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13 Things You Want To Know About Tilda Swinton

by Peter Knegt (May 7, 2009)
13 Things You Want To Know About Tilda Swinton
Tilda Swinton with John Cameron Mitchell at the Apple Store in SoHo last week. Photo by Peter Knegt.

Last week in New York, actress Tilda Swinton headed to the Apple Store in SoHo to bring her unparalleled stage presence to indieWIRE and Apple’s Filmmaker Talks.  In a lively conversation with director John Cameron Mitchell (“Hedwig and the Angry Inch”), Swinton discussed her latest film, Erick Zonca’s “Julia,” in which she plays a strung out, manipulative alcoholic who decides to kidnap a young boy.  And as truly entertaining as the “Julia”-specific parts of the conversation were, it would be unfair to deny you the many other Tilda tidbits that came out during the hour-long talk.  So here, in no particular order, are the many facts that we learned about Ms. Swinton that night:

1. She doesn’t really drink.

“I do try,” she said. “It doesn’t really work. I either go to sleep or throw up. But when I came to do all the drunk stuff [in “Julia] I was a little hesitant, until I realized I’ve actually been pretending to be drunk for most of my adult life. I’m the one with all my drunk friends who’s not really drunk, but having just as good - or possibly better a time.  And then driving them home. And letting the police in. And turning the music down.”

2. She and “Julia” director Erick Zonca met when they both tried to break into a Cannes dinner with a fire extinguisher.

“I met him years ago, five years ago, or maybe longer, in Cannes,” she recalled. “We were both involved in vaguely official ways in the closing night celebrations. He was on the short film jury, and I was giving a prize. And we both had, therefore, absolute reason to be at the closing night dinner. And we were both shut out for some reason. We weren’t ejected, we just never got in… So we became really quite involved in this whole drama of trying to get in. It involved a fire extinguisher at one point, trying to get through a window. It was ridiculous. I - of course - was not drunk. He definitely was. I remember hearing much later through a mutual friend, ‘Erick Zonca is developing a film for you.’ And I thought, ‘well that is insane, because the guy doesn’t know me, and was drunk.’”

3. John Cameron Mitchell’s aunt lives in Tilda’s hometown, Nairn, in the far north of Scotland

“I saw her last Friday,” she said to Mitchell after blowing him a kiss to give to his aunt the next time he saw her.

4. She has her own film festival in said town (alright, you probably knew this, but her explanations of it are endlessly amusing).

“There is no cinema other than a multiplex,” she explained. “It’s half an hour away and it shows ‘Harry Potter’ pretty endlessly. There is a high street with all sorts of little shops closing down all the time, or being turned into charity shops. I was walking down the street one day and I saw the old Bingo Hall was up for rent. And for some insane reason I decided what I had to do that afternoon was to rent it.”

Swinton rented it, and had her first festival - “The Ballerina Ballroom Cinema of Dreams” - last August. “It was entirely intended as a family affair,” she said. “My friend Mark Cousins and I, and my children who are eleven and extremely cineastic, put together a list of our favorite DVDs. We were fortunate enough to have a friend in Berlin who lent us an amazing digital projector, and we put on this little ramshackle film festival. And it became a kind of international event… It was sold out. People came from all over Europe. People came from Australia. Somebody came from Papua New Guinea. And even more amazing - one evening, Kenneth Anger turned up! It was bizarre!”

5. The festival has since travelled to Beijing.

“As a result [of last year], the Scottish government asked us to make a Scottish version in Beijing,” Swinton said, laughing. “Which we did last month! We went to Beijing and we took over this perfectly regular cinema and dressed it up as a Highland Forest and we played our favorite Scottish films. Everybody sat on bean bags.”

6. And the next one in Scotland is going to be mobile.

“Unfortunately, our bingo hall is [no more],” she said. “Somebody bought a house behind it. And said they didn’t want us to do it again because our fire exits - in the event of a fire - would go out onto their drive. But we decided to make homelessness our friend, and we rented the screen machine, which is a mobile cinema.”

Swinton and company will start on a street in Nairn, then show a film on a moving ferry boat, and then patrons will camp outside (showing “Sullivan’s Travels”) with Swinton and the screen machine.

 
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posted on May 7, 2009
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