Tilda Swinton: The Full Sundance Interview

When Tilda Swinton told Movieline the other day how eager she was to play Conan O'Brien, that was only the tip of the interview iceberg. The Academy Award winner was at Sundance to promote Luca Guadagnino's romantic melodrama I Am Love, where she stars as Emma, a rich housewife who finds carnal excitement and personal fulfillment outside of her marriage to a wealthy Italian industrialist (if you're unfamiliar with her early work, it might shock you that Swinton speaks fluent Italian throughout the movie; then again, the actress has all but made a career out of such stylish surprises).

I sat down with Swinton in Park City for a lengthy talk about the state of melodrama, her opinion of film festivals (she organizes a rather unconventional one herself), her directorial ambitions, and the boggling thing she'd just discovered moments before.

How are you, Tilda?

I've just learned a new word today, which is "yumberry." Did you know that it existed?

Yumberry? No, what is it?

It is a thing called a yumberry, and on the back it actually says, "organic yumberry juice."

That still sounds suspiciously created in a lab.

It's very odd.

You said something very interesting after the screening last night, that you think the state of film melodrama has fallen into disrepair. What do you attribute that to?

Well, I suppose it's got something to do with the relationship that television's been enjoying with melodrama. Television has become completely tied up in the idea of plot and communication and script and dialogue and people being able to be articulate to one another, and less interested in what we're interested in, which is something expressive and inarticulate and something that an active audience might be able to notice.

For example, if you're able to show a woman surreptitiously winding up a ribbon that came off an unwrapped present, you can do that in the cinema. You can do that more powerfully, I'd suggest, than if you give her a long speech explaining why she might want to do that. It's about noticing behavior in an atmosphere of silence, rather than this preoccupation with the idea of explicit plot and dialogue. Melodrama in cinema used to rely on the idea of atmosphere, and I don't think it's been relied on much in the last thirty years. Television simply cannot rely on it in the same way -- it can't play the same game that cinema can.

I Am Love certainly has loads of atmosphere. In fact, Luca seems consumed with showing us everything that goes into what we're seeing, whether it's the servants preparing a dining room, a chef creating a meal...even textiles in the factory the family owns. What does that add?

I think that it's a really wide project about making the audience active...it's a different attitude toward the audience, letting them choose. You'll take a milieu like that house and make sure that it's part of the text of what you're showing, that you not only see people sitting down and having dinner, but you also see people washing up, or preparing the food and bringing it downstairs. You'll actually see around and even behind the back of the curtain, to use a Wizard of Oz analogy. It's not just about going around, it's about going wide, or under the carpet and making the audience capable of feeling their own way and choosing their own point of view in almost a documentary way. It's not about a rather rigid directorial style which chooses an attitude that you're dependent on...you can actually feel quite fluid in your relationship with the place.

This is a movie that the two of you had been planning for a long time.

We devised it together, Luca and I, and we've been talking about it for about seven years. Actually, there's been an even longer conversation about the kind of cinema we're interested in exploring through a number of projects, and this is just the first that we were ready to shoot. Now, we look back and we're grateful for all that time. I never doubted that we would make it, but it took a long time.

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