With her penetrating eyes and unflinching delivery Tilda Swinton is a natural at playing cold-blooded villains, from Narnia's White Witch to Constantine's Gabriel to Karen Crowder, the devious litigator in Michael Clayton.
In reality the British actress couldn't be warmer or more genuine, and in an interview with
CityNews.ca while in Toronto for the film festival she said she hopes when people see her up there on the big screen they find a friend.
"I think one of the things, and I speak as a cinephile myself, that we long to find in the cinema is company," Swinton explains in a phone call from the Windsor Arms hotel. "It's a wonderful thing that cinema can give one, beyond any art form I think. A sense of 'Oh that person's felt that too, I'm not the only one.' That's what we go to the cinema for."
The Cambridge-educated thespian was luminous on the red carpet Friday for the gala presentation of director Tony Gilroy's Michael Clayton, starring George Clooney as the title character, a lawyer specializing in helping high-profile clients out of potentially scandalous situations. Swinton's character, the anxious, ambitious Crowder, represents the agro-chemical conglomerate Clayton's called in to assist.
"At the beginning you see someone full of doubt and anxiety who's really not very comfortable in her own skin," Swinton says, noting that Crowder wasn't drawn as a purely evil character. "You see someone who's searching for some kind of perfection that clearly doesn't exist in her life, and what a mess that gets people into."
Though Hollywood has begun to give Swinton the credit she deserves in recent years, she still chooses edgy roles with filmmakers she admires. The Man from London, also showing at the festival this year, is a perfect example. Hungarian director Bela Tarr wanted the actress for the part of a railway worker's nagging wife, and she accepted without hesitation.
"Bela Tarr's landscape is a place that I've lived for a while through his film. It was really extraordinary to go back into it. To walk past the monitor and see myself and think 'That looks like a Bela Tarr film' and then to see my own face was really bizarre," she admits, joking that she'd happily "tar a road" with the respected director if he asked her to.
The Man From London is Tarr's first film in seven years. In it a railway worker finds himself in a moral quandary after finding a suitcase full of money. The 135-minute film was made in only 28 cuts, one for each scene.
"It was quite extraordinary. I've never worked with anybody who's worked in the same way (as Bela Tarr), I'm not sure there is anybody who works in the same way," says Swinton. "One rehearses for many, many hours this complicated camera move and then eventually shoots at the end of the day and we shoot to the (Mihaly Vig) score. To me it's medieval cinema, but it's supersonic at the same time."
Swinton speaks about both festival films with vigourous enthusiasm and admits she's "having a ball" in life right now.
"I was really spoiled early on when I worked with filmmakers I felt comfortable with because it could have gone downhill really fast," she says. "I could have been thrown into the industrial mill but I fortunately was able to avoid that. Life's too short to not have as much fun as you can."
Screening at TIFF07:
Michael Clayton
Fri. Sept. 7, 9:30pm
Roy Thomson Hall
Sat. Sept. 8, 12pm
Ryerson Theatre
The Man From London
Fri. Sept. 7, 6pm
Scotiabank Theatre
Sat. Sept. 8, 12:45pm
Scotiabank Theatre
Fri. Sept. 14, 8:30pm
Varsity 6
(Actress Tilda Swinton in a scene from Michael Clayton)
Laptop courtesy
LG