‘I am all for strangeness’: Tilda Swinton on artistic integrity, acting and the afterlife

Tilda Swinton has been posing in different costumes for the Observer’s photographer and, as I arrive, has just changed into tartan trousers, saucy two-tone shoes and is standing perfectly still as a hairdresser attends to a blond quiff that makes her look like an incredible exotic bird – or a dandy hooligan, although her face looks too seraphic to mutate into aggro. What you see almost at once is that Swinton is giving 100% to the task at hand while being obligingly considerate to everyone around her. The mix of professionalism with warmth disarms, especially when you might have expected a superstar loftiness.

For Swinton is a superstar – ranked by the New York Times as one of the greatest actors of the 21st century. Original, distinctive and questing, she has played everything from a distraught mother in Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk about Kevin (2011) to the ancient, querulous Madame D in Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) and the White Witch in the Narnia series (2005-2010). She was in Almodóvar’s short The Human Voice (2020) and is about to star in his next full-length feature (details still under wraps). She is a chameleon yet always herself. She has won an Academy award, a Bafta, been nominated for three Golden Globes and, having just turned 63, is still seen as a fashion icon of androgynous beauty with an unchanging profile – like a figurehead on the prow of a ship. What a difference there must be, I’m thinking as I watch her in front of the camera, between her “real” life in the Scottish Highlands by the sea and all this London razzmatazz.

Eventually, we find a quiet space to talk ­in the studio’s dressing room. We have a huge amount to talk about because in addition to questions from celebrities and readers, we need to make space for her new film, The Eternal Daughter, directed by Joanna Hogg. This is, loosely, a sequel to the coming-of-age Souvenir films in which Swinton starred alongside her daughter, Honor (who has recently graduated from Edinburgh). Swinton is now changed back into her own clothes, a casual, scarlet mohair jumper that matches her lipstick from the shoot and is perched on a high seat as if a cocktail might be about to appear (I’m afraid it isn’t).

In The Eternal Daughter, she plays two women – the mother, Rosalind (those familiar with the Souvenir films will recall the character), and the daughter, Julie – now middle-aged. A gimmick, you might think – but watch before judging. This is a film of brilliantly devious artistry. It opens with a white taxi advancing down a straight road, flanked by winter trees and enfolded by mist. Julie is taking her mother to a country house hotel that turns out to be without guests as if in a dream – or a nightmare – all mahogany melancholy with a passive-aggressive receptionist and a non-stop gale blowing outside. These are the ingredients for a conventional haunting, but The Eternal Daughter will prove to be a haunting of a new kind. I suggest that it is about what it means to haunt yourself and Swinton agrees: “That is at the heart of the film,” she says.

Oscar Wilde wrote: “All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.” Swinton suggests that, in the film, the “great question” is “where does my mother end and I begin?” She shifts between playing a mother of bleached, upper-class delicacy and a dashingly urban and visibly distressed film-maker daughter with huskiness to her voice. The two women are at once conjoined and helplessly apart and the film repays a second viewing because it is, in the deepest sense, about double takes.

Swinton explains that she and Hogg have been friends since they were 10 or 11 and have always talked about their mothers, who sound not altogether dissimilar. Swinton is from an aristocratic, military Anglo-Scots family and her mother, like Hogg’s, was a “postwar bride who married in the 50s, had children in the 60s and had done this deal with life – happily to a degree – to be a devoted wife first and foremost”. Their mothers had only “limited intimacy” with their daughters. Add to that, Swinton and Hogg became artists. When I suggest that this might have been difficult for their mothers, that they might have felt excluded from their daughters’ lives, I seem to hit a nerve: Swinton’s eyes fill with tears. The film has been a chance to explore that gap and to ask the unanswerable: how does one let go of one’s mother?

Swinton’s mother died 13 years ago ­– before Hogg’s: “I remember telling Joanna about it… I was looking after her all through and afterwards and was struck by how I took on her speech patterns and would sometimes wear her things – cardigans or shoes. There was a period of time, before she actually left and after she’d gone, when I was enmeshed in a very specific and material way. I’d find myself using language she’d have used and would feel the frisson of a thrill, the opportunity to use a particular turn of phrase… it is a way, of course, of keeping them with us. I also remember feeling the burden – a feeling, not a fact – of surviving as a form of betrayal.”

Perhaps it is because we are talking about bereavement or because – unforgettable and unforgotten – he returns like a refrain in any formal conversation with Swinton, that we move on to the loss of her great friend Derek Jarman (in whose films she appeared: Caravaggio (1986), The Last of England (1988), War Requiem (1989) and The Garden (1990). She talks about losing him to Aids when she was 33. Even decades later, she remembers feeling as if she could have died herself: “I was particularly close to Derek and remember being very aware that, in a strange way, I could have gone with him.” She talks, too, about the late John Berger, another close friend. And just as, in 2008, she collaborated on a film about Jarman’s life, she made a film about Berger that also involved her twins, Xavier and Honor, (children of the writer John Byrne). “I remember thinking: can we make a film in which people get to meet John?” Swinton struggles to find a word equal to the two men: “To call what they had charisma is actually reductive because they were such a force of life.” And although not up to the job, this is the word that must serve for Swinton too. As we move on to the questions, I watch her respond: concentrated, involved, sometimes laughing aloud and occasionally stopping to say she needs more time to think, to be sure that she has answered the question.

Pedro Almodóvar

Film director

It is well known that you and David Bowie look alike. I remember seeing a clip of you exchanging clothes; he dressed like you and you like him. What did you talk about in that meeting? And with which of your many appearances do you think Bowie most identified?
I remember that while making The Stars (Are Out Tonight), a music video directed by Floria Sigismondi, I’d found a silly, anatomically deformed carrot in my salad at lunch – we talked about that, it kept us going for days… Although, more seriously, I also remember having another conversation. He was very ill at the time, which I knew about – although I didn’t know quite how ill. And he started to talk about an afterlife and he said, categorically, that he didn’t think there was one. He was always sending me images – sometimes silly, sometimes not. I used to be amazed at how aware he was of what we were all doing: he was so switched on… In terms of appearances, I was honoured that he came to see my piece The Maybe at MoMA. My sweetheart [her partner, the artist Sandro Kopp] saw him standing completely unnoticed for quite a while in the crowd, absolutely no one clocked him. Also, I could add that there was a photograph of me by Jean-Baptiste Mondino with makeup smeared all over my face. I know he loved that one – he told me many times.

What do you dream about at the moment?
Silvia, Observer reader, Sofia, Bulgaria
Forgetting things. The heady possibility of travelling without mislaid passports. Breathing under the sea. I’m not particularly forgetful but there are such exertions needed for travel, especially because, when I’m at home, I do sink down into the loam a bit. I always think if you work in cities, it probably keeps you on the boil, but I’m not at all on the boil at home. I’ve come away with a lot of dog paraphernalia today – that is actually my home jacket [she gestures at a green waterproof beside us] and it has all sorts of dog things in it I don’t really need.

Elton John

Musician

You’ve had your photo taken by a lot of brilliant photographers. If you could choose to be photographed by anyone from the history of photographers, who would it be and why?
Paul Strand, partly because I associate him with the Hebrides, which I love so much and which is so important to me. Strand was American and his work in the Hebrides was quite extraordinary. His portraits of people appear as landscapes, and vice versa.

What’s the most Scottish trait that emerges when you’re abroad, especially in the US?
Kevin Nel, Leigh-on-Sea
I don’t know if it is my most Scottish trait, but the inability not to start weeping at the sound of bagpipes anywhere in the world… I went this summer with my son – we are military historian nerds – to Normandy and Pegasus Bridge, which was the site to which Lord Lovat brought his own Highland piper from Beauly (near where we live) and he went across Pegasus Bridge in the most audacious and perilous circumstances, which must have put the fear of God into the Nazis, as the pipes have done for centuries to the English. Another of my most Scottish traits is that I am not able to stand being described as British.

Wes Anderson

Film director

Is there a character, or an idea for a character, who you would love, more than anything, to play? Tell us all about her.
I imagine a detective or maybe, rather, the provincial lady of a decrepit manor with a deep love of detective fiction who is irresistibly drawn into solving some gruesome, convoluted intrigue. Almost certainly mute… possibly, in fact, a ghost… Yes. A ghost, trying to get her solved clues across the divide. I imagine the final clue that nails the solution to the murder being the canine nose smear on the bottom panel of a French window – the only possible culprit being a particularly short-legged terrier… Write it, Wes – you know you want to…

What is the best and worst thing about being a fashion icon?
Sarah McLeary, Dunbar
A fashion icon is in the eye of the beholder. There is no downside and the upside is a profound amusement.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Film director

What is it you love so much about dogs and the sea?
They represent a sense of home for me and the experience of home. I’ve lived beside the sea for 25 years and find it difficult to imagine not living by the sea; it’s very spoiling and genuinely enlightening – as are dogs. I have lived in a pack for almost as long for the same reason.

Are actors born or made?
Lizzie Hyder, Exmoor
Acting is – pretty much always in my experience – a made thing, something consciously constructed for studied effect. Performance is something innate and unlearned of which we are all of us capable, all the time.

Olivia Laing

Writer

One of the things I most admire about you – and about Derek Jarman – is your deep and wild artistic integrity. It feels increasingly rare as artists and performers are pressurised into becoming commodified. How do you resist? How do you nurture and protect your freedom as an artist?
It helps if you don’t have any developed sense of yourself as a commodity. I see that as a privilege Derek and I share. Derek went to art school as a painter, I went to university [Swinton read social and political sciences at Cambridge] and have since been quite open about my shame about not writing as much as I should. But performing for me and, to a certain extent, making films exists in a liminal space. There’s a great quote from La Dolce Vita: “I’m too serious to be a dilettante and too much a dabbler to be a professional.” I read that subtitle before I met Derek, and while still at university, and almost shot out of my seat. In the film, it’s spoken as an expression of meekness, but I see it as a real position of strength because it means one can remain limber and unformed. There is something about keeping work in one’s peripheral vision that allows it to live in an atmosphere of adventure and rest and play.

I was bullied a lot at school because of my red hair and freckly skin colour. I’d like to know if you were bullied for being a redhead and, if so, what effect that had on you?
Sara Jane Tipton, Bradford
I was mercilessly bullied at school. There was a culture of bullying in the school I was in. I can only say I survived. I remember saying to my children, if they ever had moments when they were young of feeling overpowered, that I would much rather they came home saying they had been overpowered than that they had done the overpowering.

Daisy May Cooper

Comic actor and writer

If you were to come back as a ghost who or where would you haunt?
Funny you should ask. My grandmother used to say that the great advantage of dying was that you would get to go to all the places you never managed to when locked into a body. I’m fully intending – and preparing – to haunt indiscriminately and with a distinctive va va voom. All my efforts on April Fools’ Day are rehearsals for the afterlife in which, I realise, I believe. I have serious plans I’m actually looking forward to bringing to bear. Daisy, I’m saving an erratic cloud of butterflies for you. And a special smell.

Which of your characters’ wardrobes did you enjoy wearing the most?
Ben Akhtar, Brussels
Rosalind Harte over the two Souvenir films and The Eternal Daughter wears a wardrobe made up very largely of my own mother’s clothes – her shoes, her jewellery. I have a particular tender affection in my memory of wearing these things.

George MacKay

Actor

What has been the most vital or formative experience with a character’s costume and makeup you’ve had and why?
That’s difficult because I love working with costumes and looks in general… it’s my way of staying true to my original intention, which was only ever to be in one film – then cut out. So changing all the time is very important to me. But it would be slightly rude not to mention Orlando, given that it is about a spirit who almost only changes his or her clothes and does not really change in any other way.

As we know from Jim Jarmusch’s film Only Lovers Left Alive, you’re a vampire. Who would you most like to join you in eternal life?
Henriette van Dorp, Hengelo, the Netherlands
God, I love that question [laughs]. Christopher Lee and I always had a longstanding conversation about joining forces one day… I can still dream.

Max Richter

Composer

I got my cinema education at the Filmhouse, Edinburgh and the Everyman Hampstead (where I went when I was supposed to be in lectures). Where did it start for you?
For me, the cinema in Eyemouth – the fishing village near to where I grew up in the Borders. The cinema was minute, down a sidestreet and well loved, but I fear it is no more. My brothers [Swinton has three] took me secretly to see Confessions of a Window Cleaner and drilled me all the way home in the car so that I could pretend we had gone to see Gold with Roger Moore. They told me the plot of Gold in gory detail and, the next morning, when my father rather diffidently asked what we had seen at the pictures, I gave him chapter and verse. He was very suspicious – he must have realised something was up in that I appeared to have been paying far too much attention. Later, my cinema education was at the Arts Cinema in Cambridge (for Tarkovsky) and the hallowed Lumiere cinema in St Martin’s Lane (for Jim Jarmusch/Ozu/Parajanov/John Waters), the demise of which is the reason I can’t go down St Martin’s Lane ever again – such a loss.

Is there any author or book you feel particularly in dialogue with at the moment?
Sue Pitkin, Chicago
Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat. She never fails and this particular book has something breathtakingly and empoweringly vicious about it… It feels really modern … She just sends me.

Seamus McGarvey

Cinematographer

You’ve worked with some of the greatest directors of our time. Your choices have been brave and unusual. Is directing your own film something you’d like to do, and if so, have you got a particular project in mind?
It’s something I’m trying not to do on a regular basis because my… OK, let me think… because until it feels like a light prospect and not something that fills me with a kind of dread, I will steer clear. And the other thing I could say is that I have, as your question points out, had the privilege of working alongside some of the greatest film directors of our time and am more apprised than most people of what directing a film takes.

What advice would you give to young artists struggling to find the space, time and money to make work in these financially straitened times?
Daniel Grimston, London, playwright, poet, actor, director
I’ve never been a believer in advice – especially for artists. You know what you have to do. Look after yourself. Look after the bits of yourself that need to be clear to make your work. And keep your flame safe.

If you could send one of your films in a capsule into deep space, to be discovered by aliens as evidence of human civilisation, which film would it be?
James Pattison, Durham
The Eternal Daughter, because it is a film about love and evolution and surviving one of the most difficult things in human experience.

Sandy Powell

Costume designer

Was there a specific piece of advice from Derek Jarman that has been significant or words of wisdom that have guided you to this day? (His advice to me was to approach every day at work with the excitement of going to a party, which I have tried to stand by!)
I also learned that lesson and treasure it closely. I also really valued his opinion that whenever we were scrambling to leave a place, having not done everything we had intended to do, it was actually an advantage because it meant we would definitely return. That thought was very useful and hopeful – the looking ahead and recycling of regrets into new horizons and intentions.

Princess Julia

DJ and writer

How do you go about preparing for a role, from a first reading to the final embodiment of a character?
As you well know in your own life and work, Julia, with the diligent and concerted prioritisation of maximum time spent with friends.

I understand you have four springer spaniels. What do you love about this breed?
Irene Salazar, Essex, springer spaniel lover
What’s not to love? Perspective. Wisdom. Priorities. Jokes. Loyalty, but that’s trite because all dogs are loyal. The star of The Eternal Daughter is Louis. The stars of Souvenir were Rosie and Dora and then, in Souvenir: Part II, they were joined by Snowbear, Rosie’s grandson. Louis is Rosie’s son and has the solo spot. He is the superstar – King Louis. But he does not have a great line in whimpering. He’s a very uncomplaining and stoic dog, the poet philosopher in the family. The whimpering in The Eternal Daughter is provided by his nephew Snowbear – a bit of a Singin’ in the Rain collage [Debbie Reynolds’s singing was dubbed by Betty Noyes in the 1952 musical].

…and how do you deal with burrs on ears and tails and muddy paws?
With learned humility and forbearance. And in the full knowledge that a life without them would be so very much the poorer. Burrs: relentless de-burring and occasional chopping of dreadlocks – minimal. I quite like the challenge of really full ears and sitting watching a film pruning them. Muddy paws: it is really useful to live by the sea. My dogs have full baths every day.

Alloysious Massaquoi

Musician, Young Fathers

Have you ever made a choice when playing a character that you later regretted?
It’s a good question – and I am very, very starstruck that he should write in… Constantly… regret is almost always detectable at the moment the director decides to move the camera on. The great trick is to try to move on oneself. Every shot carries choices with it and one is filled with misgivings far more often than thinking: great, I’ve made it. In fact, I’ve become suspicious of those rare moments when one thinks one’s nailed things. Often this will be about the least interesting take… Heraclitus said, “Long live doubt.” Through doubt comes insight. I learned that from Derek Jarman as well.

As a close friend and collaborator of the great Derek Jarman, do you feel there is an artist alive today whose creative output resembles his?
Jamie Matley, Manchester
One of the many wonderful things about Derek is that he was a torch bearer who came down a long line of what he would have described as outsider artists from William Blake onwards. The great thing is that the artists inspired by the same spirit as Derek are legion and he would have been the first to champion and cheer that fact. He is an inspiration for that spirit, for a collective attitude to work and an inclusive attitude to his audience and a radical glee in making work, which is a very powerful position. I can attest to that because I am affected by the same thing.

Joanna Scanlan

Actor

What are the benefits of a Steiner school education?
Self-determination. Flexibility. The knowledge that life without screens is possible. An ability to climb trees/make things with your hands/grow food/sing and dance with abandon. My children were privileged to experience a Steiner education. I look at them now, at 26, and see two undaunted and spirited individuals, imaginative, generous, merry-hearted, fair-minded, open-eyed, self-determined, democratic, adaptable, collaborative, grounded, grateful, kind and generally up for bringing what they can to brighten the horizon.

Irvine Welsh

Writer

Nairn County or Inverness Clachnacuddin? (These are rival Scottish football teams near Inverness.)
NURRRRRRRRRRRRRRN (natch).

You’ve worked with Italian film director Luca Guadagnino several times, including A Bigger Splash and Suspiria. What makes your collaboration with him special?
Marco Foti, East Sussex
Luca feels like a playmate from a very early sandpit… I first met him when he was 22 and the fantasies and projects we dreamed up then were always wild and beyond our immediate horizon. The character of that early bond goes on: we have retained that sense of the ramshackle and over-reaching.

What’s your favourite Scottish loch and why?
Chris Harland, Leeds
It’s a loch on an island in the Outer Hebrides. It is tiny as a tennis court and, in summer, full of water lilies. I’ve no idea what it’s called but am sure it has a long Gaelic name. The water – peat water – has a sort of buoyancy. The colour is of good malt whisky and buoys you up like a cloud from below. It is the closest thing to nirvana I can think of. There is nothing like it and it doesn’t change. Tomorrow, I’m going to the South Bank to present my favourite film ever: I Know Where I’m Going!, by Michael Powell, which has a new print and is going on release around the country and the island in the film – Mull – also doesn’t change. I was there last month. It’s a reliable, unruinable place.

Many know you best as the protect-at-all-costs matriarch in Danny Boyle’s The Beach. At the time, did you see the film’s themes of overtourism and sustainability as prophetic?
R Evans, Hertfordshire
We – and most importantly Alex Garland, whose book the film is based on – had an inkling, but as is very often the case, things tend to get worse before people really wake up. It’s difficult to imagine now that we were able to film in such an extraordinary place [the Thai island of Ko Phi Phi Le] with absolutely no one around. It was 25 years ago – since then, the island has become a sort of theme park.

Do you find life stranger than fiction?
Ayo Akingbade, London
I am all for strangeness; bring on stranger and stranger fiction.

Do you find the kinds of projects you want to do and roles you wish to play are changing as you get older?
Mellissa Reynolds Donello, Worcester
I don’t – and this is where I am a bit of a problem – because I tend to develop projects that are tailor-made with collaborators. They are not films that come to me, they are like pieces made on me so continue to be relevant and specific to me. If anything, it is becoming more and more nourishing to me to make these pieces out of my own life experience and I get further and further away from the paradigm of ideas other people might have for me.

• The Eternal Daughter is in UK and Ireland cinemas from 24 November. Internal Reflections: The Films of Joanna Hogg runs through November at the BFI Southbank