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Interview | Bret Love As burn after reading, the new Coen Brothers movie starring Tilda Swinton and Brad Pitt, opens the Venice film festival this month, the Oscar-winning British actor speaks to Voyager about her unconventional career in film When Tilda Swinton won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in Michael Clayton in February of this year, [...]
Interview | Bret Love
As burn after reading, the new Coen Brothers movie starring Tilda Swinton and Brad Pitt, opens the Venice film festival this month, the Oscar-winning British actor speaks to Voyager about her unconventional career in film
alt="The actress Tilda Swinton on whom the spotlight of major-league success is shining ever brighter">
When Tilda Swinton won the Academy Award for Best
Supporting Actress
for her role in Michael
Clayton in February
of this year, she didn’t
need to feign surprise
at receiving the honour. After all, practically every odds-maker
had placed their bets on Cate Blanchett (for I’m Not There)
and Amy Ryan (for Gone Baby Gone) to win. Some pundits
even put Swinton’s odds behind those of octogenarian actress
Ruby Dee (for American Gangster). But Swinton’s turn as
villainous Karen Crowder – the cunning and conniving legal
counsel for an ethically dubious multinational conglomerate
– was merely the latest in a string of impeccable performances
from the classically trained Scottish actress. Perhaps the
biggest surprise of all should have been the fact that it took
the powers-that-be so long to recognise this heretofore
Hollywood outsider’s immense talent. When I meet her in
a Los Angeles hotel though, she certainly seems to belong.
Born in London in 1960 into one of Scotland’s oldest
aristocratic families, Katherine Matilda Swinton, the daughter
of an army major general, attended boarding school at the
exclusive Heathfields where she was in the same class as the
late Princess Diana. She also briefly attended Fettes (where
Tony Blair was educated) before studying English literature
at Cambridge University. While there, she performed in
numerous stage productions, eventually moving on to work
for a single season with the Royal Shakespeare Company. But
the visually striking redhead’s cultural tastes were decidedly
unconventional, and her penchant for the unusual eventually
led her into a professional partnership with experimental film
director Derek Jarman. Beginning in 1985 and continuing for
nine years, the duo collaborated on seven critically acclaimed
films, including Caravaggio, Edward II and Wittgenstein, before
Jarman succumbed to complications from Aids in 1994.
alt="The actress (right) as a young nobleman in Orlando who was instructed by Queen Elizabeth I">
“There was a time in the 1980s when filmmakers like Derek
Jarman, Peter Greenaway, Sally Potter and Terence Davis were
encouraged to develop a voice as artists,” Swinton recalls
of this heady creative period. “After the British Film Institute
production wing, which funded all of these artists, was
closed, all the funding for film became encompassed under
an umbrella. That’s what’s now called the UK Film Council,
which is closely allied to a tourism objective. It’s a completely
different thing. In those days, the idea of making a profit was
absolute anathema to film artists.”
Her most noteworthy performance during her first decade
as an actress came in the Sally Potter-directed Orlando, based
on Virginia Woolf’s novel, in which she played a nobleman who
lives 400 years and changes sex from man to woman. But
Swinton still insists that she owes her career to Jarman.
“I don’t think there’s any way that I would be what you
call an actress now if I hadn’t met Derek,” she declares, her
green eyes wide with emphasis, “because working alongside
him made it possible for me to be the way that I have to be.
If the only cinema that had been available to me had been
everything else in the UK at that time – which was basically
Richard Attenborough or Merchant Ivory– there’s no way
I would be working in film.”
alt="With fashion duo Viktor & Rolf who regard Swinton as a
muse for inspiring their androgynous designs">
Jarman’s impact on her is clearly profound. The year after
his death, Swinton participated in an art installation which
required her to lie asleep in a glass box for eight hours
a day in a subversive take on Sleeping Beauty. Entitled The
Maybe, it was part of a high-profile show by the artist Cornelia
Parker in London’s Serpentine Gallery and Swinton’s already
milk-pale colouring combined with her prone figure laying in
a see-through coffin-type box raised questions about mortality.
Fortunately, she returned to work in film, though it was
six years after Jarman’s death before she took on what could
even remotely be considered a major role, starring opposite
Leonardo DiCaprio in Scottish director Danny Boyle’s The
Beach. The film launched a pattern in Swinton’s career that
soon found her veering from edgy indie fare to left-of-centre
studio films which exposed her to an increasingly broader
audience. Glossy Tom Cruise vehicle Vanilla Sky was offset
by the darker Young Adam with Ewan McGregor. Then, after
sci-fiflick Constantine with Keanu Reeves, came the genrestretching
Adaptation with Nicolas Cage, followed by the
ponderous Bill Murray movie Broken Flowers.
alt="At the 2008 Oscars with George Clooney">
Working with critically acclaimed directors, ranging from
Cameron Crowe and Spike Jonze to Jim Jarmusch, the actress
found herself with a raised profile internationally. And her
unconventional looks also made her an unlikely style icon.
Cutting-edge Dutch designers Viktor & Rolf, known for their
androgynous tailoring, called her their muse and based several
fashion collections on her.
Recently, Swinton has found herself with a renewed
enthusiasm for the job. “I’ve never been addicted to acting,”
she confesses. “Acting is something that I have relatively
little interest in. If I’m addicted to anything, I would say I’ve
always been a paid-up film fan, and the idea of being able
to make film is still truly thrilling to me. My modus operandi
has crystallised, because I was spoiled very early. Working
with one filmmaker [Jarman] for nine years, I learned to
work with my friends, and to feel happy while working.
Fortunately, I have never had to move outside of that. I’m
so blessed: I keep running into people who become new
friends and create that sort of family atmosphere.”
alt="receiving the statuette for Michael Clayton">
But it was her own family situation that ultimately led
Swinton to the most accessible role of her career, portraying
the White Witch in 2005’s The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion,
The Witch And The Wardrobe and its recently released sequel
The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. In 1997 she gave
birth to twins Honor and Xavier (their father is Scottish
artist/writer John Byrne), and made the personal decision not
to take roles that would require her to be away from her north
Scotland home for months at a time while her children were
little. So when the films’ director Andrew Adamson offered her
a small but pivotal role in the first of his eagerly anticipated
adaptations of C.S. Lewis’ beloved fantasy novels, which fitted
in with her new practical requirements, the devoted mum felt
that “on a scale of 1-100, it was 101 in terms of irresistibility”.
Still, Swinton denies that the canny choice was motivated
by any sort of career blueprint to balance box-office
blockbusters with more personally fulfilling independent film
fare. “Honestly, I’m not aware of having a career,” she insists.
“I’m aware of having a life. I wasn’t a ‘Narnian’ as a child, so
I didn’t have the feelings of pressure. I knew Narnia was a big
thing to people, but I didn’t realise until recently quite how big
it was. But I’m truly thrilled at the idea that maybe, thanks to
Walt Disney [Pictures], people might go and seek out Derek
Jarman films. That really gives me a thrill. And this might make
it easier for me to get films made in the future.”
alt="in The Beach">
The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe went on to gross
more than $500 million internationally and whether by clever
career calculation or sheer circumstance, it landed Swinton
on the A-list for the first time. Suddenly, the maverick actress
found herself working with Hollywood’s crème de la crème.
It was starring opposite George Clooney on the suspense
thriller Michael Clayton, written and directed by Tony Gilroy
(The Bourne Ultimatum, Armageddon) that earned her that
coveted gold statuette. About the high-profile role, Swinton
says: “I’m such a tourist to go into that exotic world with these
people. [Michael Clayton] was written by someone who’s so
sophisticated and playing with that genre in such
a way that you’re not only dealing with a hero and a villain,
but also collateral damage victims along the way. You’re
dealing with someone who’s really looking at character and
human behaviour so he can write a part like the one I was
asked to play, and really make it a meal in itself for the person
who gets to do it, which I’m grateful to say was me.”
While she has said that all her roles have a little bit of
her in them, none of the parts she has played resembles her
unconventional personal life. Soon after her Oscar win it was
revealed that while she and Byrne, 68, live together to raise
their 10-year-old twins, they each have other lovers. Swinton’s
is German artist Sandro Kopp, 18 years her junior, whom she
met on the set of Narnia…, and with whom she travels abroad.
alt="Supernatural... As the White Witch in Narnia: The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe">
However offbeat, Swinton appears to have found
simultaneous happiness in her relationships and career. Now
no longer the dark horse, this surprise Oscar winner seems to
have her pick when it comes to plum roles for actresses ‘of
a certain age’ (which is how Hollywood regards 47-yearold
women). She stars in next month’s highly anticipated
Burn After Reading, a dark comedy directed by fellow Oscar
winners Joel and Ethan Coen, in which Brad Pitt and Frances
McDormand play two unscrupulous gym employees who
find a CD-Rom containing the top-secret memoirs of a
high-ranking CIA agent, played by John Malkovich.
“I’m married to John Malkovich and I am the lover – there’s
no other word for it – of Mr George Clooney,” Swinton says of
her role in the Coen brothers’ follow-up to No Country For Old
Men. “I haven’t cleared this with them, so I hope they don’t kill
me for saying this, but I would call it a caper movie,” she says
of the film, which early previews have compared to the Coen’s
dark comedy classics Fargo and The Big Lebowski.
alt="Asleep in a glass box for an art installation by
Cornelia Parker that echoes the Sleeping Beauty fairytale">
Swinton also stars with Pitt in David Fincher’s (Fight Club)
forthcoming The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, adapted
from an F Scott Fitzgerald story, (which sees a debut cameo
from Pitt’s infant daughter with Angelina Jolie, Shiloh Nouvel).
She then re-teams with Bill Murray and Jim Jarmusch for The
Limits of Control, and rumour has it she’ll co-star opposite Sean
Bean in Come Like Shadows, a Macbeth adaptation. Clearly, this
fiercely independent icon is just beginning to enter her prime
in her late 40s, and having the time of her life doing so.
“I think I enjoy my work now even more,” she says with
a smile. “It sounds sacrilegious to say that anything’s a delight
when you’re away from your children, but the truth is that
making films, going round the world on promotional tours,
all these crazy things that were so difficult before are so much
easier after raising twins that, frankly, it is a delight.”
Burn After Reading opens the Venice Film Festival this month
and goes on general release in September. The Curious
Case Of Benjamin Button is due for release in November
