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- [00:00]
Tilda Swinton
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- [00:30]
David Marchese
From the new York Times, this is the interview. I'm David Marchese. Unexpected connections sometimes arise in this job. As it happens, I had two of them with this week's guest, the Academy Award winning actress Tilda Swinton. Both of them shaped my feeling about the conversation you're about to hear, though in very different ways. Let me tell you about the first one in a book of sketches by the British writer John Berger called Bento's Sketchbook. One drawing has always mesmerized me. It's of an androgynous face, almost alien, and it exudes this deeply human curiosity and compassion. That sketch is labeled simply Tilda. I hadn't really thought about who it was based on until that is when, in preparation for my interview with Swinton, I watched a documentary she co directed about Berger. In it, she mentioned Bento's Sketchbook and a light bulb went on. Despite being a longtime admirer of that sketch and Swinton's acting, I never put together that I'd been entranced by the same person the whole time. I couldn't help but take that as a good omen for the interview. The second connection was tougher to interpret. You might remember that my last interview was with a doctor about medical aid and dying, a subject that I've had recent personal experience with. Swinton's upcoming film the Room Next Door, directed by Pedro Almodovar, is about, and I swear I didn't know this ahead of time, an eerily similar topic. In the movie, Swinton plays a woman named Martha who asks her friend Ingrid, played by Julianne Moore, to support her decision to die by suicide after becoming terminally ill. I would have felt phony or disingenuous not to share this coincidence with Swinton, but I can't say I was exactly eager to explore it either. She, as it turns out, felt otherwise. Here's my interview with Tilda Swinton. Your new movie, the Room Next Door, is based on a great novel by Sigrid Nunez called what are you going through? Yes, and that novel takes its title from a quote by the French philosopher Simone Vale, which Is the love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him, what are you going through? So let me ask you in the Simone Weill sense of the question, what are you going through?
- [02:53]
Tilda Swinton
I'm enjoying right now the attention to that question and the fact that our film puts that question into the air. The idea of bearing witness and the question of what is friendship? But even more than friendship, what is it to coexist? What is it to not look away? I think of it actually as a political film because of that question, that it just. It's like a balloon that we launched above people's heads. How is it possible to coexist? And how is it possible to bear witness?
- [03:33]
David Marchese
I have some questions about how people might think about that, but I want to preface them by sharing what I hope is sort of a morbidly humorous anecdote related to the film.
- [03:45]
Tilda Swinton
Sounds good.
- [03:46]
David Marchese
We'll see. We'll see. So the last interview I did was with a doctor in Canada who performs medical assistance in dying. She helps people to die. And the occasion of doing that interview was my mother's. Haven't gone through that process earlier this year. So it's kind of a heavy interview for me. And then afterwards, the opportunity arose to interview you. And I thought, oh, oh, great, I love Tilda Swinton's movies. And then I saw you were doing the director of the Room Next Door is Almodovar. And I thought again, oh, I love the exuberance of his work. This will be great. So then I.
- [04:23]
Tilda Swinton
It'll be a laugh.
- [04:24]
David Marchese
I went to the screening, you know, I got a popcorn. You know, I got my Diet Coke from a soda fountain, which is this guilty pleasure of mine. I even got some M and Ms. I get down to my seat.
- [04:34]
Tilda Swinton
So good.
- [04:34]
David Marchese
I'm feeling good. I'm sitting there, ready, and within a few minutes, it dawns on me that your. Your movie is about assisted suicide. So thank you, Tilda.
- [04:42]
Tilda Swinton
Welcome. And I have to ask you, how did you feel at the end when you stood up and there were MMs all around your feet and you had a sugar rush headache? Because what you've described is quite a banquet of experience. Your experience with your mother, your experience with this doctor, and then to see a piece of art that's also swimming in the same material. How did you feel in relation to the other two experiences?
- [05:17]
David Marchese
Oh, boy. I felt, well, sort of like I was suggesting. I was not immediately jazzed to be made to revisit my emotions so soon, but I also felt Glad that the subject was being treated in an emotionally truthful way. And then I have to say, and I really am not just saying this because I'm talking to you now, I did feel some catharsis in sort of revisiting the emotions through having seen them depicted in the film. How does that ring for you?
- [05:55]
Tilda Swinton
I'm really pleased to hear that. I mean, I think the reason I ask the question is that I'm thinking of what you just said, which is such a particular experience that you had to come to a piece of art, having been through the real lived experience with your mother, which is particularly piquant, can we say? So there's that. Which we can unpack in a minute if we want to, or maybe another time when we speak.
- [06:24]
David Marchese
I'm sure the audience has had enough of me being upset about my mother, but I'll move on.
- [06:28]
Tilda Swinton
Well, you know what? Here's the thing, David. You know, moving on is, I think, in many ways, grossly overrated.
- [06:35]
David Marchese
Can I ask you, because I know that you've had experiences somewhat similar to the experience depicted in the film. You have been with people near the end. Can you tell me about your experience with that and how that may have made its way into the film?
- [06:55]
Tilda Swinton
Yes, it's an enormous part of what I want to talk to you about, because it is the reason that this film is so important to me. I have spent much of the last 15 years in the Ingrid position, naming the person that Julianne Moore plays. And it's felt like that on almost all occasions to both of my parents, to the father of my children and many other friends. But it's also something that has been in my lived experience since I was quite a young person. I mean, my first Martha was Derek Jarman. Derek Jarman, when I was 33, died. He was the first person who I knew very closely and lived alongside very, very tightly, who got very ill, first of all with HIV in 1988, 1989, and then died in 94. After those years that we, for those of us who had that secondhand experience, that witness experience, know, was a pretty tortuous journey. He was the first person that I met who was looking down the barrel and did not look away. And I was very much in the Ingrid position. The person that Julianne Moore plays is really frightened. I was that person. I knew that life, mortal life, comes to an end. But I always feel that immortality and mortality are basically the same thing. But what Derek modeled for me was something that has really influenced my perspective.
- [08:39]
Unknown
On the whole charade.
- [08:41]
Tilda Swinton
If you like, his absolute refusal to look away. There was a sort of exhilaration for him to have the limit of his life made clear to him. He was almost gleeful. And he just drove into the curve and he became sort of enlivened by it. And I would say that the last few years of his life, notwithstanding the illness and the pain and suffering that he went through on a physical level was, you know, I think he said, were some of the most joyful years of his life. And I felt what I witnessed was someone who just made his dying alive. It was entirely lived. And his death was not interesting.
- [09:39]
David Marchese
What do you mean?
- [09:40]
Tilda Swinton
There's nothing interesting about death. It's just. We just stopped. For me personally, death itself, you know, is not the star of the show. The dying is the interesting bit. And how do we die?
- [09:52]
David Marchese
You said immortality and mortality, for you, are the same thing. What do you mean?
- [09:57]
Tilda Swinton
None of us are getting out of here alive. It's not just unlucky people who die. It's every living creature, and that's what life is. It's so banal to have to say this, but one does have to say it because there's so much denial around it, and I've heard so many people who are living with a cancer that is finally going to take them away that there is a sort of vernacular around this sort of battle terminology. And, you know, you're either a winner or you're a loser, or you. It's all about fighting. And it's such a distraction. It's such a red herring, that attitude, because it brings with it the concept that we might win. It's like.
- [10:40]
David Marchese
Well, also, the flip side is, as if somebody who loses didn't fight hard enough, which. It's sort of an insult, but more.
- [10:48]
Tilda Swinton
Than an insult, I agree with you. It's an insult and it's just a waste because that's not the point of being alive. The point of being alive is that we know it's limited and there's no magic. There's no rabbit up your sleeve that you can pull. I remember when I was with my mother beside my mother when she was d. And I found that, you know, borderline traumatic, the fact that there was nothing that could be done. And I remember sitting there thinking, is there no mortality police we can call?
- [11:21]
David Marchese
You mean to stop it from happening.
- [11:23]
Tilda Swinton
To just like, this is not. This is barbaric, this death thing. Surely this is not right. And I remember feeling that with childbirth as well. I thought, what this is? What this is medieval pre Medieval torture. Can't we have fixed it by now? This brutality?
- [11:43]
David Marchese
You know, just hearing you talk about your mom. I've read you elsewhere refer to feeling like a foundling as a child. You know, sort of like you were being raised in a family that was not your own. And I know you grew up in a sort of aristocratic Scottish military family that could trace its ancestry back a thousand years. And I'm wondering if you can tell me more about why you felt sort of displaced as a child.
- [12:12]
Tilda Swinton
Well, it's so wonderful that you recount that back to me, David, because in the last few years, and it actually really started with my mother's departure, which was 12 years ago, my father died six years ago. I have realized that that was a complete ruse that I was led to believe. Not on my part, but I was sort of systematically misled.
- [12:33]
David Marchese
Misled about what? I'm not.
- [12:34]
Tilda Swinton
I'm not going about being an artist, being such a being, being such. And I've realized since my parents died that there are artists scattered through my family. My great grandmother was a great, great singer who had a salon with Gabrielle Faure in London. And she was a great singer of lieder in drawing rooms around the Belmond, around Europe. And she was born in St. Petersburg. She was a great muse of John Singer Sargent. There's an incredibly beautiful portrait of that hangs in the Art Institute in Chicago. And I'm privileged to say that I now have the custody of two extraordinary drawings by Sargent of her. They were very close friends. And one of these drawings was above the television in our family sitting room. And she used to look at me over the top of the television for all of my teenage years when we were watching Starsky and Hutch and Morecambe and Wise and all the good stuff. But she had her eye on me. And her artistic eminence was underplayed by my parents, who were not artists. And I don't think they quite understood it. I think they were rather. Honestly, I think they'd forgive me for saying, rather frightened of artists.
- [13:50]
David Marchese
Why?
- [13:51]
Tilda Swinton
I don't know. I think they. Why? I remember very distinctly a moment when my father was a. He once had his portrait painted. And a painter came to the house. And I was about nine, I suppose. And I remember this sort of frisson in the air. A painter is coming to paint, Daddy. And I remember when this man came, I didn't see him. I remember looking down a corridor knowing that a painting was taking place down this corridor and the light was on. And I knew that my father was in There with an artist, it's like being in there with a wild lion or something.
- [14:36]
David Marchese
But this is something that you came to understand in your family, that you did have artists in your lineage. Later, do you remember feeling as if you were consciously trying to rebel against your family by becoming an artist?
- [14:51]
Tilda Swinton
It didn't really feel like that to me. I just needed to find my company. And the first sort of practicing artist I ever met was a boy. I was at a girls school in Kent, and there was a boys school just down the road. And I met. I can't even remember how I met him, but I met this boy called Johnny who was at this boys school. And he was into art. And we. We just sort of. We were like art nerds. And I used to escape the school to meet him. And it wasn't remotely romantic, but it was very sexy, actually, because we were having these clandestine meetings, talking about art and showing each other our drawings. So it did have a kind of erotic feel. But we were not involved. But we. Or we weren't involved sexually. But there was this. I knew, and I must have been about 15, 16 when this happened. So I knew that there were other people and I just was looking for them and didn't find them for a long time. I mean, here's something that I was telling somebody yesterday at this school I was at. We weren't allowed music, which I think is a terrible abuse to a growing sensibility. And particularly in the 70s. I mean, think what we were missing out. But that's probably why they were doing it. They were sort of keeping us away from the Sex Pistols.
- [16:09]
David Marchese
And this is a boarding school. You went to a boarding school.
- [16:12]
Tilda Swinton
And I remember when I was about 13, seeing the COVID of Aladdin Sane.
- [16:17]
David Marchese
Oh, the David Bowie album? Yes, the famous one with the lightning bolt painted across his face with the gingery hair. Yeah. And this pearlescent little drop on the collarbone, right?
- [16:28]
Tilda Swinton
Yes, the mercury collarbone. And I recognized him. He looked so familiar to me. And I bought this record with my Christmas money. And I didn't have a turntable and I couldn't play it. Four years, I didn't hear Aladdin Sane. I owned it. I knew that it was something.
- [16:45]
David Marchese
Did you imagine what it sounded like?
- [16:48]
Tilda Swinton
Yes, I think I did. But it wasn't the point. It was the vision, not the sound at that point. And then, you know, of course, when I knew what it sounded like, I was hook, line and sinker. But anyway, the point being, it was the art.
- [17:03]
David Marchese
But initially you wanted to be a writer, and this is Something that I was particularly interested in from a young age. You were writing poetry and people were reading what you were doing, and then you got to Cambridge intending to be a writer, and then for some reason, around about the age of 21, you stopped writing.
- [17:20]
Tilda Swinton
Yeah.
- [17:21]
David Marchese
What happened?
- [17:23]
Tilda Swinton
It was really quite traumatic because it was what I was. It wasn't that I wanted to be a writer. I was a writer. And to a certain extent, David, and I have the nerve to say this to you, I still am. I find it difficult to describe myself really, internally as anything else. I certainly find it very difficult to describe myself as an actor. But I was a writer. I was a poet as a child, and I invested my energies in that. And I. For what it's worth, and it's worth a lot when you're young, I won poetry competitions and that's why I wanted to go to university. And I got my place, I'm embarrassed to say, at Cambridge, as a writer. I got an exhibition as a writer.
- [18:03]
David Marchese
What was your poetry about?
- [18:06]
Tilda Swinton
What was it about? It was about nature mainly, I think. There was one. I was looking for it the other day.
- [18:12]
David Marchese
Where is it?
- [18:13]
Tilda Swinton
One particular one which was about a swan that I found on the river at home. That one. Quite again, it's embarrassing to say. I mean, I was, whatever, 15, a kind of poetry prize, and I was very proud of that. And it was more than my identity, it was my solace. I was quite a solitary child and my writing was my. That was my company. It's important that I stress that, because when I stopped writing, and you ask why, I mean, that we could have a whole masterclass on that.
- [18:49]
David Marchese
Wait, but why? Why did it happen you.
- [18:51]
Tilda Swinton
I. Well, I could blame somebody. I could blame the program for just inundating me with too much. I'm not going to blame somebody. That's silly. I clearly didn't have the confidence to hold my flame in that headwind of other voices. And so when I got to Cambridge, there was a lot of teaching and there was a barrage of amazing noise, but it just. I was just. I was like a tortoise. I just put my head in. And so I was bereft. I was truly bereft at that time because I'd lost my company. And then I met friends, a couple of writers particularly, who were writing plays, and they said, come and, you know, be a part of this society. And I started being in the plays to hang out with them. So I was very much a performer by default and very much led by the company. And that's frankly that's all she wrote. That's the way I work.
- [19:54]
David Marchese
You know, I think when the Room Next Door was shown at the New York Film Festival, I think it was just last month, maybe there was a post screening talk and it was interrupted by pro Palestinian protesters. And you, I thought very gracefully in the moment, you know, said the protests were, I'm paraphrasing, uncomfortable, but necessary and also relevant to the film. Because Syria, Beirut, Gaza represent also the room next door. And the film is asking people to be in the room next door and to not look away from what's happening. And is it your hope that people would sort of make a political connection or have political connections spurred in that way by seeing the film?
- [20:39]
Tilda Swinton
I want to say I'm very glad you bring that up, actually, David, because I would like to make very clear that I did include in that list of places Moscow and Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. It's really important to me to mark that when it was reported, the names of those places was not mentioned. And I think we have to be very careful about that. Because if I was making a point at all, the point I was making is that we are absolutely in the room next door to everyone all the time. The film is about not looking away on the micro and a macro level. And it was a very interesting moment because here's the thing. Those people who came to make a statement in that room, I believe dignified that room. And it was of interest to me that Pedro and I, as Europeans in concert, immediately offered them our microphones. And that that was apparently remarkable. It's something to do with the fact that we are brought up in unarmed societies. I talked to my American friends afterwards and it never occurred to me that somebody coming in with a banner might be armed. But that's my privilege. But also the idea of being frightened of free speech is something we really have to take on. And it is true, I did say it is uncomfortable, but that doesn't mean it wasn't the right thing for them to do it and that we didn't welcome them. It's also true, by the way, we didn't hear what they wanted to say very well, because they were masked. And I would say to them next time, don't be masked, don't mask yourselves, because we want to hear what you have to say. And then you can say it clearly and own that presence, that statement, that gesture.
- [22:47]
David Marchese
And be clear, it's entirely possible that they were wearing masks for apprehensiveness about legal reprisals.
- [22:55]
Tilda Swinton
Well, that is the lead that I buried. You're absolutely right to mention that. And we need to look at that. Are we really content to live in a society where someone making a very valid point publicly in a completely appropriate setting is frightened that they will be persecuted for doing that essentially non threatening thing?
- [23:20]
David Marchese
Can I. You know, this is a question I don't know that I would have asked before November 5th and Donald Trump's election. But you know, you cut your teeth as an artist in the mid-80s, late-80s, working with Derek Jarman, sort of making avant garde queer cinema that he directed. And this is of course is happening, you know, in the middle of Margaret Thatcher's England, an extremely conservative time in that country's history. And I. Is there anything that you learned about being an artist in that cultural and political atmosphere that perhaps feels useful to you in this moment when right wing politics and right wing sentiment are again dominant?
- [24:13]
Tilda Swinton
Yes. I left London in 1997 when my children were born and went to live in the north of Scotland where I live. I've lived ever since. And I never went back to London for years, but I happened to be there last autumn for a few weeks. And it was really interesting because both of my children at the time were living in London and they were both 26, which was an age I was in London. And so I was very much awash with nostalgia and I was constantly making beautiful plans to meet up with my children. And I realized that every Saturday they were marching. And it was, it struck me so deeply that that's what I was doing when I was 26. Every Saturday we were marching for one thing or another, whether it was against the Iraq war, whether it was against clause 28, which was the repressive bill.
- [25:10]
David Marchese
That Thatcher was basically a homophobic bill.
- [25:12]
Tilda Swinton
A homophobic bill about. And we, we campaigned long and hard against that, or whether it was in support of the miners strike. We were constantly in Trafalgar Square and my children were too. And I realized that there was something in me that was grateful for them that they have this experience. I mean, long live the opportunity to assemble freely and to protest, especially as a young person, and especially as a young artist.
- [25:48]
David Marchese
But my question is in my mind more about the potential efficacy and utility of art when it comes to protests and in moving people's politics. How much of an effect do you think art can have in that regard?
- [26:05]
Tilda Swinton
Well, that brings me back to a question that I kind of asked you. Again, I probably wasn't clear right at the beginning of our conversation when you explained that you'd had These three experiences with the concept of death with dignity, the experience with your mother, the conversation with the doctor, and then seeing a piece of art, and I asked you a question and we went off another alley, so I'm asking it again. What do you think in terms of those three experiences? What did the art manage to do for you?
- [26:41]
David Marchese
Um, I think, you know, you. There are feelings I have, and to see them reflected in the art or even tested against the art tempers them with a flame. Sort of, you know, it's. I sort of walk away with the feelings and ideas more deeply held often for me. And I know this is not the question you ask, but I've become more. Much more skeptical over time that film or music or literature just can do more than galvanize that they can actually change feeling or precipitate a political feeling or idea that was not held in the person before. And what's your response to that?
- [27:26]
Tilda Swinton
I suggest that what art does, first of all, it offers us an opportunity to be quiet and to be still and not necessarily to go inward, but to allow in that gesture of stillness for the sort of reverberation of whatever we're witnessing to that a connection to form. So, for example, again, sorry to use the. Use the example of your three, your triptake of experiences around this material.
- [28:11]
David Marchese
Yeah, please.
- [28:12]
Tilda Swinton
Your experience with your mother, not to be reductive, was lived. And I imagine. I don't want to take any liberties here, but it's such a car crash, that experience. One's so in it and one doesn't know what one's doing, but one's in it and it's happening and it's crashing over your head and you're just staying alive and surviving it. I'm sorry if that doesn't sound representative.
- [28:36]
David Marchese
Slow motion car crash.
- [28:38]
Tilda Swinton
Slow motion car crash. Yeah, it's so true, but still, point being, there's nothing you can do. So that's an encounter with helplessness. Right. The actual lived experience is an encounter with helplessness and trying to survive it. Think, how can I bear this helplessness, this powerlessness? And then you do. And then your conversation with the Doctor. Again, I'm imagining I'm making this up now, but I imagine was intellectually very stimulating. You were talking about ideas, and then when you're sitting in the dark and you're watching a film, here is an opportunity for you to look on something being played out in front of you. You're seeing us playing it out in front of you. There's levels of distance which are very Soothing to the nervous system so you're not taken back into the ID state. You're able to observe, rather like in a meditation state. And then you can make these connections. I think the sort of superpower that art has is this distance that it affords us, this capacity to be still and to allow these resonances to arise from inside. So I think that we may encounter new thinking when we encounter art, but in order for it to really start to grow, it needs to connect with something inside you. And in the instance that you describe of your triptych experience, I think it's a great palate cleanser to go through a traumatic experience, to see it played out in the safe environment of, I hope, a movie theater in the dark with strangers, with fountain Diet Coke with a lot of Diet Coke and as many MMs as you can crunch into the carpet afterwards. That is the optimal experience. And that's when the connections do get made. So I agree with you.
- [30:42]
David Marchese
I don't mean to belabor this. It's just one thing I want to add to the politics and art conversation. And I realize I'm probably just a grouch about this now at this point, but I used to really feel like consuming art was sufficient when it came to forming a political identity and political engagement. And I just think over time, I think, oh, gosh, I should have spent a lot more time and energy out in the street and less time and energy in the theater or with headphones on. I realize I'm rambling now, but these are just things that I've been thinking about.
- [31:20]
Tilda Swinton
I'm liking everything you're saying, and I'm surfing the wave of it. It's not a ramble at all. It's great. It's so interesting, all of this, because I think what I feel like asking in response to your question or your remarks is, why do we have to choose? I mean, the real question is, who are we and how must we live? It's about the living. The living is the most important thing and in many ways the only thing. And I don't necessarily want to designate one thing as political activism and another thing as artistic practice and another thing as living your life. I mean, for me, there ain't no walls between any of them. But also, when I met Derek Jarman and the people with whom I worked in the first years of my life as a practicing artist, I wouldn't say I was taught any of this, but I was encouraged in this view and this perspective and this investment, because I would say that felt the same and the people that I first started working as an artist with, the life and the living of it was everything. So when we were working together and I worked with Derek Jarman for what, nine years before he died, the thing was that the films, I always say that the life and the conversation was the tree. And the films were like leaves. They just came out of the end of the branches. They grew out of the conversation and the conversation grew out of the life we were living. I remember Derek coming to me and I'm unapologetically talking about Derek a lot because he's the root of all of this for me and my experience with him. I remember him, he always used to go on Sundays, we used to go to Camden Market to shop in the, you know, bric brac. And I remember I met him for lunch one day after I couldn't go in the morning. And I went to his flat in Soho and he produced this incredibly beautiful piece of cream woven cloth, like really beautiful hand woven thing. I don't know where it had come from. And he said to me, I just bought this from an antique dealer in camden lock for £1,000 and I'm going to make a film out of it. And that film became the Garden, which is one of his masterpieces. But he bought the cloth first to be the Shroud of Christ at the beginning and the heart of this film. It was the buying of the cloth, the expenditure of £1,000, which was just beyond anything that any of us could afford, the investment. But it all started with going to Camden Lock on a Sunday morning. Does that explain the sort of attitude.
- [34:20]
David Marchese
The life came first, the life always.
- [34:23]
Tilda Swinton
Comes first, and the work comes out of the life. But here's another thing that I wanted to say. We could always pick this up tomorrow, but it's just again, like the leaf has come out of our conversation. David, I was thinking about what we were talking about just a beat before, about this resonance in the theater, that place of witness and that openness to resonance. And this is a huge thing I'm just about. This is a bombshell. I'm just going to lay it out.
- [34:53]
David Marchese
Just go for it.
- [34:54]
Tilda Swinton
The thing I want to talk about, and we'll talk about it tomorrow, is people's innate goodness. I wonder whether art isn't a call to our innate goodness and an opportunity to connect with that in the first instance, of course, the empathy machine that cinema in particular is. I mean, art is a massive empathy machine, but cinema in particular, that, you know, Eminem, Diet Coke, place in the dark, is an invitation to step into other people's shoes. I mean, it's such a massive gesture of agape, isn't it, that I wonder. This is I'm seeing you and raising you in your wondering. Okay? My wondering is about people's innate goodness. And since you mentioned November 5th and we've talked about the rise of the meanness of right wing politics, let's name it, let's use a word that is appropriate here, meanness of that across the planet. What oil might get through that grease? How might one be able to connect, reconnect with the innate goodness? And I don't want to assume that anybody else believes in innate goodness, but I'm declaring that I do. I do believe we were all little children, scared little animals once. All of us, including all of those people that we're thinking about. They were all little children once. And I don't know what happened to them to make them this mean, but we have to contact them somehow. We have to find a way of reconnecting with that.
- [36:49]
David Marchese
Tilda, I have lots of thoughts in response to that.
- [36:52]
Tilda Swinton
So it's can you sleep on them?
- [36:55]
David Marchese
I will sleep on them and we'll pick this back up tomorrow.
- [36:58]
Tilda Swinton
See you tomorrow. It's one of the most favorite things to say. I love saying see you tomorrow.
- [37:06]
David Marchese
After the break, I call Tilda Swinton back and she tells me why I should be less skeptical of the power of art.
- [37:13]
Unknown
There's this tendency in the far right to encourage us all to give up on human connection and entirely be self serving and cynical about the notion of connection, like they would love us to give up.
- [37:42]
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- [38:57]
David Marchese
This is the interview. I'm David Marchese. You know, so we'll get to where we left off with the question of art and human goodness.
- [39:08]
Unknown
Yes, art and human goodness. Good morning.
- [39:12]
David Marchese
Yeah, but I was hoping maybe to briefly travel down a couple other highways and byways first. Yeah, but, you know, I noticed that often in conversation, including in our conversation and in other interviews of yours that I've seen and read, you downplay the idea of yourself as an actor and you say, you know, you don't know anything about acting, you don't want to know anything about acting, but you've been acting extremely well and with obvious great care for a lifetime now. You haven't just Inspector Clouseaued your way into a successful career.
- [39:46]
Unknown
Great reference.
- [39:47]
Tilda Swinton
I love that.
- [39:48]
David Marchese
So why are you so invested in self deprecation when it comes to acting? It strikes me as a faint on some level, but I want to hear you explain it to me.
- [39:58]
Tilda Swinton
It strikes you as a feint. Yeah, it's just accuracy, David. I think it has something to do with the kind of.
- [40:07]
Unknown
My origin story. I never set out to be an actor. You are completely right. I have been what they call acting for quite a long time now. And whether it's well made or not is kind of not the point.
- [40:25]
Tilda Swinton
But I think I'm so aware that.
- [40:29]
Unknown
This endeavor, both being an actor and being seen to be an actor, is something that, as far as I can see, most people who undertake it take very, very seriously and expend a lot of energy in sort of preserving. And I would feel a fraud if I sort of made noises that implied that I was one of them. And I'm. I would rather get there first before somebody calls me a fraud. And the fact that I haven't stopped and I've continued to be invited into things means that it's not so bad that, you know, but. But being good is not really the point for me.
- [41:12]
David Marchese
It's interesting that you said you're not so concerned about being good. I'm thinking about that in contrast with perhaps how you felt about writing. And one of the ways that you put it was you didn't have the confidence to hold your flame in the headwinds. But why is your disposition towards acting different than your disposition towards writing?
- [41:36]
Unknown
Was, I suppose, off the top of my head, because, okay, this is actually a really important point, and maybe this makes it even clearer. I work as a performer, in concert, in communication, in conversation with my colleagues, and I write alone. And one of the things that keeps Attaching me to performing is the comradeship of the collective activity of it. And it seems to take more for me to sit and write alone. And I'm still waiting for the life to clear enough for there to be an actual sort of oasis in which I can do that. But I have been choosing. I don't want to sound like a victim of my own life, but I have been choosing to be work in conversation with other people. And I think when I hear and read what real actors talk about, they seem to talk a lot about existing alone and putting their work together by themselves. And that's, again, just not the way I work. I work entirely collectively.
- [42:54]
David Marchese
Can I wrench the conversation in a ridiculous direction just for a second?
- [42:59]
Tilda Swinton
Sounds good.
- [42:59]
David Marchese
Just because I'm a sucker for the paranormal. My understanding is you live in the Highlands of Scotland, not too far from Loch Ness.
- [43:09]
Unknown
Oh, very near Loch Ness.
- [43:11]
David Marchese
Have you. Have you ever seen any evidence of the monster?
- [43:14]
Unknown
I have seen evidence of a friend of mine who has lived in a static caravan beside Loch Ness for, oh, I think pretty much 20, maybe even 20 more years because he once saw the Loch Ness monster.
- [43:30]
David Marchese
He says he saw it.
- [43:31]
Unknown
He says he. He did see it.
- [43:33]
David Marchese
Well, he saw something and he lives.
- [43:35]
Unknown
There now, waiting for a second bite of the cherry. And he's very happy. And he makes little statues of the Loch Ness monster and sells them. And that's how he sustains himself while he's waiting. So that I do know. Yeah, Loch Ness is what. Why wouldn't one believe in the Loch Ness monster anyway? It's impossible to prove that there isn't one. It's rather like dinosaur civilizations. There is no proof that dinosaurs did not develop cell phone technology. There's no proof.
- [44:11]
David Marchese
No proof. Dinosaurs didn't create cell phones.
- [44:14]
Unknown
But hey, we have to keep open.
- [44:16]
David Marchese
We have to be open to the possibility of wonder.
- [44:19]
Unknown
We live in hope.
- [44:21]
David Marchese
We live in hope. So now I want to get back to where we ended before. Okay, so you raised the idea that, or you posed the question that art might be a call to our innate goodness. And I have a very hard time buying that notion. But I would very much like to be disabused of my skepticism around that. And I just think there is so much art, even great art, that speaks to the worst of humanity. You know, you could look at Leni Riefenstahl's films, you know, or the writing of Celine or a million other examples, and I don't see these things as having anything to do with innate goodness. I think maybe you could Say that the thing that art allows us to do is to tell the truth about humanity and show it in all its dimensions. But that's not quite the same thing as any sort of call to goodness. So tell me I'm wrong.
- [45:20]
Unknown
Okay. Can I just ask a question before.
- [45:24]
David Marchese
Of course.
- [45:25]
Unknown
Why do you have a gag reflex about the idea of innate goodness?
- [45:29]
David Marchese
Oh, I don't have an gagging point about the idea of innate goodness in general.
- [45:33]
Unknown
Okay.
- [45:33]
David Marchese
I think, you know, love is an innately good thing. I think, you know, you could say life is innately good. But I do find myself increasingly skeptical about the idea of art as being in any way inherently positive. If we accept that art can be positive, I don't understand how we could not accept that it can also be negative. I think there's something a little naively optimistic about the idea of art as innately good in any. Any form.
- [46:06]
Unknown
Okay. I think I want to move the goalpost a tiny bit.
- [46:09]
David Marchese
Yes.
- [46:10]
Unknown
Maybe I'm conflating truth telling and innate goodness. Maybe that's what I'm doing. Maybe that's the prism through which you could see what I'm trying to say. Okay, let's talk about Leni Riefenstahl for one second. The fact that watching Leni Riefenstahl's work and finding oneself stirred by it on any level, aesthetic, probably because she was a great aestheticist, that was her power.
- [46:37]
David Marchese
Yes.
- [46:38]
Unknown
To feel ourselves stirred by that is an opportunity for us to notice in ourselves the stirrings and notice in ourselves the dangers of those stirrings, and to just, as you say, truthfully assess and weigh up and learn about ourselves that we are susceptible so. And that noticing that capacity to be honest about our own susceptibility is, I'm stretching it now, a good thing, a healthy thing, to have that perspective. And so we might be enriched by that perspective. We might be. Become the stronger and the more socially responsible if we're aware. If we're just aware of our own vulnerabilities.
- [47:33]
Tilda Swinton
I don't know. Does that make any sense?
- [47:35]
David Marchese
It does make sense. This is related. I think you pointed to a meanness in the world that feels ascendant at this moment. And you suggested that the purveyors of that meanness, they too were once vulnerable little children, and, well, still are.
- [47:55]
Unknown
Still are, whether they tell us or not.
- [47:57]
David Marchese
And I'm just not sure what to do with that connection. Like, so the awareness of those two things, the meanness in the world, and that the people who are being mean still are vulnerable little children could elicit what productive response.
- [48:16]
Unknown
I suppose it's just about trying to not give up on connection, the possibility of connection between, between people and the thing that's so upsetting, deeply upsetting on a societal level and on a personal level about the predicament in which we find ourselves globally now where there's this tendency in the far right to encourage us all to give up on human connection and entirely be self serving and cynical about the notion of connection. They would love us to give up. They would love us to give up on trying to reach some kind of agreement. I mean, we just have to find agreements now.
- [49:02]
Tilda Swinton
That's what we have to focus on.
- [49:04]
Unknown
What can we agree on? I can tell you, and he may even read this, but if I ever met your incoming president, there is something I would really love to talk to him about, which is having a Scottish mother, having a mother from the Isle of Lewis. I know the Hebrides very well. That's something that I can go towards him on.
- [49:29]
David Marchese
What would you want to talk to him about?
- [49:31]
Tilda Swinton
That I'd like.
- [49:32]
Unknown
I want to hear.
- [49:33]
Tilda Swinton
I want to hear about her.
- [49:34]
Unknown
I'm very curious about her, aren't you?
- [49:39]
David Marchese
Extremely curious. I have to say I think the odds of President Trump clicking on the Tilda Swinton interview are low. But you never know.
- [49:48]
Tilda Swinton
You do yourself down.
- [49:49]
Unknown
David, I'm sure he's a fan of you.
- [49:51]
David Marchese
Yeah. Who knows? Who knows? You know, it has struck me in speaking with you that the way you talk about your development as an artist and even your life, you just make it sound contingent. You know, you met these writers, you know, you happened to, you wound up in Derek Jarman's orbit and of course everyone's life is rooted in contingency, but there has to have been real intention in your life. And I'm wondering, at the risk of sounding like a, you know, like I'm pumping you for self help tips or something like that, what advice might you have for how to at least increase the possibility that someone might get the life they want?
- [50:34]
Unknown
Well, I'll tell you a little something and then we'll, we'll figure out why I want to tell you it, because it might. See if it means anything that might answer your question. I do remember a moment in my very young life which says a lot about the kind of milieu in which I grew up. I remember when I was really young and my youngest brother was a baby in arms, so I can't have been older than five in the family church, the Kirk, where my family would go on Sundays our family have a loft, a separate loft which sits above everybody else and looks down. And I remember sitting up there one Sunday and looking down and seeing the people that I had been playing with the day before on Saturday. And I remember asking my mother why were we sitting upstairs and we weren't sitting downstairs. And I remember to this day the.
- [51:33]
Tilda Swinton
Look on her face.
- [51:34]
Unknown
She could not come up with an answer. And I noticed two things. First of all that my brothers didn't ask this question. I love them, they're sentient beings, but they did not ask that question. I was the only one. And the other thing that I noticed since is that no one has ever come up with a good answer. So the reason I tell you that story is the quest for connection was always there in me, is still there in me. Connection is what I'm driven by and I was lucky enough to notice it when I was sub 6. And so I'm quite a simple animal, I think. I think I can hold one idea. So here's my answer to your question. Figuring out what your idea is, what your original setting, what your factory setting is, is probably a good place to start to know oneself and to then when you do find your original setting, to honor it and try not to betray it and enjoy. Enjoy the quest.
- [52:52]
David Marchese
That's Tilda Swinton. Her new movie, the Room Next Door, will be in select theaters on December 20th and opens nationwide January 17th. This conversation was produced by Seth Kelly and was edited by Annabelle Bacon, mixing by Afim Shapiro, original music by Dan Powell and Marian Lozano photography by Devin Yalkin. Our senior booker is Priya Mathew and Wyatt Orme is our producer. Our executive producer is Alison Benedict. Special thanks to Rory Walsh, Renon Borelli, Jeffrey Miranda, Maddie Masiello, Jake Silverstein, Paula Schumann, and Sam Dolnick. If you like what you're hearing, follow or subscribe to the interview wherever you get your podcasts. To read or listen to any of our conversations, you can always go to nytimes.com theinterview and you can email us anytime@theinterviews.com Next week, Lulu talks to travel expert Rick Steves about the joy of discovering new places and why he sometimes decides to keep those discoveries to himself.
- [53:56]
Tilda Swinton
Occasionally I find a place that cannot handle the crowds and I will not write it up. You know, it's just too fragile. Occasionally I find a place that doesn't want the crowds.
- [54:06]
David Marchese
That's pretty rare, to be honest. And I don't write it up because.
- [54:09]
Tilda Swinton
I don't want to send people to a place where they're not welcome.
- [54:13]
David Marchese
I'm David Marchese and this is the interview from the New York Times.
- [54:27]
Unknown
This podcast is supported by Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Hey, stop what you're doing right now and listen up. More than 2 million patients a year rely on Planned Parenthood health centers for services like STI testing and treatment, birth control, abortion and more. It is essential life saving, life changing health care. Planned Parenthood needs your help to protect access to health care. Donate today@plannedparenthood.org protective.