Tilda Swinton on We Need to Talk About Kevin, the Joys of Chaos, and What 'Indie' Means Today

Another year, another blisteringly grand performance from Tilda Swinton: After a run that commenced with her Oscar-winning role in Michael Clayton and continued with her underseen creative triumphs Julia and I Am Love, Swinton arrives in theaters next week as the haunted lead in We Need to Talk About Kevin. If there is any justice in the Oscar cosmos, she'll be back in the Kodak Theater as at least a nominee come February.

Of course, that cosmos knows little justice, and anyway, that's not why Swinton is in the business. "I don't choose roles; I choose people," she said at a recent guild screening of Kevin in New York City -- a reference to her friend Lynne Ramsay, the brilliant filmmaker behind Ratcatcher (1999) and Morvern Callar (2002) who makes her return to directing after nearly a decade away. Along with Rory Kinnear, Ramsay adapted Lionel Shriver's epistolary novel about Eva Katchadourian (Swinton), an erstwhile travel writer who settles down to motherhood despite her acute unease with the concept. Her pregnancy yields Kevin, the raven-haired baddest of bad seeds who reflects back to Eva every dark apprehension under which he was conceived. When, as a teenager (played by a smoldering Ezra Miller), he commits an unthinkable crime, Eva is left to face the consequences alone as the community's most notorious pariah.

Swinton and I caught up yesterday in New York City, a day after the actress-producer-artist presented the Gotham Awards' Best Feature prize and at the start of another week of appearances geared to stir much-needed (and much-deserved) word of mouth about We Need to Talk About Kevin. (The film opens Dec. 9 in limited release and will roll out nationally through the winter.)

How were the Gothams last night?

They were a blur, but they were fun. They were great. I'd never been before.

Really?

First time!

It's funny, because to announce something like a tie between The Tree of Life and Beginners, were you thinking, "These are indies?" Or is "indie film" just a matter of semantics now?

It all gets lost in translation. I have no idea what "indie" means now. I certainly don't know what it means here. I really don't. It means something different every decade, I think. There was a time when it didn't have a capital "I," and now it does. Now it has award shows. It has studio backing a lot of the time. So I myself am bemused, but I'm a little bit of a Rip Van Winkle when it comes to "indie." The roots of it were different anyway in Europe than in America. So I really don't know.

As the co-producer of We Need to Talk About Kevin, would you call this an indie?

Well, you could say that's it's not an indie because it received money from BBC Films. But then you could also say it's an indie because the hard core of the people who made it worked on it unpaid for several years. It didn't have development finance. You could say that that qualifies a film as independent. I mean, we all wish we were Stanley Kubrick, working on something for over a decade, funded by Warner Bros. I would love that. But when you're working on a film like I Am Love for a dozen years on a song and a prayer, that feels really indie. A lot of the time it feels like you're pissing in the wind. It depends on your distribution as well -- how your film is actually seen. The first American independent film I made -- with David Siegel and Scott McGehee -- interestingly enough, I remember after it was released someone came up to me and asked, "Is this the first Hollywood movie you've ever made?" And that was a credit-card funded movie -- entirely independently put together. But the fact that it was picked up by Fox Searchlight and given a really nice release gave it a different kind of patina. So your independence is a color that can either be thrown out of you, or it can be thrown on you by a gel and a light.

I talk to more and more actors who go into producing who seem to actually resent discussing that side of the job -- as if it compromises the art. What's your relationship with it?

To be honest with you, that's the territory of the bulk of the last 25 years of my life. I've spent much more time putting projects together with filmmakers than performing. Performing and actually shooting is just a thumbnail compared to the whole body of what production is. So no -- I have no sense of resentment at all. In fact, I think that's the science of it. Honestly, that's the bit of it I'm particularly interested in. I'm more interested in it.

A few weeks ago, I was at a guild screening of Kevin where you spoke about having finally made Julia, I Am Love and We Need to Talk About Kevin after collective years of struggle. And you compared that having a farm that you were watching grow for a while, and when you harvested it, that'd be it for a while.

We've had the harvest. It's grown! Now it's time to maybe sow something else. But the field is fallow.

It sounded like you were planning a break. How long a break are we talking about -- if it happens?

A break from what, is the question. I hope there will be a break from going out in public. [Laughs] And hopefully a break from talking for a while. But there are other seeds being planted now; it just depends how long they take to come up. They might take as little as two years, or they might take as much as 10. Don't know.

But people do -- pardon the pun -- need to talk about Kevin. There is lot to discuss here.

It's helpful if they see it first! But it's all good.

Starting at Cannes and moving forward to today, having heard the conversations about it yet being as close to it as you've been over the years, how has that chatter affected your own perception of the film -- if at all?

This is not a new conception, because it's in many ways what we set out to do -- it's a relief that I notice this. But sometimes you have an intention -- the best one in the world -- but the film is a beast of its own, and it ends up doing something different. That's not necessarily a bad thing; very often it can be better than you intended. But in this case, I really feel that the film is about and was intended to be about a person's mind. That's what it's about -- a human consciousness. It's about memory, it's about guilt, it's about isolation and fantasy. It's much more about that than it is about any of the events that we see or are referred to.

It's partly about the psyche she shares with Kevin, right?

Who knows how much of it is what we call "true"? It could all really be a hallucination. The last few times I've seen it, I viewed it through that prism. That's really useful -- that's a really good ride. I recommend that trip. If you go to the film expecting social commentary or expecting some kind of thriller that relies in a kind of reliable territory, then you might be disappointed. You might be unsatisfied. It's not a conventional enough film to satisfy the tropes of a genre. It's not a genre film at all. I think it's truly radical in that sense. If you go expecting to do that "thing" -- cinema being the great empathy machine that it is -- to just go into somebody else shoes and wallow in their experience and limit yourself to that, to relax into that, then I think that's the most valuable thing the film can offer.

It's also about the American psyche -- something that you and Lynne had to approach as outsiders. How did that go?

We had a discussion about that. When we were putting the film together, there was a moment when, money being what it is... Money tends to bring its own color with it sometimes, its national color or a kind of agenda, and there was a moment when -- because the film is largely funded by British money -- there was a question about whether it really need to be shot in America, or whether it even needed to be an American story. It was very quick business for us -- the central core of Lynne, Rory and me -- to know that it had to be.

And that in itself begs the question of why? I'm not really clear on why, apart from the fact that -- having said that it's not social commentary -- it is about a kind of atmosphere. And while the atmosphere it evokes isn't exclusively about America -- I mean, let's face it: America is incredibly good at exporting its cultural atmosphere to most the rest of the world -- there was something simpler about placing it where it was set in New York. It felt clean. And because we were dealing with sort-of clean elements, because our budget was what it was, and we had to pare it down into this Greek tragedy of a few protagonists and a chorus of kids outside a high school and no other society. You never go into the school. You never see any life with friends. You don't get any back story of Franklin's family or Eva's family, which you do in the book. Because we were so pared down, we needed to be that straight-up.

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