Tilda Swinton: States of Being

 

Jefferson Hack: I watched Ways of Listening (2013) and you used a phrase in your interview with John Berger, I think it was a “continuation.” You talked with him about the idea of our lives being transient within a bigger framework. That concept has really touched me, because it’s the idea that your output is not only all about you but from and for others.

Tilda Swinton: The idea that the buck stops with oneself, with myself, is too much for me. I can’t do it — it just doesn’t work. It’s not true for a start, but just the sensation of that idea gives me claustrophobia. The only way in which it’s possible to feel capable of doing anything is to link oneself up to that generational through line. It’s like hanging onto a galloping horse — you’re just hanging on to the reins; the horse has got all the power. You are just being pulled along. That’s the feeling, somehow.

 

JH: Everything is a continuation, isn’t it?

TS: That’s one of the great things about life, that there are these — not exactly repetitions — but these revisitations from generation to generation. It goes on and on. That’s one of the things I love about reading the diaries, the letters, and the biographies of artists — it’s very often the same territory from century to century.

 

JH: When did you meet John Berger?

TS: I met him when he asked me to be in a film called Play Me Something in 1989, which was based on a story by him. It was directed by Timothy Neat and is about a group of people who land on this island in the Hebrides called Barra. They are stranded in the airport terminal because the airplane can’t land and can’t take off. John Berger plays a mysterious storyteller who starts telling us a story to pass the time about some lovers in Venice. It’s a beautiful, beautiful film, and I play a sort of island girl. He is unique, and what he brought into my life is unique.

 

JH: He was a generation before Derek Jarman, wasn’t he?

TS: Yeah, he is the same age as my father. And he is the same generation as my great teachers Margot Heinemann and Raymond Williams, who were these great socialist writers I knew at Cambridge. He was another foster father for me. I had read Ways of Seeing (1972) when I was at school. It just blew my mind, as it blew most people’s minds. He feels like a witness to an invaluable experience.

 

JH: “Witness” is a good word.

TS: He is from the generation of our parents but he feels like an ally in a different way, in a quiet, original way. One of the reasons that I wanted to make Harvest (2016) — which is the last of our four films together — is because the first film became about the two of us talking about our fathers, and I wanted the last film to be about our children. I wanted to share how interested he is in their ideas. He always claims that what he is doing as a storyteller is listening. He is listening to other people’s lives. He wrote letters for illiterate soldiers during the war. When someone would say, “I want to write to say how much I love her but I can’t find the words,” he would say, “Would you maybe like to say it like this?” It was an amazing training for a storyteller.

 

JH: I guess that’s sort of what we are talking about when we discuss continuation; this through line where we are all interpreting the work of those that have gone before us and maybe adding a little something to it.

TS: I think his attitude of attention to the world outside of him has been incredibly supportive to me. I mean, certainly, when you are a young artist you’re given to understand sometimes that you’re supposed to have a lot more interest in yourself than you might have. And he — for me, anyway — he validated: “No, you’re not as interesting as anything out there. Go look. It’s fine not to be caught up in yourself.” Which is really a great thing. I want more of John Berger than I fear the universe is going to give us.

 

JH: When you look on YouTube, you see a lot of clips from him in the 1970s, then there’s a little bit in the early 1980s, and then he sort of disappears. It’s incredibly urgent to get him today, with the perspective of time. It seems he’s even more relevant in this postdigital age. We believed the Internet would expand our view of time and space and our relational connectivity but actually it’s reduced communications to a very small, narrow bandwidth. Tell me about the “cultural resistance movement” because this is something that I’ve held on to a long time, but I want to understand what that term means to you.

TS: I have to really think when it started to mean something to me. Because practically speaking, the idea of resistance, or feeling oneself swimming upstream, or just feeling slightly out of kilter with those around one was something I was familiar with from a very early age. But when did I start to feel there might be other people who were also swimming the same way? I feel like it was late in my life. When I left school and went to South Africa as a volunteer, I was aware that I was swimming against the political current there. One of the things I’m very, very moved by with my own children is that they have the good fortune to be living through a different education than I did. They know their life has begun and they would have said that when they were eleven or eight. I didn’t feel that my life had begun at their age. I was sitting it out through my childhood — well, between about ten and eighteen, when I left school.

 

JH: What I got from the notion of a cultural resistance movement was this idea of being in opposition to things like inequalities in cultures, so when Derek was fighting for gay rights, when there was class war and Thatcher was in power and there was so much
nationalist pride — these kinds of reductive notions were pervasive and dominant in culture, and the idea of being a cultural resistance movement was saying, “No, we’re not agreeing to that. We have our own codes and practises.”

TS: But the first step even before saying that is to turn and face someone else and say, “Hey, we’re in this together.” So even before you get your message together and turn to the rest of the world and say, “We’re saying this,” there is this amazing, exhilarating moment when you realise you’re not the only one and there is somebody else. And if you feel alienated as a child or as a young person and are slightly led to believe that you are in the minority, that the world thinks one thing and you think another, then when you start to make alliances and recognise fellow travellers it is beyond. It’s a wonderful, wonderful thing. I suppose I started doing that properly when I met Derek. That was when I realised that there were people who felt so many of the things I had felt… It was like going through the looking glass. I can’t put it more simply than that. “Right, there is a universe there and other people exist, too,” and that was amazing. I first met Derek in 1985, when he asked me to be in Caravaggio. He was already a very visible figure on the cultural landscape of this country.

 

JH: Yeah, Jubilee had already come out. He was one of the first people to be very vocal about being HIV-positive, wasn’t he?

TS: I honestly believe that when Derek became aware that he was HIV positive and when he owned it publicly, it was a real grounding for him in the way in which we were talking earlier about the idea of being linked up to some kind of force that goes through you. It was as if he was — I won’t say he was removed previously — but he was plugged in at that point more than he had ever been. There was something that had plugged him in as a cultural activist, beyond being an artist. I mean, he became HIV-positive in ’89 and he quite quickly publicly declared it. At that time many people were terrified and silent about their HIV status. I hate to say this, but it’s not that hard to imagine now because people are still saying ridiculous things in some parts of the world — people were talking about HIV-positive people being shipped away and put on some kind of plague islands, and not being able to get insurance or not being able to get mortgages or losing their jobs or their homes.

JH: He was doing it for everyone else. He was doing it for the hundreds of thousands of people who were living with the stigma but unable to tell their friends and family that they were positive.

TS: It was a sort of penny drop for him in terms of his service.

 

JH: It was heroic.

TS: It was, but at the same time he couldn’t have done anything else, and it did cause him a lot of grief. That doesn’t mean to say that it wasn’t a selfl ess act, but it served him, too, like all the best selfless acts.

 

JH: When you met him in that creative underground scene in London, of experimental filmmaking, theatre, performance, art, photography, club culture — that sense of a creative milieu must have been so rich, so much came from that period that it must have felt like a cultural resistance movement; no one was doing it for money, no one had any money. Today, that seems increasingly rare.

TS: It’s phenomenal to think that only twenty-five to thirty years ago, someone like Leigh Bowery was living and working in the way that he was. You look at that work, look at those performances, look at those costumes, you look at those looks — beyond looks, those artworks — and you realise that he made them very often for one time only. Not for film, but for the people who happened to go to that party that night. It was a completely different, existential thing. Process not product. Unique, original, authentic experience not reproducible units for widespread, impersonal sale.

 

JH: It was a really interesting thing to feel that what we were doing at Dazed & Confused and AnOther Magazine was in this tradition of independent creativity — a resistance movement that was also against pop culture, or a popular culture that had a political agenda.

TS: It occurs to me to look at this term “cultural resistance,” because although I completely accept and support it — I’m not nitpicking about it — I do want to say that there’s an alternative to thinking about oneself as a resistance, which is thinking of oneself, or realising, that one is at the centre. That one’s not peripheral, one’s not alternative, that one is at the centre. There isn’t one mainstream and the rest are some twiddly little burns just running down the hills and sort of dribbling into a puddle, but that there are many, many mainstreams, and one man’s mainstream is another man’s puddle, and one man’s puddle is another man’s mainstream.

 

JH: Many streams in a delta.

TS: Many streams in a delta! And that feeling of being excluded somehow ties up with the idea of being a resistance, because one needs a certain force to resist something.

 

JH: There was a lot of that in the 1980s; there was a lot of violence, a lot more tribal identity and commonality — with the multiplicity of options today do you think the power or force of opposition is perhaps lessened?

TS: It brings with it its own problems — it brings with it a potential lack of focus. I don’t want for a second to sound nostalgic but there’s no question that in the 1980s and early 1990s when times were really dark politically in this country and when very sinister things were being put forward, it was clearly a choice to be, as you say, in resistance.

 

JH: What were you fighting for — Derek and your tribe?

TS: We were fighting just to be our own mainstream, not to be excluded or marginalised or dismissed or disenfranchised. And to dignify our audience by the fellowship of the company we keep with them.

 

JH: Did you seek validation from the establishment, or was that not part of the agenda?

TS: One of the things that was really true about Derek, and I’m sure he’d agree if he was sitting here at the table — so I’m sure he is giggling somewhere as I say this — is that he had this great indignation because he was from a privileged background, very well educated, and he saw himself as this sort of heir to a classical trajectory, and yet he felt himself marginalised because he was a gay man and was completely out as a gay man. He was really indignant that he was not placed at the centre of the culture. So he would absolutely support this idea of resistance, because he did — he resisted the fact that he was being marginalised, dismissed.

 

JH: What is your cultural resistance movement? What does it mean to you to do the Ballerina Ballroom Cinema of Dreams [a pop-up cinema in Nairn], to do The Maybe [a sleep project in art institutions]? What does it mean to you to make the films you make, to spend years developing independent movies?

TS: For me, it’s a question of being a witness. I mean, I don’t carry with me that sense of having been persecuted the same way as Derek did, but I am the witness to those who do carry that sense, and I am really enlivened to do what I can to bear witness and do whatever I can to represent and keep company with them. If I am creative at all it’s because of my ability to have conversations with people and to connect with other people.

 

JH: This whole thing about collaboration is such a part of this book and my work, and what I relate to is this ability of yours to work within a family of creators but also to extend that to be constantly bringing in new influences, constant new participants to challenge your own way of thinking. Do you see collaboration as a compromise, or do you see it as a gift?

TS: I don’t know. I do occasionally work alone. I work as a writer by myself, of course, and a few times made pieces of work that are conceived and articulated as pieces of work by myself.

 

JH: How do you do it? What’s your process?

TS: Well, I keep thinking during this conversation of this example Jonah Lehrer gave in his book Imagine (2012) — he was talking about a study people have made about creativity but they had taken the example of the Broadway musicals. They had taken the most successful Broadway musicals and they realised that there was a correlation between a string of very successful productions. The ones that worked consistently were the ones that were made by a core of the same people, but always with the inclusion of a little something extra, an element of change. And it just kept pushing the form. And all the way through this conversation between you and me, I keep thinking of this because that really speaks to me. I think the reason it speaks to me is because when you ask me the question, “How does collaboration work for you?” I just picture myself in a state of curiosity about the conversation, and that’s why I’ve been very thoughtful. I’ve started with Derek and it’s kind of extraordinary that I’ve been able to make these other collaborations after that very long, very thoughtful collaboration. And I keep going on finding more collaborations, and it’s amazing to me. And now I’ve worked several times with Jim Jarmusch, several times with Olivier Saillard, with Bong Joon-Ho, with Luca Guadagnino — and that’s just only from the past four years! And when I think back about the Jonah Lehrer example, it’s all about a new strand of a familiar and compelling conversation, it’s a new chemical reaction, it’s a new set of synapses, and for whatever reason, it makes me tick. Without it, I would run aground.

 

JH: And how important is play in creativity?

TS: It’s everything, absolutely everything. And what I mean by “play,” if this is what you mean, is a sense of spontaneous connection, making it up as you go along. Which I know is a cause dear to your heart, because I was looking at evidence of it yesterday morning: I was moving some books onto a shelf and I saw the Dazed book, and I thought it’s such a great title, because that’s how I feel about life in general and making work in particular.

 

JH: The title of this one is We Can’t Do This Alone. The idea that we are part of a tradition — that we wouldn’t be doing this now if it weren’t for those who had come before us. Also, we can’t do this alone physically because I am a product of the people I collaborate with; it’s very much about their input, and also “we” as to who it is for — the work is not for me, it’s for others… It’s really interesting because everything you have talked about has echoed the search that I’m on for understanding why I am attracted to those kinds of storytellers.

TS: Absolutely. And my sense of how you work is that you feel yourself deeply connected to your audience. And that is incredibly important as a creative input as well. It’s not all done in a vacuum; it’s done with that force field that one’s there to be in dialogue.

 

JH: I’m the fan. I take the point of view of the audience.

TS: Exactly. There are all these myths abound that we are all very different; that life is incredibly long and that we can get out of it alive and that we can get away without experiencing pain and heartbreak and joy and miracles. And that myth is a real obstacle, so it feels to me that one of the things we can do, in the movement of cultural resistance, is to dissolve as much as we can the bonds of that myth, to encourage people to recognise and acknowledge how short life is, and how worthwhile it is getting real and honest about all of the wonderful things and difficult things, and sharing and feeling a sense of trust and engagement with each other before it’s too late! It feels to me that that’s what the force of the resistance movement is about. It’s about disillusioning people that they can usefully be distracted from the real stuff. Some of it is really tough and difficult, but at the same time, the really miraculous stuff resides in it as well.

 

JH: What I am trying to do with the book is provide the reader with a toolkit of ideas to unlock the future possibilities, and say that everything is possible.

TS: I believe that’s a really responsible thing to do. It’s not just an exciting thing. I think it is responsible exactly because of all the things we have been talking about — the line, the torchbearers, all the way back to William Blake. It is possible for that thread to be lost if one doesn’t bear witness to it. It’s a point of responsibility and point of record to bear witness to the line, to the baton, the race…

 

JH: It’s always been key to me to empower youth. What do you think we can learn from them?

TS: What can youth teach us? One word: illusionment.

 

Tilda Swinton in conversation with Jefferson Hack, June 16, 2015