Tilda Swinton (as Martha)
Appearances
Fresh Air
Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
They were losing their insurance. There were talks about putting people with HIV virus on sort of leper colony islands offshore.
Fresh Air
Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
They were losing, families were disowning them, all sorts of things were happening. Not everybody, of course, but there were these tortuous scenarios that came with the fear around this illness and the fear being born by ignorance, of course, as ever.
Fresh Air
Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
And he was someone who was a public figure who stepped right into that zone, right into that light and brought light onto that fear and owned it and said, yes, I am HIV positive and had another five years of life and filmmaking, by the way, until he finally left the building in 1994. And I was what I would call in the Ingrid position, in the position of the
Fresh Air
Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
person who Julianne Moore plays in this film. I was young. I was, whatever, 27. And I was very frightened. I was ignorant. I hadn't known, apart from my grandparents, I hadn't been close to anybody who had died and knew nothing, hadn't at that point reflected on death at all, particularly, and was very, very frightened. And he figured for me an attitude to mortality that
Fresh Air
Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
which has informed my entire life since and definitely my portrayal of Martha. He just faced it down. And I remember this one particular moment when we were in the hospital and he was being very pragmatic and saying to me, right now, Tilda, I want to talk about this.
Fresh Air
Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
I want to leave this cottage to you and I want this to happen and I want you to do this with the paintings because I was sort of an heir to him. And I felt myself crying. I felt these tears welling up. And he took one look at me and said, nope. No, can't do this. Can't do this. If you're going to do that, can't do it. Sorry. And I was so challenged by that because it felt very brusque.
Fresh Air
Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
It felt very tough of him. But now I understand what he was doing. He was basically saying to me, I need something from you. And if you are not clear to give it to me right now, can you just absent yourself, work your head out and come back and be that person for me that I need you to be? Which I was able to do.
Fresh Air
Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
I was able to understand the message, you know, go away, deal with my own feelings and then come back and learn how to be. that person who Ingrid learns to be for Martha in our film.
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Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
And what he needed and what Martha in our film needs and what everybody that I've had the privilege to sit beside since has needed is a witness, somebody who is just there, who doesn't try and mess with the situation, who doesn't try and mend it, who is somehow apprised of and reconciled to a kind of powerlessness. But for the person watching... It's almost unbearable at times.
Fresh Air
Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
And that's why I understand now why people have said to me in the past, it's worse for you. Because we sit there. We can't believe there's nothing we can do to help. We're hale and hearty. And we are able to do things in the world that this person who's ailing can't necessarily do. And yet we can't help. It's challenging to a degree.
Fresh Air
Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
And that's the grace that that person, the person in the Ingrid position, the bystander, the witness. needs to really kind of chow down the acceptance of that powerlessness.
Fresh Air
Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
You know, interestingly enough, we didn't talk about anything explicitly, and we didn't need any kind of reconciliation, my parents and I. But we did have – and this is a truly extraordinary treasure in my life – We did have these moments, not moments, but these weeks together, in my father's case, several years, of togetherness that I didn't necessarily see coming when I was younger.
Fresh Air
Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
I never thought that I would be able to look after my mother as a child, as one of my own children, and bathe her and... and be her carer, as I was for the last eight weeks of her life. She was diagnosed with cancer, sort of stage four cancer, very suddenly, and was given weeks to live. She actually lived for four months, and I was able to look after her.
Fresh Air
Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
I was working for the first two months, and I had to pop back and forth. But when I came back to see her, asked her if she wanted me to take her home from the hospital she was in, she said yes, and I took her home and looked after her myself. And to look after her in the way that I... I was able to, such an amazing thing. I never could have seen it in my stars.
Fresh Air
Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
And we never talked about anything explicitly, but just that and her giving herself over to my care was such a beautiful gesture and so generous of her because I treasure it now. And then my father, who was always such a one-man dog, he was devoted to my mother and a little distant with his children afterwards. And I never thought I'd get a look in.
Fresh Air
Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
And if my father had died first, I don't think I would have known him half as well as I do now. But when my mother departed, he was so bereft and for a couple of years really, really struggling. And I was able to step in and look after him. And that's beyond rubies to have a completely transformed relationship to one's parent because they're then in... A clarified state.
Fresh Air
Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
I wouldn't say a weakened state. I don't believe it is a weaker state. I think it's just clearer. And he was free to be as tender and as vulnerable as he was in a way that he just stopped fighting being as vulnerable as we all are. Scared little animals. He was able to be that. And that was such a beautiful thing to share in and support him in. So, yeah. But we never talked about any of it.
Fresh Air
Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
I mean, there was one moment my mum was... And this is one of the things, you know, in my inner monologue or rather dialogue with her, I... I want her to see this film so much, The Room Next Door, because I remember in her last weeks, she was so impatient.
Fresh Air
Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
She was on morphine drivers in a hospital bed in a drawing room at home, surrounded by dogs and flowers and books and us and music and my father at the end of the bed reading The Telegraph. So she was very comfy and cosy and it was pretty much the nicest place she could have been for those last weeks. But she was really impatient. Her mind was still as sharp as a tack.
Fresh Air
Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
And I remember one day, about a week before she died, her doctor coming as she came pretty much every day, local doctor, wonderful GP. And my mother saying, is there nothing we can do? And I remember my father kind of twitching the paper and not looking over the top of it. And I was doing my tapestry beside her. And the doctor said, well, I mean, yeah, it's amazing.
Fresh Air
Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
You've obviously got a very strong heart. I don't know why you're still around. And my mother said, can't we do something? And the doctor said, well, yeah, you were put on those statins because you had that stroke and maybe we could take those off. Warfarin or whatever. And my mother said, could we? And she was like a child at Christmas. She said, do you think we could? That would be wonderful.
Fresh Air
Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
Turned to me, said, wouldn't that be wonderful? That was a Martha moment, you know. If she'd been able to take a pill then, she would have. She was ready. She wanted to go. And she only had another week to go, and it was relatively graceful. She just sort of fell asleep and slept for several days. And then at the very last minute...
Fresh Air
Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
opened her eyes and looked at me and took a last breath and went. As very often happens, there's a sort of slight rallying, which is a beautiful thing to witness.
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Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
For her and for you. Truly, truly. I'm very grateful for both of them, that they had really graceful departures.
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Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
It's so funny, Terry, because the more and more I live, the more I think that I'm going right down the middle of the family tendency, actually. When I think of comradeship, when I think of, you know, the project, when I think of, you know, the kind of trench warfare of independent filmmaking, when I think of walkie-talkies, when I think of, you know... kind of packed lunches in dark fields.
Fresh Air
Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
I have a brother who was a soldier for many years and we've always compared notes and I think we live very similar lives, in fact, and less perilous to make films, but for sure. But you're right, there is a chain of command that I know that that soldiers live and die by, that we don't necessarily, certainly not maybe in studio filmmaking more. Maybe that's more the hard army.
Fresh Air
Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
But, yeah, in the world of filmmaking that I sprung out of, it's a collective, and that's not necessarily what an army is. Yeah, I think in that sense, yes, I did...
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Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
branch out from the family trade but having said that you know there is this very strange epiphany in my recent years that I was always told by my parents that I was a bit of a strange thing and that there were no artists in our family but I've recently discovered since they died I may say that our family tree is littered with artists and yeah I'm not in fact an apple falling that far from the tree at all
Fresh Air
Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
No, no, no. You are absolutely right. Singularly inspired and informed by the uniforms. In fact... I'm making a piece of work now about that very thing, how central my response to my father and my grandfather's uniforms has been. I used to watch my parents getting dressed up to go out to grand parties and my mother would wear some really nice silk dress and look beautiful.
Fresh Air
Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
But my father had all the glamour. He had, you know, the gold frogging and the medals and And those black trousers with the scarlet stripe down the side. Scarlet. I mean, it occurred to me the other day. Here I am working with Pedro Almodovar, who's, you know, works in scarlet. He is one of the great artists who work in scarlet.
Fresh Air
Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
And scarlet has always really meant something as a child of, you know, Scottish culture. military family. Scarlet is an important thing for the British Army. And yeah, it's hugely important. And I have always been truly, sincerely and seriously interested in clothes and what they do for us and to us. I was one of four, but I have three brothers, no sisters. And I didn't have many dresses.
Fresh Air
Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
I wore a lot of hand-me-downs as the third child often does, and they were boys' clothes. And, you know, nothing's different. I still wear boys' clothes. They are, you know, usually the most comfortable things to wear for me.
Fresh Air
Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
But the fact that I can wear both, and I encourage everybody to wear both, by the way, which is why it's so important for people to understand that clothes are just choices and and we can wear whatever we want and choose our identity every morning or every hour. That aspect of clothing has always been really important for me. I love it.
Fresh Air
Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
I think you've just described your interest in androgynous style. I don't even know that it's androgynous. I just feel that it's about being boundaryless. And you described, you know, with certain accuracy that Orlando, the Virginia Woolf novel and the film that we made in 1992 is about gender. I would suggest it's not only about gender.
Fresh Air
Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
It's sort of glancingly about gender, but it's really more about boundaries. It's about classlessness. It's about internationalism. It's about someone who's immortal, by the way. And that feeling of endless possibility, that's something that really fuels my motor. And I've always had that sense that, you know, why limit yourself? Why say yes? I'm going to be this kind of woman.
Fresh Air
Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
I'm going to dress only like this. I'm going to be this kind of man. I'm going to dress and behave only like this. It's such a waste. You know, we don't feel that when we're children. I think maybe I had a very light-filled childhood before I went to boarding school when I was 10.
Fresh Air
Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
I think that during those first 10 years I must have felt, and I'm only guessing at this, but I must have had a sort of bedrock of... of possibility. And I really loved it. And I would like to keep it going in my life. And we all knew it when we were little. We could dress up as anything, a dog or a dinosaur, an old lady, just get a stick and bend over. There's no great miracle to it.
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Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
And we somehow, as we get older, we're encouraged to lose that sense of possibility and stick to our guns and And then if we want to change, it's some massive trauma to society. You know, the whole idea of transitioning being terribly, you know, much other people's business, which, of course, it palpably is not. It is nobody's business than the person whose life is being informed by it.
Fresh Air
Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
I was named queer by my queer colleagues when I lived amongst them when I first became an artist in the 80s. We were all queer, meaning that we were living in a world that felt self-determining for us and felt very much at odds with what we call the straight world, the square world, which was not necessarily to do with, you know, heterosexuality or homosexuality.
Fresh Air
Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
It was to do with an attitude of mind and an attitude of living. And so I was named, it's not that I named myself particularly, but I was named as a as a queer fish. We were queer fish. And I'm proud to continue to be a queer fish. And I've been in very happy and loving relationships with men for the last, whatever, 30 years with my children's beloved father, John Byrne, who died last year.
Fresh Air
Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
Oh, I'm so sorry. I didn't know that. He's one of my mothers, my teachers. Yeah, he went last year. But he and I had these miraculous children. And then I've been with Sandra for 20 years, and we're very happy, but we're all queer.
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Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
Being queer, being odd, being quiet, being shy, being from Scotland. This was a very...
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Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
reductive English girls private boarding school and of course the terrible things which we now know if we are sentient adults is that if you take a bunch of children and we were children I was 10 I was the youngest they were mostly 11 but if you take a bunch of children from 11 to 17 and you take them away from their families you know there's a lot of grief there and so they act out some of them act out by bullying others and some of them act out by just
Fresh Air
Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
Being quiet, which I did, I was just incredibly quiet sitting in the corner. The wonderful thing is there was somebody else sitting in the corner and that was Joanna Hogg. And she and I met on the first day of school. I was 10, she was 11. And she and I have been friends ever since and have become very close collaborators now. She's a great filmmaker.
Fresh Air
Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
And she was the first filmmaker I worked with on her student film in 1986. And we made the souvenir films together with my own daughter and then the Eternal Daughter that I was talking about earlier, where I play both the mother and the daughter. So that was one blessing in the heart of that experience. And that was Joanna.
Fresh Air
Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
Oh, it was an absolute coup de foudre when I read that script, because it spoke to my great passion for classic Hollywood films. You know, it felt like I was reading a Billy Wilder script or a Joseph Mankiewicz script. I mean, it felt so pure and beautifully wrought. I mean, Tony Gilroy is a master. I mean, he's up there. He's up there with those great screenwriters.
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Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
He's, you know, Preston Sturgis. I mean, it felt like gold. And so it is. It continues to be a golden classic Hollywood film.
Fresh Air
Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
Well, it's one of the glorious things about working with Pedro Almodovar because you know that Alberto Iglesias is going to be there with you. And we didn't have the score before when we were shooting, but we knew we would. And so I did a certain amount of imagining when we were shooting what the music might be. But when I finally saw it, I was so moved.
Fresh Air
Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
Thank you so much, Terry. It's such a pleasure to be here and Happy New Year to everybody.
Fresh Air
Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
I mean, it is, as anybody listening to that can attest, incredibly moving. And there's something about the cello, which I find so sensitive to the film. It's like, I don't know, I haven't talked to Alberto about it specifically, but it feels like... There's this pulse of intrigue in that music. It's like something's going to happen. It's like a secret in the middle of it.
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Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
Like, what's going to happen? And there's the cello. It's like a sort of bass note. It's almost like saying to us, you know what? It's going to be quite heavy. Just keep breathing. And then you've got the strings saying it's also going to be quite light. There's going to be something to amuse you along the way. But we're just going to get started. through it.
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Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
It's such beautiful and brilliant music. He's an extraordinary composer. And the marriage of the two of them is, you know, unparalleled, I think, in current cinema. I mean, it brings to the fore the ways in which Pedro is a poet. His film is poetry. When people talk about the language in the film, and I know that for some English speaking audiences, it may seem a
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Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
And there's a moment when you start watching the film and you go, OK, so people are speaking in a slightly formal way. This is no mumble poor. This is not vernacular in a sort of modern American idiom, even though we're set in America. That is the way he writes. He writes in a sort of slightly poetic style. I always say he writes in high heels and he does it even in Spanish.
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Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
People don't speak Spanish in the way that people speak Spanish in his Spanish films and they don't really speak English in the way that they speak English in his films. And I think one of the reasons he writes that way is because he knows that Alberto Iglesias is going to be there with the poetry of the music underneath and around. It's like he's dealing with these very clear gems.
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Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
And Alberto is making the setting for the piece of jewelry. But that means that Pedro can keep everything very clean and crisp and clear and sometimes a little bit hard. But that's because he knows he's got this sort of amniotic fluid of Alberto Iglesias all around the edges. It's so beautiful.
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Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
Yeah, yeah. It is a tango. Exactly right, Terry. It is a tango. And you know what? It takes two to tango. And that's what this film is about. It's about a partnership. It's about a fellowship and particularly about friendship between women. One of the things that's beautiful about the story is that these women were very close a very long time ago and they've had a couple of decades off.
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Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
Ingrid was living in Paris and Martha was a war correspondent and they've just lost touch. And then they come back together at this critical moment. And I think there's something particularly beautiful about that. And I've lived long enough to know that this is a thing that starts to happen at this point in your life. You start to meet people who you haven't seen for a couple of decades.
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Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
And that bond is so particular because you're drawing on your bond from when you were in your 20s. It's still there. It's still fresh. But you don't have to sweat the small stuff of, oh, and then you were married to so-and-so, and then you got divorced, and you had two children, right? Okay, and then you lived where? You lived in Yemen or whatever.
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Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
And you can then get on with the business of reigniting that original bond. And that's what this film is about. It's about that tango.
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Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
Absolutely. It's an incredibly personal and resonant film for me. And when Pedro showed me the screenplay, I was so grateful to him, not only because it reflects so many conversations that he and I have had over the years.
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Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
the time that we've been friends but also very much my experience of the last 15 years supporting and bearing witness to loved ones who've been dismounting as I like to think of it it's a great opportunity to place that witness up on a big screen for people, and with a kind of clear-eyedness, which I think is always emblematic of Almodovar's work.
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Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
He's so determined always not to look away, and that's absolutely what this film is about.
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Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
And also about surviving things of all kinds, surviving torturous relationships with our parents or surviving a long absence from a loved lover. It's always about overcoming and somehow scaring away the things that frighten us ourselves. And what they say, embrace the tiger, return to the mountain. That's very much his attitude to life. He is pretty fearless, I would say.
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Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
It was a profound blessing, Terry, because when he first sent me the script, I did have to double check with him who he was asking me to play. And when he, because as I say, I've been in what I call the Ingrid position so often in my life, and thankfully so, it is a... A great privilege to occupy that seat.
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Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
Ingrid is the witness. Ingrid is the name of the person who Julianne Moore plays. And when he told me that he wanted me to play Martha, I remember this sense of relief because it was the snow that I didn't know, because it was going to be a new track. But it was a snow that I'd wondered about for so long, having sat on the other side of the chasm, as I kind of think of it.
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Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
And I'd heard so many loved ones and friends saying to me, it's so much worse for you than me. I'm in the hot seat. I'm going down, but you're having to bear this. And so to test that was a very interesting project. And it did bear out, I have to say. There is something, I'm not suggesting that, I'm not, you know, don't want to be too grandiose about this.
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Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
I mean, this was a drama that we were figuring out. It I got a tiny bit closer to imagining myself in that position, and it's not a fearful place to be, I didn't find.
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Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
And yet, with a couple of exceptions, that fear dissipated and was replaced with something really inspiring, which was the essential acceptance of the inevitable. I mean, this is the thing that this film is really about. You say with accuracy that it's about suffering. And of course, technically it is about dying, but it's really more than anything, Terry, about living.
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Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
It's about someone who has made the decision. to live right up to the wire, go on living, and for that to be the banner that she's carrying. And it's about the interest of life and an interest in life and about someone who, by the way...
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Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
sets her cap at investing her last months, her last weeks in the three things that I've always thought were the things that we'll always see us through, friendship, art and nature. And so it is so full of, packed with energy and you reference the colours which are always there in Pedro's work. The colours also bring it energy.
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Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
The way in which someone who is mortally ill is choosing the brightest and most beautiful jerseys she can find to go out in and end up in, you know, a kind of Mishima pose in the most beautiful yellow suit and bright red lipstick. There's that feeling of an investment in energy, which I think is really, really profound and worth...
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Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
reflecting on i think you know a life spent considering how we're going to spend our end is not wasted time you know it's a really important thing to think about she says i think i deserve a good death i think she's right i think we all do
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Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
I worked with my great friend and comrade Morag Ross, who's the first makeup artist I ever worked with. I worked with her with Derek Jarman. Caravaggio was the first film we both made. And we worked very closely together on creating this feeling that Martha is both here and not here all the time. And, of course, there's a sort of graduation in her pallor. There's a graduation in her presence.
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Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
So I take care of the spiritual presence, if you like, and she was very attendant with the way in which Martha moves through the spaces, as you say, in a slightly removed, phantom-like way. But that's what the film is doing. If someone is – and I've been privileged to be alongside people who have planned to leave. They know that they're going to go, and they've even set a date –
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Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
And they are at that point in such an interesting state because they are half in, half out. on a tightrope, which is so tangential and so delicate and actually really exquisite. And she's there. She's on that tightrope. So she isn't fully present. And her body is definitely on the decline. It's shutting down.
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Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
And she talks about that very touchingly, I think, about how difficult and painful it is to feel your brain which you've relied on, she has relied on all her life. She's had a very, very sharp brain all her life. And to feel it failing her, shutting down and struggling with her cognizance is super, super painful for her. And it's that, of course, that drives her further out into the ocean.
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Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
The physical aspect was really not the issue. I had COVID as many people. I think I've had it four times now. But having this fourth time that I had it, which was, oh, I'm very bad at dates, but it was 2021. I was going to say 1921 there. Might as well be. I had it in the August. I had it, I'd been in Cannes and got it, I think, in some super spreader event, very happy event.
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Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
And had this bad physical crash for a couple of weeks and then went on to work with Wes Anderson in Spain on Asteroid City where he died. gifted me with several long, impenetrable monologues. And this was the thing. My mind didn't work properly. I could not remember anything. And that was very frightening. I mean, it was clearly not natural.
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Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
It was clearly a response to whatever had been in my system. And it was very sobering. And I did wonder if I was, you know, looking at early onset Alzheimer's. And it was with me for, I would say, about eight months and just gradually, gradually lifted. Or it was like...
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Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
wading through a marsh it just got lighter and lighter and I was able to track it of course because I was making three feature films during that time for which I had to learn dialogue and the The Wes Anderson project was definitely the worst. I could not remember anything. And then the next project, which was Problemista, Julio Torres' film. Oh, I love that film. I love that film, too.
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Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
He was on our show after he made it. Oh, was he? Oh, how wonderful. Yeah, I know. He's a great friend and what a fantastic person he is and a contribution to the planet. He's a wonder. But for that project, I could tell that things were getting a little bit easier, but... Yeah, it was still a stretch. And then I now can't remember. But a few months later, I made another project.
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Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
And that was a little easier again. And I would say I'm pretty much back to speed. But it's taken its toll.
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Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
They have. What a wonderful question, Terry. Lovely to chew this cud with you. I remember the very first Martha in my life, who was my friend, Derek Jarman. And by Martha, you mean somebody who... Who is facing their end. My friend Derek Jarman was diagnosed with HIV in 1988, 1989, and died of AIDS in 1994.
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Tilda Swinton Thinks About Her Death
And when he discovered his diagnosis, he was, at that time, really remarkably open about it publicly, which was, if you can remember that time, anybody listening who can remember that time, and those who can't, I can tell you, was really an extraordinary gesture because people were so frightened. People were being persecuted. People were losing their jobs. People were losing their homes.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
kind of packed lunches in dark fields. I have a brother who was a soldier for many years, and we've always compared notes, and I think we live very similar lives, in fact, and less perilous to make films, for sure. But you're right, there is a chain of command that I know that that soldiers live and die by, that we don't necessarily, certainly not, maybe in studio filmmaking more.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
Maybe that's more the hard army. But, yeah, in the world of filmmaking that I sprung out of, it's a collective, and that's not necessarily what an army is. Yeah, I think in that sense, yes, I did...
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
branch out from the family trade but having said that you know there is this very strange epiphany in my recent years that I was always told by my parents that I was a bit of a strange thing and that there were no artists in our family but I've recently discovered since they died I may say that our family tree is littered with artists and yeah I'm not in fact an apple falling that far from the tree at all
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Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
No, no, no. You are absolutely right. Singularly inspired and informed by the uniforms. In fact... I'm making a piece of work now about that very thing. How central my response to my father and my grandfather's uniforms has been. I used to watch my parents getting dressed up to go out to grand parties. And my mother would wear some really nice silk dress and look beautiful.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
But my father had all the glamour. He had, you know, the gold frogging and the medals everywhere. And those black trousers with the scarlet stripe down the side. Scarlet. I mean, it occurred to me the other day. Here I am working with Pedro Almodovar, who's, you know, works in scarlet. He is one of the great artists who work in scarlet.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
And scarlet has always really meant something as a child of, you know, Scottish culture. military family. Scarlet is an important thing for the British Army. And yeah, it's hugely important. And I have always been truly, sincerely and seriously interested in clothes and what they do for us and to us. I was one of four, but I have three brothers, no sisters. And I didn't have many dresses.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
I wore a lot of hand-me-downs, as the third child often does, and they were boys' clothes. And, you know, nothing's different. I still wear boys' clothes. They are, you know, usually the most comfortable things to wear for me.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
But the fact that I can wear both, and I encourage everybody to wear both, by the way, which is why it's so important for people to understand that clothes are just choices and we can wear whatever we want. and choose our identity every morning or every hour. That aspect of clothing has always been really important for me. I love it.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
I don't even know that it's androgynous. I just feel that it's about being boundaryless. And you described, you know, with certain accuracy that Orlando, the Virginia Woolf novel and the film that we made in 1992 is about gender. I would suggest it's not only about gender. It's sort of glancingly about gender, but it's really more about boundarylessness. It's about classlessness.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
It's about internationalism. It's about someone who's immortal, by the way. And that feeling of endless possibility, that's something that really fuels my motor. And I've always had that sense that, you know, why limit yourself? Why say yes? I'm going to be this kind of woman. I'm going to dress only like this. I'm going to be this kind of man. I'm going to dress and behave only like this.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
It's such a waste. You know, we don't feel that when we're children. I think maybe I had a very light-filled childhood before I went to boarding school when I was 10. I think that during those first 10 years, I must have felt, and I'm only guessing at this, but I must have had a sort of bedrock of... of possibility. And I really loved it. And I would like to keep it going in my life.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
And we all knew it when we were little. We could dress up as anything, a dog or a dinosaur, an old lady, just get a stick and bend over. There's no great miracle to it. And we somehow, as we get older, we're encouraged to lose that sense of possibility and stick to our guns and And then if we want to change, it's some massive trauma to society.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
You know, the whole idea of transitioning being terribly, you know, much other people's business, which, of course, it palpably is not. It is nobody's business than the person whose life is being informed by it.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
I was named queer by my queer colleagues when I lived amongst them when I first became an artist in the 80s. We were all queer, meaning that we were living in a world that felt self-determining for us and felt very much at odds with what we call the straight world. the square world, which was not necessarily to do with heterosexuality or homosexuality.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
It was to do with an attitude of mind and an attitude of living. And so I was named, it's not that I named myself particularly, but I was named as a as a queer fish. We were queer fish, and I'm proud to continue to be a queer fish. And I've been in very happy and loving relationships with men for the last, whatever, 30 years, with my children's beloved father, John Byrne, who died last year.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
Oh, I'm so sorry, I didn't know that. He's one of my marthers, my teachers. He went last year, but he and I had these miraculous children, and then I've been with Sandra for 20 years, and we're very happy, but we're all queer.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
Being queer, being odd, being quiet, being shy, being from Scotland. This was a very...
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
reductive English girls private boarding school and of course the terrible things which we now know if we are sentient adults is that if you take a bunch of children and we were children I was 10 I was the youngest they were mostly 11 but if you take a bunch of children from 11 to 17 and you take them away from their families you know there's a lot of grief there and so they act out some of them act out by bullying others and some of them act out by just
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
Being quiet, which I did, I was just incredibly quiet sitting in the corner. The wonderful thing is there was somebody else sitting in the corner and that was Joanna Hogg. And she and I met on the first day of school. I was 10, she was 11. And she and I have been friends ever since and have become very close collaborators now. She's a great filmmaker.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
And she was the first filmmaker I worked with on her student film in 1986. And we made the souvenir films together with my own daughter and then The Eternal Daughter, where I play both the mother and the daughter. So that was one blessing in the heart of that experience. And that was Joanna.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
Thank you, Terry, and for everything you do. It's such a breath of fresh air.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
And then round the corner with that dog. Got it dressed up in a red coat and green booties. Why's the dog got on a coat? It's got fur in it. Must be sweating under there, stinking. That's cruelty to animals, that is. Putting it under all that plastic. I've got a mind to report him to the NSPCG or whatever they call them. And her over there with that fat baby.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
Cold, cold, cold, and she's walking up and down the street with nothing but a big pink bow on its bald head so everybody can tell it's a girl. Like I care. Parading it around in the little outfit. Not dressed for the weather. Nah, with pockets. What's a baby got pockets for? What's it going to keep in its pocket? A knife? It's ridiculous.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
I will not go out in mortifying anguish. I've gotten hold of a euthanasia pill. Don't ask me how. On the dark web, you can find almost anything. I also have an abundance of opioids for the moments of pain. And don't look at me like that. I'm not asking you to convince me otherwise. I don't know what to say. I'm hoping you'll say yes. Yes to what? To my asking you to help me. Help you what?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
I faced death several times, but I've always been accompanied. We reporters form a kind of mobile family. This is another war. I'm not afraid of it. But, like the other times I faced death, I don't want to be alone, Ingrid. I'm asking you to be in the next room.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
Thank you so much, Terry. It's such a pleasure to be here and Happy New Year to everybody.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
Absolutely. It's an incredibly personal and resonant film for me. And when Pedro showed me the screenplay, I was so grateful to him, not only because it reflects so many conversations that he and I have had over the years.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
the time that we've been friends, but also very much my experience of the last 15 years supporting and bearing witness to loved ones who have been dismounting, as I like to think of it. It's a great opportunity to place that witness up on a big screen for people and with a kind of clear-eyedness, which I think is always emblematic of Almodovar's work.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
He's so determined always not to look away, and that's absolutely what this film is about.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
And also about surviving things of all kinds, surviving torturous relationships with our parents or surviving a long absence from a loved lover. It's always about overcoming and somehow scaring away the things that frighten us ourselves. And what they say, embrace the tiger, return to the mountain. That's very much his attitude to life. He is pretty fearless, I would say.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
It was a profound blessing, Terry, because when he first sent me the script, I did have to double check with him who he was asking me to play. And when he, because as I say, I've been in what I call the Ingrid position so often in my life, and thankfully so, it is a... A great privilege to occupy that seat.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
Ingrid is the witness. Ingrid is the name of the person who Julianne Moore plays. And when he told me that he wanted me to play Martha, I remember this sense of relief because it was the snow that I didn't know, because it was going to be a new track. But it was a snow that I'd wondered about for so long, having sat on the other side of the chasm, as I kind of think of it.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
And I'd heard so many loved ones and friends saying to me, it's so much worse for you than me. I'm in the hot seat. I'm going down, but you're having to bear this. And so to test that was a very interesting project. And it did bear out, I have to say. There is something, I'm not suggesting that, and I don't want to be too grandiose about this. I mean, this was a drama that we were figuring out.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
It wasn't actual experience. But I got a tiny bit closer to imagining myself in that position, and it's not a fearful place to be, I didn't find.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
And yet, with a couple of exceptions, that fear dissipated and was replaced with something really inspiring, which was the essential acceptance of the inevitable. I mean, this is the thing that this film is really about. You say with accuracy that it's about suffering. And of course, technically, it is about dying. But it's really more than anything, Terry, about living.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
It's about someone who has made the decision to live right up to the wire, go on living, and for that to be the banner that she's carrying.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
And it's about the interest of life and an interest in life and about someone who, by the way, sets her cap at investing her last months, her last weeks in the three things that I've always thought were the things that we'll always see us through, friendship, art and nature. And so it is so full of, packed with energy and you referenced the colours which are always there in Pedro's work
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
The colours also bring it energy. The way in which someone who is mortally ill is choosing the brightest and most beautiful jerseys she can find to go out in and end up in, you know, a kind of Mishima pose in the most beautiful yellow suit and bright red lipstick. There's that feeling of an investment in energy, which I think is really, really profound and worth...
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
reflecting on i think you know a life spent considering how we're going to spend our end is not wasted time you know it's a really important thing to think about she says i think i deserve a good death i think she's right i think we all do
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
We worked – I worked with my great friend and comrade Morag Ross, who's the first makeup artist I ever worked with. I worked with her with Derek Jarman. Caravaggio was the first film we both made. And we worked very closely together on creating this feeling that Martha is – both here and not here all the time. And of course, there's a sort of graduation in her pallor.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
There's a graduation in her presence. So I take care of the spiritual presence, if you like. And she was very attendant with the way in which Martha moves through the spaces, as you say, in a slightly removed phantom-like way. But that's what the film is doing. If someone is... And I've been privileged to be alongside people who have planned to leave.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
They know that they're going to go and they've even set a date. And they are at that point in such an interesting state because they are half in, half out, on a tightrope, which is so tangential and so delicate and actually really exquisite. And she's there. She's on that tightrope. So she isn't fully present. And her body is definitely... on the decline. It's shutting down.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
And she talks about that very touchingly, I think, about how difficult and painful it is to feel your brain, which you've relied on, she has relied on all her life. She's had a very, very sharp brain all her life. And to feel it failing her, shutting down and struggling with her cognizance is super, super painful for her. And it's that, of course, that drives her further out into the ocean.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
it's hard to be unconventional in in the military do you feel like you went in an opposite direction it's so funny terry because the more and more i live the more i think that i'm going right down the middle of the family tendency actually when i think of comradeship when i think of you know the the the project when i think of uh you know the kind of trench warfare of independent filmmaking when i think of walkie-talkies when i think of you know um