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.
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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