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
The Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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.
The Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
I was a poet as a child and I invested... My energy is in that. And 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.
The Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
And what was it about? It was about nature mainly, I think. There was one, I was looking for it the other day. Where is it? One particular one, which was about a swan that I found on the river at home. That one, a kite 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.
The Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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, we could have a whole masterclass on that.
The Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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 I was like a tortoise. I just put my head in.
The Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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.
The Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
That's the way I work.
The Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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 Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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 the 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.
The Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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're 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.
The Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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.
The Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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 and be clear.
The Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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?
The Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
Yes. I left London in 1997 when my children were born and went to live in the north of Scotland where 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 I 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.
The Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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 struck me so deeply.
The Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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?
The Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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 that thatcher was basically a homophobic bill homophobic bill about um and we we campaigned long and hard against that or whether it was in support of the miners strike we were
The Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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.
The Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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, 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.
The Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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?
The Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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 a connection to form. So, for example, again, sorry to use the example of your three, your triptych of experiences around this material. Yeah, please.
The Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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.
The Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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. How can I bear this helplessness, this powerlessness? And then you do.
The Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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?
The Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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. And you're seeing us playing it out in front of you.
The Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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.
The Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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.
The Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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.
The Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
With a lot of Diet Coke and as many M&Ms 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.
The Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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 Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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.
The Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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 they felt the same. The people that I first started working as an artist with, the life and the living of it was everything.
The Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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.
The Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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 bric-a-brac. And I remember I met him for lunch one day after.
The Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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.
The Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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?
The Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
The life always 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 bit before about this resonance in the theater, that place of witness and that openness to resonance.
The Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
And this is a huge thing I'm just about... This is a bombshell I'm just going to lay down.
The Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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 Eminem at Diet Coke place in the dark is
The Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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, is about people's innate goodness.
The Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
And since you mentioned November the 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?
The Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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.
The Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
We have to find a way of reconnecting with that.
The Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
Can you sleep on them? I will sleep on them.
The Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
See you tomorrow. It's one of my most favorite things to say. I love saying see you tomorrow.
The Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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.
The Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
Great reference. I love that.
The Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
It strikes you as a feint. Yeah. Yeah. It's just accuracy, David. I think it has something to do with the kind of 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. But I think I'm so aware that
The Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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 would rather get there first before somebody calls me a fraud.
The Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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 being good is not really the point for me.
The Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
I suppose, off the top of my head, because... Okay, this is actually a really important point, and maybe this makes it even 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
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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 working in conversation with other people.
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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.
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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.
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
He says he did see it. Wow.
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
And he lives 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... 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.
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
Welcome. And I have to ask you, how did you feel at the end when you stood up and there were M&Ms 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?
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
There is no proof that dinosaurs did not develop dinosaurs. Cell phone technology.
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
Can I just ask a question before... Of course. Why do you have a gag reflex about the idea of innate goodness?
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
Okay, I think I want to move the goalposts a tiny bit.
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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.
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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. And that noticing,
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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 become the stronger and the more socially responsible if we're just aware of our own
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
I suppose it's just about trying to not give up on connection, the possibility of connection 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 to
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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. That's what we have to focus on. What can we agree on?
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
in relation to the other two experiences?
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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.
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
You do yourself down, David. I'm sure he's a fan of you.
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
Well, I'll tell you a little something and then we'll figure out why I want to tell you it because it might, let's 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.
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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?
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
And I remember to this day, the look on her face. 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.
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
So the reason I tell you that story is the quest for connection is 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-six. 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.
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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.
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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.
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
So there's that, which we can unpack in a minute if we want to, or maybe another time when we speak.
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
Well, you know what? Here's the thing, David. You know, moving on is, I think, in many ways, grossly overrated.
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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.
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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.
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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 second-hand 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.
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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 on the whole thing.
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
charade, 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.
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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. What do you mean?
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
There's nothing interesting about death. We just stop. For me personally, death itself is not the star of the show. The dying is the interesting bit. And how do we die?
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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...
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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 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.
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
But more 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, you know, 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 dying,
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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?
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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, premedieval torture. Can't we have fixed it by now? This brutality?
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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.
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
About being an artist. 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 Foray 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.
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
There's an incredibly beautiful portrait of her 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.
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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... My eminence was underplayed by my parents, who were not artists, and I don't think they quite understood it.
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
I think they were rather, honestly, I think they'd forgive me for saying, rather frightened of artists. Why? 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.
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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.
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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 just sort of, we were like art nerds.
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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 were involved sexually. But there was this I knew and I must have been about 15, 16 when this happened.
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
So I knew that there were other people involved. 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 the 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.
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
But that's probably why they were doing it. They were sort of keeping us away from the sex pistols.
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
And I remember when I was about 13, seeing the cover of Aladdin Sane.
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
With the gingery hair.
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
And this pearlescent...
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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 for years. I didn't hear Aladdin Sane. I owned it. I knew that it was something.
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'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
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.