Mavericks: Tilda Swinton

Toronto International Film Festival Program Guide
2011

Mavericks: Tilda Swinton
Moderated by Noah Cowan

Passionate cinephile and controversial movie star Tilda Swinton is the epitome of what we mean by the word “Maverick.”

Swinton is one of those rare performers who has forged a relationship with Hollywood on her own terms, using her stardom to support often challenging film projects. Yet her choices as an actress possess a remarkable consistency. Roles as wildly diverse as her White Witch in the first Narnia film and her near-silent performance in Hungarian über-auteur Béla Tarr’s The Man from London suggest a remarkable self-awareness. Her classical, icy beauty serves as an ideal tableau upon which to explore the range of human vulnerability. We know that a Swinton performance will give us an uncomfortable glimpse into our own frailty, and she has been richly rewarded for her honesty as an actor with multiple accolades, including an Academy Award® for Michael Clayton.

Swinton’s early defining moments came out of her relationship with Derek Jarman, easily one of the last century’s most important filmmakers. His poetic, angry, politically charged cinema collapsed the boundaries between film and visual art, and Swinton acted as co-conspirator. Few can forget the rage-filled dance Swinton performed in Jarman’s The Last of England, an embodiment of inchoate terror at the wrenching social changes wrought by Margaret Thatcher. She made several other signature works with Jarman, perhaps most significantly Edward II, in which she played Queen Isabella. Around that same time she appeared as gender outlaw Orlando in Sally Potter’s celebrated film of the same name. These roles launched Swinton as one of our greatest living actresses, as a hero/ine of gay and transgendered cinema and as a style icon.

But Swinton is more than a muse. She has produced several exceptional films, including I Am Love, and is at the Festival this year as lead actress and executive producer of We Need to Talk About Kevin, Lynne Ramsay’s startling new work based on a book once thought unadaptable.

She has also extended her activism into the presentation of cinema, championing a kind of mobile film festival/cinematheque in her native Scotland and in China. She and long-time collaborator Mark Cousins’s 8½ Foundation continues to provide children (at age eight and a half) with a gift of major art cinema at the moment when they are perhaps first able to accept alternative, more challenging fare into their lives.

Swinton is a forthright interview subject, unafraid of unfashionable opinions and rabble-rousing polemics on the current state of cinema. This should be fun.
—Noah Cowan