Profile: Tilda Swinton
The actress reveals her unconventional approach to making films
Tilda Swinton doesn’t choose to be in films the way most actors do. She doesn’t even like to think of herself as an actor at all—rather as a creative partner. She makes films with other artists who are willing to share their vision with her. That’s certainly true of A Bigger Splash, which premiered in May, and in which she stars with a remarkable trio of actors: Ralph Fiennes, Matthias Schoenaerts, and Dakota Johnson. The movie is the latest Swinton has made with Luca Guadagnino, an Italian writer-director whom she’s known for 20 years. Their previous film together was the romantic Italian melodrama I Am Love, in 2009, which was nominated for an Oscar. And their first film together was The Protagonists, a murder mystery, way back in 1999.
“Luca and I are always in this sort of endless conversation about… everything,” Swinton says. “And occasionally it’s about making films. I knew that he was preparing A Bigger Splash, and we discussed very early me being involved, and very early we decided that I wouldn’t be. For a number of reasons. Partly because I was not wanting to make a film at that time. And then it sort of came around that he asked me again, and I was really tantalized by the thought of being with him, shooting with [cinematographer] Yorick Le Saux and that creative family which is so dear to me. But,” she adds, somewhat mysteriously, “I didn’t want to speak.”
As first conceived, Marianne, the character Swinton was to play in A Bigger Splash, did indeed speak. Guadagnino’s film is very loosely based on a sexy 1969 French thriller, La Piscine, which starred hunk du jour Alain Delon and, as a sultry Marianne, Romy Schneider. In that film Schneider is merely an object of men’s lust and jealousy, but in Guadagnino’s update, Marianne was going to be an actress, and as a character in a foursome of criss-crossed sexual desires, she’d be a major player in the fray.
“When I worked out that I didn’t want to play an actress,” Swinton continues, “and I didn’t want to talk at all—and when I realized that that was the thing that was stopping me from saying, ‘Yes, I do want to be a part of this’—then I proposed this idea of not speaking, of being a rock star who has lost her voice. And when Luca said, ‘Yeah, let’s do it!,’ it became an adventure that we kind of dived into together.”
When PROVOKR spoke recently with Guadagnino, he went even further than Swinton in describing how they work as one. “It’s weird to even call it a collaboration,” the director says. “I think of it as life. Every time we can be together as a family or as workers, we do it. I don’t see any problem in sharing my ideas and my process of creativity. It doesn’t diminish my personal stake—it enhances it. It’s about ownership and authorship, and there are huge misunderstandings about what it means to own something. For me, the concept of a muse is stale.”
In A Bigger Splash, Swinton’s Marianne is recovering from vocal chord surgery on the sun-dappled Italian island of Pantelleria, way out in the Mediterranean, halfway between Sicily and the African coast. She’s there with Paul, a filmmaker and her lover of several years, who is played by a tan, Adonis-like Matthias Schoenaerts. Without warning, Harry (Ralph Fiennes), a former lover of Marianne’s and her producer, arrives with his nubile and flirtatious young daughter, Penelope (Dakota Johnson), in tow. And that’s when the psychosexual crossfire of attractions and frustrations ensues.
The bohemian pairings in the film are something that Swinton might well understand. Born into an Anglo-Scottish family with noble roots and educated at posh boarding schools, she rebelled early on, joining the Communist party and hanging with avant-garde artists in London. She had twin sons 17 years ago with John Byrne, a playwright and painter and her partner of many years. The family moved to Nairn, in the Highlands of Scotland, and then several years later, Swinton became tabloid fodder when she fell in love with a much younger man, the German–New Zealand artist Sandro Kopp. Now Swinton and Kopp live together in Nairn and share the duties of bringing up her boys with Byrne and his new companion.
Though the 55-year-old Swinton has acted in major Hollywood franchises, such as playing the White Witch in The Chronicles of Narnia, and won an Oscar for her role as a corporate operative in Michael Clayton, opposite George Clooney, her more typical modus operandi is the kind of creative partnerships she has formed with Guadagnino. Even in Hollywood she tends to collaborate with the same auteurs, such as Wes Anderson (Moonrise Kingdom; The Grand Budapest Hotel) and the Coen brothers (Burn After Reading; Hail, Caesar!). This has been true for her entire career—ever since she was a 25-year-old Cambridge grad tooling around the London theater scene and shot her first feature, Caravaggio (1986), a dreamy biography of the renaissance painter, with experimental filmmaker Derek Jarman. She continued to work with Jarman in film after film, till his death in 1994 from AIDS.
“Everyone who worked with Jarman worked behind the camera,” Swinton has said. “It was clear that there was nowhere else I could have gone to have that kind of experimental license to play. And so, to a certain extent, I’ve never done anything else, although I have had the great blessing to have been ‘invited,’ as I describe it, to other people’s parties in Hollywood, for example, to go and learn other ways to make films. But what I do—what my real work is—is developing films with filmmakers from scratch.”
And that’s how she came to work with Guadagnino and help create A Bigger Splash. “You build up this shorthand and this sensibility that you share. And you build it up by living alongside one another—you know, sitting at a kitchen table, going on long journeys together, gardening alongside one another, talking about the cinema you’re interested in, talking about the life you’re interested in—just sharing a kind of palette. And then, out of that shared conversation and shared sensibility, you make a few films. And that’s what it is like with Luca: the more years we accrue, the more films we accrue, the more life we accrue. We’re closer and closer all the time.”
