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

There's also this idea of Eva's Armenian heritage and former career as this globetrotting travel writer, now pinned into this community -- this stranger in a strange land, despite being American.

She's in this location. Whether she's in a community at all... Again, none of this is exclusive to America. But there's something very particular about the kind of isolation that feels like it's possible to get trapped by in a kind of privileged, moneyed isolation. That feeling of money, life being elsewhere. You're trapped in that terrible house, which is like something out of The Shining. And you're as isolated as maybe that character was in The Shining. But there's that feeling having these things but being stuck and not being... As she said, her wide reach into the world is now cut from her. Her wanting to be elsewhere, her waking up every morning wanting to be in France. That's not exclusively American, but it is a specialty. It's grown here.

You've said Lynne was very precise in her screenplay, right down to the sound design. But how much creative flexibility do you need to retain on such a lean, relatively quick shoot?

Flexibility about what, is the question. You know, the great thing about doing anything in a group -- and it doesn't have to be filmmaking; it could be cooking or running a magazine or whatever -- is that if you have some nice, solid, reliable elements like certain key people you can really rely on, and certain agreements about what you're doing, you can actually be very flexible. We had a lot of immovable objects. We had this incredibly short time to shoot.

Which was...

30 days.

Yikes.

So we knew that we had some ridiculous amount of set-ups every day just to get through. There's so much immovable there that you knew you could never stop in a moment and say, "Hmm, let's think about this for two hours. Let's retire to a trailer." There were no trailers. "Let's retire to a corner and chew this through..." That was absolutely impossible. And we had a shooting script. But if one of your immovable objects is actually the reliability of [cinematographer] Seamus McGarvey, who's an old friend of ours and has got all the tools to be absolutely present and pull it out very quickly -- to light and set up very fast -- then playing with the atmosphere actually felt very... free.

Really?

Yeah. That's what it's all about: Setting up a safe fence around the kindergarten so that the children can play. If you've got a wobbly fence, you're going to get chaos. But if there are some things that really, really set, you can say, "OK, we've got half an hour. This office party -- what's it going to be like? Let's see..." But I think the important thing is knowing what's usefully reliable and what's useful to keep random.

I've heard stories about this being a difficult shoot. The schedule was one thing, but I've been told Lynne had problems on set: She was either difficult to work with, or didn't quite know what she was doing at times, she didn't feel comfortable with it... Generally, she added a level of stress that nevertheless might have helped the film -- that duress, that unease. Is that at all true? Did you recognize or have to deal with anything like that?

Well... What can I say about that? It's interesting. I'm trying to sort of... [Pauses] Getting the film together was incredibly stressful -- mainly for Lynne. Lynne had not worked for nine years; she had this terrible kind of false start with The Lovely Bones, the pain of which is pretty incalculable if you are nursing something solitarily for several years and then it gets taken out from under you. The whole business of getting this up and running was extremely stressful for her.

Having said that, I'm quite surprised by what you tell me, because... I mean, maybe I'm not the best person to judge that. For me, the shoot was actually relatively graceful given that preproduction was so stressful. From my perspective, Lynne did know exactly what she was doing. I was incredibly impressed and proud of her. In fact, I've had this kind of experience recently with the [I Am Love] filmmaker Luca Guadanigno, who had worked a long time on the project and then, from a standing start, went into a brief shoot and nailed it. I was really impressed by that. [Lynne] would be allowed to flounder, I think. Some filmmakers who have just made five films on the chop flounder in a way that she didn't. So I'm surprised by that. But then again, maybe I'm not the right person to judge. Maybe I have a higher tolerance for chaos.

Well, if you're familiar with her and Rory and the creative core, and others aren't...

Yeah, I think maybe that's true. Having said that, if there was discomfort for people less used to chaos, then I'm sorry for them. And they should be all the more proud for kind of holding the ship. Because we did finish it, and we might not have.

And you made a great film.

Yep. By hook or by crook. It's very tricky: This is the second film of the last three or films I've made -- the other being Julia -- that I've made with extremely talented, kind of visionary auteur filmmakers who have made very acclaimed feature films in their own countries now making film outside their own countries. You could even say outside their own language, because even here feels like a language difference for Lynne in the way that going to Mexico to shoot in English was kind of befuddling for Erick Zonca. Both experiences were -- for me! -- extremely delightful, and I'm very fond of both of those filmmakers. They're friends of mine, and I'm developing new projects with both of them, and as I say, I'm perfectly up for chaos.

But it is painful to watch filmmakers deal with strictures they're not used to. I mean, when Lynne's in Scotland and Erick's in France? If she wants a crowd, she'll just ring up an uncle and he'll bring down his mates. That's what you do. You get a fantastic bunch; shot in most of those regions, and you'll get someone fantastic anyway. But you'll get an amazing group of people who will do whatever you want. She can talk to them; she can direct them. Here, you have a high school crowd that is just responding to a massacre, and she's allowed something like six paid extras -- six people who are allowed to speak. Meaning, "Oh, God!" And she's not even allowed to talk to them. This is all to do with incredibly important union controls. I'm not saying that's not a proper way to organize filmmaking as an industry, but it's really, really hard on the filmmaker. It's a whole new ballgame. And it's amazing that she was able to do what she did considering it's a whole new world. It was like her lexicon was taken away from her. But I also know that crew members who worked with Sidney Lumet called her the "baby Sidney Lumet" -- in honor of the fact that she knew exactly what she was doing.

All right, well that's awesome. Can I just say I'm just glad you're not retiring? I had this vision of you taking this indefinite hiatus...

Well, I'm retiring from some things. Just wait and see what I'm not doing!

[Top photo: WireImage]

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