Katie Campbell talks to Tilda Swinton about her latest role in I Am Love, a film that took a decade in the making.
Tilda Swinton is a rare bird. Beautiful and iconoclastic, she is from an ancient Anglo-Scottish family with a privileged education, first as a classmate of Lady Diana Spencer before heading to Cambridge to read Social and Political Science. In the 80s and 90s, she found her professional home in the Lefty underground arts scene as a muse and collaborator to filmmakers and artists Derek Jarman, Sally Potter and Joanna Scanlon.
Over the last 25 years, she has produced an incredible body of challenging work across film, art, music and fashion. Definitively outside of the mainstream, it has been embraced in Europe, accepted but occasionally sniffed at in Britain and largely ignored by Hollywood. Tilda, however, has stealthily raised her profile acting in mainstream but quality projects, receiving the ultimate Hollywood accolade in 2007, an Oscar, for her supporting role as a corporate villainess in Michael Clayton, alongside George Clooney. She is known to be a serious intellectual, bohemian but “all about the work”, she has a bemused sense of humour about her Hollywood success.
This is the woman who, in her acceptance speech, dedicated her Oscar to George Clooney’s nipples. Her most recent project, I Am Love, is a return to her collaborative roots, this time with her long-time friend and creative partner, director Luca Guadagnino. This collaboration was eleven years in the making, with seven years working on the story alone, Tilda is a producer or “co-originator” of the project and she is typically good-humoured when considering the leverage picking up an Oscar may have created whilst trying to raise funds for the film.
“Well we will never know, but if it did help us then it would be a good use for an Oscar in my view. We were always going to make this film, we had been working on (the story) for seven years practically and we were going to make it the month after I went to the academy awards, so I don’t know. Nobody withdrew money afterwards, at least!”
In the film, Tilda plays Emma, the Russian-born matriarch of a wealthy Milanese family whose happiness is transformed by the arrival of a young gifted chef into her world, resulting in a sensory explosion of food, nature and sex. However, she is keen to distance the project from being a tale of privileged desperation.
“I don’t feel like Emma is trapped, she doesn’t think she is at least. I don’t think this is the story of a desperate housewife. She isn’t someone who is aware that she’s unfulfilled or has any growing up to do. At the beginning of the film I think she is pretty content doing the deal she set out to do 25 years ago to the best of her ability and with a sense of satisfaction.”
Instead, I Am Love is about the senses, waking up and interacting with the world around you, it is a celebration of that moment. To this effect, as Emma experiences the sounds, tastes, smells of this new world, the audience do too. This is especially true in the food scenes.
“I would say that was very much part of the project from the beginning. One of the things that Luca and I had been talking about for so long is this idea of a sensational cinema, a cinema that occupies a sensational space, not only in terms of the camera but also in terms of its narrative not being driven by dialogue, spoken narrative, but by the interior life of the characters, their behaviour, their relationship with temperature, their relationship with texture. With great masters like Hitchcock, who worked absolutely in this sensational realm, you can always tell what temperature a room is in a Hitchcock film, because the people feel alive, they don’t feel they are just being filmed on a stage.”
It is obvious that the process of creative producing and working on a project from its genesis is the work she feels most comfortable with, was it different being on set as a producer and star at the same time on this project? Was being a credited producer a big change?
“With this film I am quite out there as a producer but to be honest the work that a producer does is work that I have done for most of my working life. It is work that I started to do, for example, when I worked with Sally Potter on Orlando, we worked on it together over 5 years and I was not and am not officially a producer on that film but the work of what a producer does I learned at that stage. To a certain extent I’ve been a producer ever since, with slight holiday breaks like working with Disney or George Clooney, where there is no need to sit with the filmmaker for 11 years to develop the script or go around the world raising money.
She continues: “Generally speaking that is the work I have always done, it is more exotic for me to be given a script that is already written and a pay cheque and asked to dress up and play. The thing that I love the most, and possibly do the best, is working in collaboration with filmmakers.”
In recent years she has taken more of these “holiday breaks” on big-budget studio films. In 2005 she took on the part of the White Witch in Disney’s Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe and followed up her Oscar-winning turn by reuniting with Clooney, joining Brad Pitt and an all-star cast in the Coen Brother’s 2008 comedy Burn After Reading and David Fincher’s Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Amongst the sets, the stars and the studio execs, is there still a collaborative process on big budget films?
“I’ve only ever gone into studio films with people I really like, they may not be people I’ve known for 20 years, but they have always been people I like having a conversation with. The work is different in that I haven’t had to travel across the world raising money or work from the genesis of the project but the collaboration feels clear always, it is sort of my drug. I am in it for the conversation. That is the most interesting part of it.”
And conversation was the very genesis of this project, a journey that started from her first collaboration with Luca, a 2002 short film called The Love Factory. Luca describes this as “a portrait of Tilda” in conversation about love, a key inspiration for the project. “We started from that, we started to try to understand how to make a narrative film about a concept”.
I Am Love is also entirely in Italian, with one scene in Russian thrown in for good measure. Tilda gives a seamlessly excellent performance in both languages. For a project so close to her heart, has the end result met her expectations? Is it the film she wanted to make?
“I would say, and this sounds like a modest thing to say, but the most amazing thing of all is that it is pretty much exactly what I thought we were going to make, what I hoped we would make. That is never easy, especially when you set out with something as ambitious as this, because we set out to do something that was such an overreach for what we were being told we could achieve.”
This project is the first from the production company she now co-owns with Luca, they have a slate of projects in development and plan to film the next one in the UK. Tilda is dedicated to the slow, nurturing script development that comes with each project. “Eleven years is a great length of time to prepare a movie, it would be wonderful to have 11 years of funded preparation? Eleven years of slightly difficult not knowing where you are going to get the money from or whether it is going to be another 15 years is quite tortuous but if one had 20 years, funded, to make a movie, wouldn’t that be amazing?
This professional nurturing is not just in her work, she also loves to nurture film fans. She is a patron of the Edinburgh Film Festival and also runs a more homemade film festival, the Ballerina Ballroom Cinema Dreams which started in 2008 when she, and co-creator Mark Cousins, took over Nairn in the Moray Firth, where Charlie Chaplin used to holiday. Seating was beanbags and entry was free if you bought cake, it was resolutely about the public watching and celebrating films, something that is not always associated with glamorous film festivals with glitzy red carpet events. On the website, Tilda calls the Edinburgh Film Festival the chicken and the Ballerina Ballroom Cinema of Dreams the egg.
“I think the EFF is a great, august institution and I am associated with it as a fan. I think I have a very elastic taste and I think that most proper film fans do. Film festivals are about film audiences, they are about giving the audience the encouragement to feel really empowered and stretch the elastic of their taste. The thing I really mind hearing is when someone says ‘that’s not my kind of film I don’t want to go and see that’. I don’t believe it is possible to write off a whole genre of filmmaking. A real film fan experience is an omnivorous experience.”
Who can argue with that? It is also an appropriate ending to a chat about I Am Love, a film that is not about hunger (commercial or otherwise) but instead about appetite, of the omnivorous kind.
