With four films opening in 2014 in the U.S. — including Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel and Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive — the 53-year-old’s celebrity only stands to grow. But Swinton could scarcely care less.
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AUSTIN — Tilda Swinton sits in a wide-open hotel conference room wrapped in a thick, cream-colored sweater so large it could fit two of her. Swinton's most recent films, The Grand Budapest Hotel (which opened last weekend) and Only Lovers Left Alive (which opens April 11), are playing at the SXSW Film Festival, and outside attendees are huddled underneath umbrellas as downtown Austin is soaked with a steady stream of cold, gray rain. And indeed, when asked how she is doing, Swinton's otherworldly face is also downcast — but for an unexpected reason.
"I've never been here before," she says. "I'm going this evening, and it's a bit sucky. It looks great out there and we're missing it all. Anyway. We'll all have to come back."
That ability to see the great good fun hidden inside what most others would describe as damp misery is one of the many reasons Swinton has become a figure of endless fascination to an eclectic cluster of fans. Starting her career in the world of avant-garde cinema and theater in the 1980s and '90s, Swinton has brought her ethereal, androgynous presence to an increasingly wider audience with roles in films like 2001's Vanilla Sky with Tom Cruise, 2005's Constantine with Keanu Reaves, and as the White Witch in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in 2005. Swinton won an Oscar for her turn as a morally bankrupt corporate lawyer in the 2007 thriller Michael Clayton, and she's since worked with the Coen Brothers and David Fincher, and to wide acclaim as the desperate mother of a sociopath in Lynne Ramsey's film We Need to Talk About Kevin.
This year, Swinton, 53, will appear in at least four films in four wildly different roles. She plays an elderly dowager in Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel, which expands its theatrical run this weekend. In Only Lovers Left Alive, from writer-director Jim Jarmusch (Broken Flowers), she stars as a regal, ancient vampire named Eve who reunites with her beloved, a vampire named Adam (Tom Hiddleston) living in Detroit. On June 27, Swinton will appear in Snowpiercer — the first English-language film from acclaimed South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho (The Host) — as the dowdy administrator of a giant train containing what's left of humanity after a climate-change apocalypse. And this summer, Swinton will play Christoph Waltz's therapist in Terry Gilliam's The Zero Theorem.
With so many opportunities for American audiences to see Swinton, her unique celebrity has every chance of growing that much larger. But in a conversation with BuzzFeed, she explains why she simply cannot be bothered by fame — and why she thinks Facebook is doomed.
Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton in Only Lovers Left Alive.
Sony Pictures Classics
I understand Only Lovers Left Alive was in development for a particularly protracted period of time?
Tilda Swinton: Well, I say it's eight years. Jim [Jarmusch], I think, says it's less. But I think it was like eight years ago that he rang me up and said, "Hey, man, let's do a vampire film." I'm really glad it took that length of time, because the right band came together, and you need that. You can't go too soon.
Was the notion of immortality what connected with you for the project?
TS: The more I think about it, the more I think [the film] is more about love than it is about being a vampire. It's about a long life and a long love, and the idea of them being so long lived, so long loving that they are vampires — she's 3,000 years old, and he's 500 — is kind of a secondary thing. Their outsider status, I think, is where the whole vampire trope kicks in. The two of them against the world.
But the thing that drew me in was Jim. Frankly, if Jim said he wanted to make a film about that bottle of water, I would be inclined to say, "Let's do it." When he first mentioned to me that he wanted to make a vampire film, one of the responses that came to my head — I'm not sure I actually said it — was, "But hang on, haven't you been making vampire films all along?" Because it really is like Jim has been making vampire films for years. His nocturnal world and that dreamscape that he so regularly lives in his films seems so hypnotic.
Is it usually the filmmaker that draws you in to a project?
TS: Pretty much without any exception, yeah.
What is it about specific filmmakers that you are so attracted to? What is it about Jim Jarmusch or Wes Anderson or Bong Joon-ho?
TS: I think off the top of my head, the lowest common denominator would be that they are master filmmakers who create their own worlds. That's the thing that I feel, as a film fan, what draws me forward. It's a really delicious thing to know someone's work as well as I knew Jim's, for example, before I met him. And then to be invited into that world? It's like in Mary Poppins, when they step into the chalk drawings. If you are a film nut and you're invited into those worlds, if you love those worlds, it's kind of a trip. I think that's really the thing.
Jim, particularly, because I feel I'd grown up with Jim. I first saw Stranger Than Paradise when I was a student, and for all of us European film nerds, he was really significant because he was the first American independent filmmaker who framed an America from a kind of alien's point of view. You know, he felt like a Bulgarian filmmaker. And yet he was American! It was something we could really chew on. It felt like he built a bridge for us. And then, you know, I was hooked.
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