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.
When we first see your character, she seems to be playing the part of the society wife quite well. Can you describe what causes her to break from that?
I would agree with you in that at the beginning of the film, she's perfectly content. She made a deal a while ago and she stuck to it and fulfilled it to the letter and really excelled. Then this point comes of potential revolution which I'd suggest is not particularly exotic and could happen to any woman in any walk of life, which is that this woman who has children quite young, these children leave home and start to become sexually active and have lives, and that moment for that woman is to return to the "her" that she left when she had children. It brings her very close to those children, in age -- she and her daughter in particular are kind of twinned at that point.
She even gets her hair cut like her daughter's, in a way.
Even the haircut. The daughter leads her into a world of romance, this feeling of liberation that she was denied or denied herself at that age. It's a second chance to be free and choose her own life.
You're also about to start a new film with the director Lynne Ramsay, who doesn't work enough as far as I'm concerned.
It's an adaptation of a book by Lionel Shriver called We Need to Talk About Kevin. Lynne and I have been working on it for a few years now. Like you, I'm longing for a new Lynne Ramsay film -- so many people are -- and I think we're going to deliver one. It's looking really good. Do you know the book?
Yes -- you play the mother of a boy who's committed a mass murder.
Yeah. It's pretty dark. [Laughs]
You're quite the development executive, with all these projects percolating for so many years.
Yes, that's how I've always been.
But you're not interested in directing any of them yourself?
Well, actually, I've been developing a project with Luca that he would produce and I would direct. We have a company together to produce a number of films -- [I Am Love] is just the first that we've finished.
Can you tell me anything about the project you intend to direct?
I can't, because I'm still not as convinced as he is that I should direct it.
Why is that?
I'm writing it, and at the moment I'm quite happy with the idea of just writing it, but he's trying to persuade me to direct it. Maybe he'll win. Who knows?
Is there any film you tend to return to the most often?
Probably the film I've seen the most in my life is a Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger film called I Know Where I'm Going. It's one of my favorites, and it's a film that I screen quite regularly. We had it dubbed into Mandarin when we had our film festival in Beijing.
Do you have another festival planned? I know you and Mark Cousins just did one in the Scottish highlands this past summer.
Only when nobody's expecting it. Everyone expects one this summer, and I can tell you that it's not happening. Just when everyone thinks that we're not going to do it, then it will happen.
Why is that?
The project is primarily and very importantly personal. It's very, very selfish and it has to be that way. It has to be self-serving for me and Mark Cousins, because our first adventure was at the Ballerina Ballroom in Nairn, and that was just a complete experiment. I mean, they all feel like experiments, and that's one of the reasons I don't want to repeat them when they're expected. It's an experiment in making cinema in a place where there is none, and screening films that most of the people coming to the cinema would never have seen before and would never be able to see in any other way.
You have to be quite overwhelmed that old ladies and fishermen and children would queue up and sell out screenings of the Bill Douglas trilogy or Fellini's 8 1/2. This idea that people won't read subtitles unless they've been to film school is nonsense, and that was really an astonishment to us, this feeling of an active audience. We made not only a festival of films, but we made a cinema audience where there hadn't been one before. One of the things that was most gratifying about that first festival is that the village of Nairn, where I live, has now started its own film society.
And that was independent of you?
Absolutely independent. Well, I'm its godfather -- godmother? -- godfather. That was exactly our point, to encourage and inspire people and let them know how easy it is. You just need a projector and a bunch of DVDs and you've got over a hundred years of film history to draw on -- and Bob's your uncle!
You're a veteran of other people's festivals, including Sundance. How do they compare with yours?
I love film festivals and I always have. I was brought up as a cineaste through film festivals. We have what I think is the most perfect festival experience, which is that we don't have to sell anything to anybody and we can show our favorite films. We don't have to make any money or reputations, and we don't have to pacify any studios. We have no press release and no journalists who don't see the films. It's kind of perfect, so whenever I come to a film festival after one of ours, I feel very sorry for the people who run them. [Laughs]
[Photo Credit: Matt Carr/Getty Images]