Archive for April, 2010

I recently caught up with the lovely and HUGELY talented (yes it required the caps-lock) Tilda Swinton to talk about her new film I Am Love. Which as films go is about as thought provoking and visually stunning as you can get. When it ended it took me a while to get my head around it and gather my thoughts, I’d definitely recommend. Tilda Swinton is an Oscar winning actress well known for her roles in both studio film and independent films.

How was your Italian going in to the project? Especially working with a completely Italian cast and crew.

Tilda Swinton: It was done imperious, I still am, to a certain extent one those lazy people that has lot’s of Italian friends but still speaks English. Things slow down when I speak Italian. Also you have to remember, we had worked on the project for so long, we had all become apart of the film, so I didn’t feel like an outsider with an Italian cast, we had worked on the film for 7 years, we had become a family you could say. I found it fine.

So many senses are being engaged when watching the film, for example when your in the hills I actually feel the heat, it works on so many levels, how hard is that to achieve?

Tilda Swinton: I would say that was very much apart of the project from the beginning, the idea of sensational cinema that occupies space,. Me and Luca (the director) had talked about that for along time now. Not a narrative that is driven by dialogue, but by their relationship with temperature, their relationship with texture, all of that being captured cinematically, what might be called ‘pure cinema’, what we think of as the language of cinema – as opposed to the language of anything else. A large part of this discussion has always been our worship of the films of certain film-makers from the past – Hitchcock, Huston, Kubrick, for example – whose claim on the development of the cinematic language is unassailable: they pushed the form by using the form, as a toolkit, with real authority. With Hitchcock for example you could always feel the temperature of the room in his film.

I felt your character was very trapped, what did you think of her yourself?

Tilda Swinton: I don’t actually feel she thinks she’s trapped, she’s aware she is unfulfilled. There isn’t a moral message with the film, I would find it unfair to give my opinion on the film because that would take away from the viewers. One of the great things that film does is it gives the viewer ownership, I wouldn’t like to say there’s a moral message because that will take away from people thinking it’s their film. I would say the film is about nature, human nature and change.

As a producer from the beginning how did your role change with that, as an actor and producer.

Tilda Swinton: Honestly with this film I am out there as a producer but I have done the same work I’ve done with most of my working life, I’m not officially a producer with a lot of my films but I do a lot of the work a producer does. I love collaborating and working with the film makers, it would be more exotic to take a pay cheque and just play but I love the collaboration side of film making. I only really go into studio films with people I really like, they may not be people I’ve known for 20 years but they are always with people I really like, the work is different because I don’t have to travel around the world trying to make money for the film.

Seeing as the film took so long to complete, has the final film exceed your original expectations?

Tilda Swinton: It sounds like a terrible thing to say but it’s really exactly what we wanted to make, what I hoped we’d make. It wasn’t always easy, because we set out to do something that was such a overreach of what we were being told we could do. It was pretty much exactly what we were looking for.