“I live on another planet, fortunately, and we do things differently there,” Tilda Swinton says over tea and a slight case of the sniffles at the Bowery Hotel in the East Village. Somehow this does not seem a revelatory confession coming from this singular and singular-looking actress. She naturally radiates a certain otherworldliness, as of a creature who has just been zapped to Earth from a distant galaxy and has not yet discovered how to manipulate the tools of ordinary human discourse.
The effect derives from her androgynous beauty, of course: the luminous, almost translucent skin, the sleek planes of her face, the architectural sweep of David Bowie-blond hair and the twiglike frame. For when Ms. Swinton speaks, she becomes unmistakably human: funny, friendly, thoughtful, intelligent but unpretentious.
The planet she refers to is not an actual one, needless to say, or even the busy world of Hollywood, but the place she literally lives. “I live in a part of Scotland where people are more likely to talk about problems with greenfly” than news of the film world, she says, referring to an insect more commonly known in planet America as the aphid. Despite her increasingly high profile as an actress with one of those coveted gold statuettes to her name — she took home a supporting actress Oscar for “Michael Clayton” in 2008 — Ms. Swinton insists she inhabits the world of mainstream film only as an alien visitor. In Scotland she lives with her twin children and her partner, the painter Sandro Kopp. (Sensational rumors from a few years ago that Ms. Swinton, Mr. Kopp and Ms. Swinton’s former partner, John Byrne, were all cohabitating, were false.)
“Aside from the odd skirmish, such as going to Cannes, Scotland is where I live year round. I have no other home,” she says. “When I visit Hollywood, I come in and out like a tourist, and I am really happy to be a tourist.”
She is in the middle of one such skirmish, in New York to promote her latest movie, “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” an elliptical psychodrama about a mother whose son commits an atrocity that leaves her feeling alienated and complicit. Directed by Lynne Ramsay (“Ratcatcher,” “Morvern Callar”), the movie exerts an unsettling, hallucinatory pull, in part because it relies more on imagery than language to draw us inside the spiraling thoughts of the central character. (Contra the title, which comes from the 2003 Lionel Shriver novel that “inspired” the film, as Ms. Swinton prefers to say, nobody does much talking about Kevin.)
Odd though it may seem for a woman who speaks with such lucidity and fluidity, it was precisely the general absence of conventional dialogue that drew her to the role.
“For me that is grace,” she says of her character’s dumbstruck confusion in the face of her irrevocably altered life. “I am really interested in silence. In inarticulacy also, which isn’t the same as silence. As a performer I like looking at the gaps between what people want to communicate and what they can communicate,” she adds. “I love good filmmaking that isn’t just about really proficient writers of dialogue, who think that everybody’s really articulate and everybody can hear each other really well. That doesn’t feel true to me, actually. I mean, that’s a fantastical universe.”
The idea certainly resonates in “Kevin,” through which Ms. Swinton’s character often wanders like a mute ghost, replaying a troubled past through the prism of an anguished mind. It also applies to Ms. Swinton’s quietly charged performance in “I Am Love” (2009), in which she plays a Milanese wife whose insular world is shattered by the discovery of erotic love. Her character in that movie, a Russian in the alien world of Italian high society, is similarly withdrawn, living inside her head until a sensual awakening changes the pattern of her life. Ms. Swinton, 51, says she is drawn to characters confronting these moments of crisis, when the trajectory of a life is radically altered.
“I’m constantly reading about actors who call themselves storytellers. I’m more of a micro-dotter,” she says. “I like to isolate the spirit of a moment, in particular the moment when the ‘me’ that I was is forced to change.”
Robert Salerno, a producer of “Kevin,” points to Ms. Swinton’s ability to illuminate her character’s interior life without a lot of dialogue as central to the film’s power. “A lot of her performance comes from her eyes and her facial expressions, and as an actress that can be even more complicated than working with dialogue,” Mr. Salerno says. “Tilda makes the audience feel the pain and torment this character goes through almost wordlessly.”
Mr. Salerno was also impressed by how completely Ms. Swinton was engaged in the film’s progress from its inception to its completion. “She was very involved, even before I came aboard, and was always wanting to know what she could do to help the process along,” he says. “Lynne is a filmmaker with a particular approach, and in this case she needed to feel a little of the chaos that the characters in the film are going through, and Tilda completely embraced what Lynne needed.”
Although she has forged a career that marries two ideals that rarely intersect — the respect accorded actors who venture deep into the thickets of art house cinema, and the headier remuneration and broader exposure that are the fruits of the realm she refers to repeatedly as “industrial filmmaking” — Ms. Swinton makes it clear that there has been little or no design in the pattern of her life. This may be why she finds such richness in roles requiring her characters to diverge from the “menu” of life choices they’ve been given, as she puts it.
“I’ve been making it up as I go along,” she confides. “In fact I never set out to be an actor. Still am not, really. I slid into performing at the point at which I stopped writing.”
Ms. Swinton, who comes from established Scottish stock (her father was a highly decorated major in the British Army), studied literature at Cambridge, where she wrote poetry. “I slid sideways into the theater, basically because of the company I was keeping,” she says, “and a feeling of experimenting with friends who were really into theater. I was totally undriven.”
Early stage ventures, including a short stint with the Royal Shakespeare Company, convinced her that theater “wasn’t the right trousers,” as she idiomatically puts it. She slid on a new pair when she met the experimental filmmaker Derek Jarman, with whom she formed an artistic collaboration that only ended with his death in 1994 from complications from AIDS. They made films together — larger and smaller, scrappy and polished — although it was Ms. Swinton’s role as the swashbuckling, gender-changing title character in Sally Potter’s “Orlando” (1992), based on the Virginia Woolf novel, that brought her to international attention.
“The way I worked with Derek and Sally during those first nine years was really spoiling, really specific,” she remembers. “And, I now realize, really rare. It put me up a gum tree. It didn’t get me any closer to being a proper actor or involved with industrial cinema. It was where I learned to work collectively and it’s where I learned what producing is and it’s where I learned at one remove the job of filmmaking. Those directors expected their team to all be filmmakers. That’s not an orthodox actor’s training. When Derek died and when ‘Orlando’ was done, I was no closer to having what you call a career.”
Her entry into industrial filmmaking — the phrase is catchy, and appropriate — came as haphazardly as her sideways tilt into an acting career. After her acclaimed performance in the independent movie “The Deep End” (2001), as the mother of a gay son she suspects has committed a murder, offers from filmmakers from outside her family of collaborators started to come. But Ms. Swinton finds that there is a natural continuity between the two kinds of work.
“The truth is, in 25 years I’ve only made about five or six true studio films, and to me all of them have been with experimental filmmakers,” she says. “It may be that David Fincher has $200 million or whatever to make a movie, but like the other directors I’ve worked with he is always messing with the form and still working in a way that felt familiar to me. Or when I was working on ‘Constantine,’ and there was all this tech geek stuff going on, it felt a lot like back when I was doing a Pet Shop Boys video with Derek Jarman, shooting it against a blue screen.”
Ms. Swinton seems content to allow the flow of career to unfold without conscious direction, caring primarily for the filmmaking company she keeps. “My habit, which I cannot imagine breaking, is the dependence on the relationship with the filmmaker,” she says, noting that friendships with both Luca Guadagnino, the director of “I Am Love,” and Ms. Ramsay, the Scottish director, preceded her collaborations with both. “That’s what I’m in it for.”
She and Mr. Guadagnino have hatched a plan to film a remake of “Auntie Mame,” with Ms. Swinton in the title role. It is hard to picture Ms. Swinton, whose characters on screen often seem to be reverberating with repression, as the flamboyant celebrator of life in Patrick Dennis’s novel. Although she does reveal a mischievous streak in person, as well as an unexpected taste for lowbrow popular culture. (When told that the humor in “The Book of Mormon” is predominantly juvenile, she lights up with glee.) Her disaffection for theater has kept her away from the stage for decades, and yet she doesn’t disdain it entirely. “I love live performance,” she says. “But the theater I prefer is the theater of the music hall, or the Saturday matinee when some TV star comes on, and everybody claps.”
But Ms. Swinton circles repeatedly back to the idea of all human behavior as a kind of performance, an idea that the self-dramatizing Mame might well espouse. What attracts her to acting, a profession in which she still seems to feel she is an apprentice practitioner, Oscar and critical acclaim notwithstanding, is the mystery of what resides behind the masks people wear.
“Starting to imagine or to notice how inscrutable we all are to one another, that’s where my interest in wanting to be a performer came from,” she says. Referring to the central incident in “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” and perhaps to many another contemporary horror, she continues: “People perpetrate atrocities and other people say, ‘We didn’t see it coming.’ The idea that people actually wear themselves on their faces seems to me to be less real than what life actually is, which is a series of concealments and containments.
“These surfaces and veils exist,” she continues, warming to her theme. “We take off one for one person, and several for another. But there is always a difference between what you show to others and what you show to yourself in the mirror.”
The actor’s challenge, and it is one that Ms. Swinton meets with a rare clarity and precision, is to explore this process of concealment and revelation. Meanwhile we in the audience, gazing into the mirror of art, can perhaps come a little closer to seeing ourselves.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul is a Cannes Festival Palme d’Or prize winning filmmaker—but you knew that already. Despite our pride in his international recognition, his art often remains difficult to penetrate. His movies move at a glacial pace, dotted with subtle folkloric references, and with no apparent plot. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (the movie that won him the Cannes prize) is actually part of a larger art project titled Primitive, a multimedia exhibition which explores the two narratives of Uncle Boonmee. First, Uncle Boonmee’s power to move through time, accessing both the future and memories going back many generations. Second, the village of Nabua’s persecution by the Thai army, who believed it to be a hotbed of communist insurgency during the Vietnam War. Through a series of (mostly) videos, Primitive returns to these two themes again and again.
Why do an exhibition?
It’s always related to the films or short films I’m doing. It’s a kind of rough sketch, or an opportunity to do something abstract that I can’t do in a movie. For Primitive, there’s Uncle Boonmee [the movie], a book, short films—many fragments. And sometimes it’s almost a performance when I collaborate with the people [in Nabua]. But since there’s less money here, this exhibition is more intimate [than the Primitive exhibitions abroad].
You’re dealing with the memory of people killed by the Thai army. Do you ever self-censor?
Even though the work is political, I don’t feel a need to censor myself. I don’t want to make a heavy political film. The installation should represent yourself, your take, your shared memories of the people there, with the hope that afterwards people can go back and talk about what happened or look it up on the internet.
Still, it is very political.
It’s impossible not to talk politics. The education system is just an illusion in Thailand. The way I grew up, the education I received, the history books of my nephew, they’re full of lies, full of propaganda. What Thailand has been going through is lies, many lies. We went to listen firsthand and record many hours of conversation with the older generations [in Nabua], to reeducate ourselves, even if it’s rather late. There are certain key institutions involved, like the army and... Something is still there. It’s about the fear, the cultural fear. Faith and fear. You worship something and, at the same time, you can’t step out of line.
You don’t worry about getting in trouble?
This exhibition is very mild. It’s not political at all. It’s very personal. It’s a journey with these kids to a spaceship. It’s about escape and all that. It has a reason behind it but living in this country, I know what I can say and what I cannot. I don’t want to be too direct anyway.
Is that the goal, though? Do people have to dig deeper to figure it out?
It’s like my film. When I make it, it’s for me, my curiosity for the place. When it’s shown, it has a life of its own. So it depends on the individual viewer, whether he or she wants to dig, how much you want to know about the background. If you don’t care about it, take it all in visually, it’s OK. For me, I have my own references but again, like other artists, I don’t mind other interpretations. That’s what art is supposed to be.
Why Nabua? Why is its past so important?
I want to know myself. Like when I make movies, I always select actors that have a lot of experience that I don’t have. People say, they are not professional. But for me they are very professional, professional at being human beings. They’ve gone through so much. But for me, my life is so simple, so I want to learn. Making movies is a pretext, a path to that. Being in Nabua has really allowed me to share and understand better, through new friends, how as a country we became what we are now. Communism was a big turning point for Thailand, how the Americans came, how people felt left out until now.
Has your art changed Nabua?
I don’t know. I’ve sent them DVDs but I haven’t gone back. I’m going back next year with the Jim Thompson Foundation, when we plan to host the exhibition in the village. I didn’t want to change their lives. I wanted to be there, not as a tourist, but not as an inhabitant. It is sensitive. Sometimes you treat them simply as subjects, and it’s like taking advantage of them.
Has funding for your art improved since you won in Cannes?
In Thailand, it’s always on and off that you don’t really have much hope in the government. Sometimes it’s coming, sometimes not. I tend to be cautious about government funding. They want you to do certain things. If I have a choice, I prefer not to have funding from them. If you look at art from countries with funding, it’s very academic and boring. Maybe the artwork would be more interesting with less money.
What’s next?
I’m finishing one very romantic film of a hotel on the Mekong, in Nongkai. It’s a one-hour film called Mekong Hotel. My crew go there and my friend, who is a guitar teacher improvises and plays guitar for an hour. My crew is trying to rehearse a movie about this ghost who goes around eating innards. It’s like a documentary but every scene is shot in a hotel room.
And will the movie in the movie ever exist?
I hope so. This is almost to find out, what is this movie? The fun part is shooting it in a hotel. It’s full of melancholia. And then I’m doing a film festival in March with Tilda Swinton, in Yao Noi, next to Phuket. It’s very snobbish and by invitation only but we’ll do a more public one in Bangkok. Then I’m doing a short film with her and writing a feature film, hopefully to be shot in 2013.
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Shrieking at how perfect her next few projects sound- from the new Wes Anderson, the Apichatpong short, the Jarmusch vampire film, and the Elizabeth Bathory film with Isabelle and Udo Kier, IDK which to be the most excited about.