 1/2 at the time -- asked me about cinema and dreams. He said, "Mama, what did people dream before cinema was invented?" Which seemed such an incredibly perceptive question about consciousness, but also so perceptive about cinema -- that he would imagine and accept absolutely the relationship between dreams and cinema. Jim was a big fan of this piece of writing, and he asked me to take a section out. And that dream that I mention about the bird flying through the room of sand is an experience I had when I was a student at Cambridge in the '80s. I saw Tarkovsky's Stalker, and there's a scene of that image -- of a bird flying through a room of sand. And I'd been having that dream my whole life, or probably since before I was 10. I've stopped having it since seeing that film, but it really blew my mind that someone else would have exactly the same image somehow and put it in a film. That really informed my relationship with cinema: the idea that it is what's unconscious. ♦