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Tilda Swinton on pushing boundaries through her roles
Brut America
Follow
3/25/2025
"Not knowing the answers is not necessarily the problem. It can be an opportunity."
Tilda Swinton on living in limbo, staying flexible, and what she would be doing if she weren't acting.
Category
🎥
Short film
Transcript
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00:00
I think anybody who says they don't know what it is to feel like an alien, or to feel like a stranger,
00:05
or to feel shy, or to feel strange, or a freak, I don't believe people who say that they never felt
00:12
like a freak. I think they are in denial. Dressing up and playing is definitely an opportunity to
00:20
remind oneself that one is, you know, one has all the tools in the box available to one at all time.
00:26
I think it is. For me, you know, I had this sense of myself, as always, writing poetry,
00:32
and I went to university in order to write poetry. I mean, I was actually given my place
00:37
on the grounds that I would, and then I stopped when I got there. And when I started to perform,
00:43
it was a way of accessing that kind of negotiation with inarticulacy, which I really value.
00:50
And maybe if I stopped performing, I would become a poet again. I would write more poetry.
00:55
I think we need any opportunity to be reminded that inarticulacy is a power for good,
01:02
and that being articulate is not necessarily the holy grail, and that not knowing the answers
01:08
is not necessarily a problem. It can be an opportunity. I mean, that's something that I
01:13
think we've all, we are all acknowledging about this last few months, that this feeling of limbo,
01:20
this feeling of uncertainty, this feeling of disconnection from knowing exactly what we're
01:26
going to do in three months' time, is an opportunity. I mean, it's painful, and it can
01:31
really bring all sorts of problems for people. But if it's possible to get beyond those problems,
01:39
and sometimes those problems are insurmountable, it is an opportunity to just not know, and to be
01:45
more present, and to notice that one might want to make a different plan.
01:50
But following the plan that you set out for yourself a year ago, or 15 or 25 years ago,
01:56
is not necessarily the way to live your life. And poetry can help you to do that.
02:00
Yes, because poetry is about response. It's not actually about being creative,
02:04
it's about being responsive. And I think we're all being encouraged by the circumstances of
02:10
the world now to be more responsive, and that is a good thing.
02:13
Memoria is very much about shared memories, memories of the earth, memories of the world,
02:18
memories of others. How is that precisely your job, as an actor, to share memories?
02:24
I wonder, I don't know. I mean, to be honest, I'm not really clear what an actor's job is.
02:29
But I think a filmmaker's job is, let's say it's the filmmaker's opportunity,
02:34
and the filmmaker's blessing, is to be able to just contact the audience, make some kind
02:41
of contact with at least the unconscious, if not the consciousness, of every person who sees the
02:47
film. So I suppose performers are the kind of conduit, they're the paint that the painter
02:55
paints with.
02:56
So it requires a lot of empathy, right?
02:59
Yes, it's not a bad thing for anybody to be in the empathy business,
03:02
but I think that filmmaking is all about, I mean, cinema is an empathy machine.
03:07
It's about tickling up that sense of complicity.
03:11
Do you remember your roles, your past characters?
03:14
Do they matter when you compose another character?
03:16
My filmography is, like anybody who's in this really blessed situation of making several films,
03:23
it's like a family album. If I ever see any of my films, it's, oh, I remember this location,
03:30
I remember just after this shot, when we were having a laugh about this.
03:35
It's very much a kind of family reverie.
03:40
But the film, the roles I'm not so clear about, I'm really clear that they exist within the frame
03:47
of the film, and then when it's over, they don't exist anymore.
03:51
So they don't change you?
03:52
I don't know, that's a really good question.
03:55
They give you an opportunity to play, just like four-year-olds dressing up as monkeys or whatever.
04:02
It's an opportunity to sort of make new shapes.
04:07
So I don't know, maybe one would be changed if one didn't have the opportunity to be flexible like that.
04:13
I like the word flexible, actually, because we spectators do remember your past characters,
04:18
from the White Fairy of Narnia to the Guilty Mother of We Need to Talk About Kevin,
04:22
or the Vampire or the Ninja in the Jim Jarmusch's movies.
04:25
And I noticed you even multiply yourself as a twin in Ogja,
04:29
as a man and woman in Suspiria, as a double in Hail, Caesar.
04:33
To what extent acting is also to multiply oneself precisely for you?
04:37
Well, I think it is. I mean, it's just to play with the material of oneself.
04:41
It's never occurred to me that one should feel a resistance to trying anything,
04:47
you know, to play someone of a hundred or to play someone who,
04:50
you know, might have a very different experience to you.
04:53
I mean, that's part of the fun.
04:57
Yeah, of course, it's all about fun.
04:59
So you still believe it's like a game, a four-year-old game?
05:02
It is. It's not just that I believe it, you know, it actually is.
05:06
I've been very, very lucky that it continues to be fun.
05:09
If it wasn't fun, I would not do it.
05:11
Tilda, I'm thinking of Orlando, of course,
05:13
which had you transformed and transported through the ages,
05:16
through genders, through multiple stories,
05:19
as though acting was about challenging limits.
05:21
Is there something of that?
05:22
Yes, I agree with you.
05:24
There's not so much challenging limits as it's this opportunity to pretend
05:29
that there are no limits.
05:30
So, for example, Orlando, which is, you know,
05:33
this extraordinary phenomenon written by Virginia Woolf,
05:37
is a spirit who doesn't recognize any boundaries.
05:41
And my fantasy about Orlando is that if it had gone off,
05:44
the book had gone on for another thousand pages,
05:46
maybe in the next chapter Orlando would have become a donkey
05:49
or a chicken or a tree or gone back to being male.
05:53
Or this feeling of freedom and the feeling of boundarylessness,
05:57
not recognizing obstacles.
05:59
I think that's the opportunity that an image like Orlando can kind of remind us of.
06:04
Of course, it's beautiful and very important today,
06:06
this fluidity, this multiplying.
06:09
Is it also a political statement?
06:10
Can it be a political statement?
06:12
Well, I mean, in that it's an existential statement,
06:15
in that it is actually reminding people that all that flexibility is theirs.
06:20
They don't have to look for it.
06:21
It's theirs.
06:23
The obstacles are the things that they take on
06:27
and may hold on to against their will or against their happiness.
06:31
But that feeling of flexibility, you know,
06:33
you look at a child of six months, it's all there.
06:36
We don't have to invent it in ourselves.
06:39
We can lose it or we can lose sight of it.
06:42
But we never lose the capacity to be that flexible and that free, I don't think.
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