The Daily
'The Interview': Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word With Trump About His Mother
Sat, 7 Dec 2024
The Academy Award-winning actress discusses her lifelong quest for connection, humanity’s innate goodness and the point of being alive.Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: What unexpected connections shaped this interview?
From The New York Times, this is The Interview. I'm David Marchese. Unexpected connections sometimes arise in this job. As it happens, I had two of them with this week's guest, the Academy Award-winning actress Tilda Swinton. Both of them shaped my feeling about the conversation you're about to hear, though in very different ways. Let me tell you about the first one.
In a book of sketches by the British writer John Berger called Bento's Sketchbook, one drawing has always mesmerized me. It's of an androgynous face, almost alien, and it exudes this deeply human curiosity and compassion. That sketch is labeled, simply, Tilda.
I hadn't really thought about who it was based on until, that is, when in preparation for my interview with Swinton, I watched a documentary she co-directed about Berger. In it, she mentioned Bento's sketchbook, and a light bulb went on. Despite being a longtime admirer of that sketch and Swinton's acting, I'd never put together that I'd been entranced by the same person the whole time.
I couldn't help but take that as a good omen for the interview. The second connection was tougher to interpret. You might remember that my last interview was with a doctor about medical aid in dying, a subject that I've had recent personal experience with.
Swinton's upcoming film, The Room Next Door, directed by Pedro Almodovar, is about, and I swear I didn't know this ahead of time, an eerily similar topic. In the movie, Swinton plays a woman named Martha, who asks her friend Ingrid, played by Julianne Moore, to support her decision to die by suicide after becoming terminally ill.
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Chapter 2: How does Tilda Swinton define friendship and coexistence?
I would have felt phony or disingenuous not to share this coincidence with Swinton, but I can't say I was exactly eager to explore it either. She, as it turns out, felt otherwise. Here's my interview with Tilda Swinton. Your new movie, The Room Next Door, is based on a great novel by Sigrid Nunez called What Are You Going Through? Yes.
And that novel takes its title from a quote by the French philosopher Simone Weil, which is, the love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him, what are you going through? So let me ask you, in the Simone Weil sense of the question, what are you going through?
I'm enjoying right now the attention to that question and the fact that our film puts that question into the air, the idea of bearing witness and the question of what is friendship But even more than friendship, what is it to coexist? What is it to not look away?
I think of it actually as a political film because of that question that it just, it's like a balloon that we launched above people's heads. How is it possible to coexist? And how is it possible to bear witness?
I have some questions about how people might think about that, but I want to preface them by sharing what I hope is sort of a morbidly humorous anecdote related to the film. Sounds good. We'll see. We'll see. So the last interview I did was with a doctor in Canada who performs medical assistance in dying. She helps people to die. And the occasion of doing that interview was
was my mother's haven't gone through that process earlier this year. So it was kind of a heavy interview for me. And then afterwards, the opportunity arose to interview you. And I thought, oh, great. I love Tilda Swinton's movies. And then I saw you were doing the director of The Room Next Door is Almodovar. And I thought... Again, oh, I love the exuberance of his work. This will be great.
It'll be a laugh. I went to the screening, you know, I got a popcorn, you know, I got my Diet Coke from a soda fountain, which is a guilty pleasure of mine. I even got some M&Ms. I get down to my seat. So good. I'm feeling good. I'm sitting there. And within a few minutes, it dawns on me that your movie is about assisted suicide. So thank you, Tilda.
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?
in relation to the other two experiences?
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Chapter 3: What personal experiences influenced Tilda's acting choices?
I'm sure the audience has had enough of me being upset about my mother, but I'll move on.
Well, you know what? Here's the thing, David. You know, moving on is, I think, in many ways, grossly overrated.
Can I ask you, because I know that you've had experiences somewhat similar to the experience depicted in the film. You have been with people near the end. Can you tell me about your experience with that and how that... may have made its way into the film?
Yes, it's an enormous part of what I want to talk to you about because it is the reason that this film is so important to me. I have spent much of the last 15 years in the Ingrid position, naming the person that Julianne Moore plays, and it's felt like that on almost all occasions. to both of my parents, to the father of my children, and many other friends.
But it's also something that has been in my lived experience since I was quite a young person. I mean, my first Martha was Derek Jarman. Derek Jarman, when I was 33, died. He was the first person who I knew very closely and lived alongside very, very tightly.
who got very ill, first of all, with HIV in 1988, 1989, and then died in 94 after those years that we, for those of us who had that 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.
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.
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.
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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Chapter 4: How does Tilda Swinton perceive the concept of death?
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.
Misled about what? I'm not quite following.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But this is something that you came to understand in your family, that you did have artists in your lineage later. Do you remember feeling as if you were consciously trying to rebel against your family by becoming an artist? It didn't really feel like that to me.
I just... needed to find my company. And the first sort of practicing artist I ever met was a boy. I was at a girls' school in Kent and there was a boys' school just down the road. And I met, I can't even remember how I met him, but I met this boy called Johnny who was at this boys' school and he was into art. And we just sort of, we were like art nerds.
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Chapter 5: What role does art play in political protest?
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.
What was your poetry about?
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.
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.
Wait, but why did it happen?
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.
And so I was bereft. I was truly bereft at that time because I'd lost my company. And then I met friends, a couple of writers particularly, who were writing plays. And they said, come and, you know, be a part of this society. And I started being in the plays to hang out with them. So I was very much a performer by default and very much led by the company. And that's, frankly, that's all she wrote.
That's the way I work.
You know, I think when The Room Next Door was shown at the New York Film Festival, I think it was just last month maybe, there was a post-screening talk, and it was interrupted by pro-Palestinian protesters. And you, I thought, very gracefully in the moment, you know, said the protests were—
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Chapter 6: How can experiences of loss inform art and creativity?
I think, you know, there are feelings I have, and to see them reflected in the art or even tested against the art tempers them with a flame, sort of. You know, I sort of... walk away with the feelings and ideas more deeply held often. Yeah.
For me, and I know this is not the question you asked, but I've become much more skeptical over time that film or music or literature can do more than galvanize, that they can actually change feeling or precipitate a political feeling or idea that was not held in the person before. And what's your response to that? I...
suggest that what art does, first of all, it offers us an opportunity to be quiet and to be still. And not necessarily to go inward, but to allow in that gesture of stillness for the sort of reverberation of whatever we're witnessing to 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.
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.
Slow motion car crash.
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.
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.
There's levels of distance which are very soothing to the nervous system. So you're not taken back into the id state. You're able to observe, rather like in a meditation state. And then... you can make these connections. I think the sort of superpower that art has is this distance that it affords us, this capacity to be still and to allow these resonances to arise from inside.
So I think that we may encounter new thinking when we encounter art, but In order for it to really start to grow, it needs to connect with something inside you.
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Chapter 7: What reflections does Tilda have on her childhood and artistic upbringing?
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
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.
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?
And I don't want to assume that anybody else believes in innate goodness, but I'm declaring that I do. I do believe we were all Little children, scared little animals once, all of us, including all of those people that we're thinking about, they were all little children once. And I don't know what happened to them to make them this mean, but we have to contact them somehow.
We have to find a way of reconnecting with that.
Tilda, I have lots of thoughts in response to that. Good.
Can you sleep on them? I will sleep on them.
And we'll pick this back up tomorrow.
See you tomorrow. It's one of my most favorite things to say. I love saying see you tomorrow.
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Chapter 8: How do nostalgia and activism intersect in Tilda's life?
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.
He says he saw it.
He says he did see it. Wow.
He saw something.
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.
There is no proof that dinosaurs did not develop dinosaurs. Cell phone technology.
There's no proof. No proof dinosaurs didn't create cell phones, but hey.
We have to keep open.
We have to be open to the possibility of wonder. We live in hope. We live in hope. So now I want to get back to where we ended before. Okay. So you raised the idea that, or you posed the question that art might be a call to our innate goodness. And I have a very hard time buying that notion, but I would very much like to be disabused of my skepticism around that.
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