It strikes me that the Scottish actress is firmly grounded in traditional values that makes her stand out in the Hollywood crowd. She actually lives in Scotland and probably a place which is rural gathering that one of the more exciting topic of discussion is about the greenfly which we may know as aphids.
She is indeed unpretentious and many of the movies she has acted in are the independent types. Her talentes were recognised with a best supporting actress Academy Award in the 2008 "Michael Clayton". She lives with her artist husband and two children far from the papparazzi. Her attitude in coming over to Tinseltown is to adopt the mindset of a tourist. That means maybe to overlook the undercurrents of jealously, resentment and backstabbing and to enjoy the pleasures of this famed city of make-believe before returning to the comfortable surroundings of the Scottish glens.
She is indeed very intelligent. She studied literature at Cambridge where she wrote poems which explains her panchent for looking into the human condition. She seems to know what was her niche and decided that stage work was not for her which explains why she went into independent films where the studio hands were not so heavy on the interpretation and expression of scripts or plots. 'I slid sideways into the theatre, basically because of the company I was keeping,' she says, 'and a feeling of experimenting with friends who were really into theatre. I was totally undriven.'
She is indeed a actor of the first order who pursues the inner workings of the characters she plays:
"As a performer I like looking at the gaps between what people want to communicate and what they can communicate. I love good film-making that isn't just about really proficient writers of dialogue, who think that everybody's really articulate and everybody can hear each other really well. That doesn't feel true to me, actually. I mean, that's a fantastical universe"
Ah! We have all been there where after a conversation or even an argument, we wished we had said that witty line or knock-them-dead putdowns but all we could come up with was an inane remark like "Shut up" or just screwed up one's face at your distractors. It's certainly different in the movies where every word uttered gels so perfectly with the gestures and facial expresssions. I can't but help but think of Jack Nicholson's tour-de-force performance in the "You can't handle the truth" speech from "A Few Good Men."
I liked what she says that she is drawn to characters confronting these moments of crisis, when the trajectory of a life is radically altered. Such events as in life brings about profound changes in outlook and points of views. Such is the building blocks of great stories where the main characters have to deal with changes whether within or beyond him or her.
"She circles repeatedly back to the idea of all human behaviour as a kind of performance, an idea that the self-dramatising Mame might well espouse. What attracts her to acting is the mystery of what resides behind the masks people wear.'Starting to imagine or to notice how inscrutable we all are to one another, that's where my interest in wanting to be a performer came from,' she says. This seems ironic considering that actors are themselves putting on masks to portray their characters revealing one thing to someone esle but something else to another as mentioned in these lines "
'These surfaces and veils exist. We take off one for one person, and several for another. But there is always a difference between what you show to others and what you show to yourself in the mirror.' This is quite the insight into one's own pysche of what one wants to show to the world and what one really bares in front of the mirror.
This comment by the journalist certainly is what movie and in turn great story-telling is to allow the audience to catch a glimpse or even enter into the world and workings of characters who populate and enrich for better or worse the world we live in.
"The actor's challenge, and it is one that Swinton meets with a rare clarity and precision, is to explore this process of concealment and revelation. Meanwhile those in the audience, gazing into the mirror of art, can perhaps come a little closer to seeing themselves."
Actress from 'another planet' Published on Jan 2, 2012
New York - 'I live on another planet, fortunately, and we do things differently there,' Tilda Swinton says over tea and a slight case of the sniffles at the Bowery Hotel in the East Village. Somehow this does not seem a revelatory confession coming from this singular and singular-looking actress, who is promoting her latest movie, We Need To Talk About Kevin. It is an elliptical psychodrama about a mother, played by Swinton, whose son commits an atrocity that leaves her feeling alienated and complicit. She has racked up Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild nominations for her role. The movie is not yet slated for release in Singapore, though.The actress naturally radiates a certain otherworldliness, as of a creature who has just been zapped to Earth from a distant galaxy and has not yet discovered how to manipulate the tools of ordinary human discourse. The effect derives from her androgynous beauty, of course: the luminous, almost translucent skin, the sleek planes of her face, the architectural sweep of David Bowie-blond hair and the twig-like frame. For when Swinton, 51, speaks, she becomes unmistakably human: funny, friendly, thoughtful, intelligent but unpretentious. Background story 'When I visit Hollywood, I come in and out like a tourist, and I am really happy to be a tourist' Scottish actress Tilda Swinton on HollywoodThe planet she refers to is not an actual one or even the busy world of Hollywood, but the place she literally lives. 'I live in a part of Scotland where people are more likely to talk about problems with greenfly' than news of the film world, she says, referring to an insect more commonly known elsewhere as the aphid.Despite her increasingly high profile as an actress with one of those coveted gold statuettes to her name - she took home a supporting actress Oscar for Michael Clayton in 2008 - she insists she inhabits the world of mainstream film only as an alien visitor. In Scotland, she lives with her twin children and her partner, the painter Sandro Kopp.'Aside from the odd skirmish, such as going to Cannes, Scotland is where I live year round. I have no other home,' she says. 'When I visit Hollywood, I come in and out like a tourist, and I am really happy to be a tourist.' Directed by Lynne Ramsay (Ratcatcher, 1999, Morvern Callar, 2002), We Need To Talk About Kevin exerts an unsettling, hallucinatory pull, in part because it relies more on imagery than language to draw us inside the spiralling thoughts of the central character. Odd though it may seem for a woman who speaks with such lucidity and fluidity, it was precisely the general absence of conventional dialogue that drew her to the role. 'For me that is grace,' she says of her character's dumbstruck confusion in the face of her irrevocably altered life. She adds: 'I am really interested in silence. In inarticulacy also, which isn't the same as silence. As a performer I like looking at the gaps between what people want to communicate and what they can communicate. I love good film-making that isn't just about really proficient writers of dialogue, who think that everybody's really articulate and everybody can hear each other really well. That doesn't feel true to me, actually. I mean, that's a fantastical universe.' The idea certainly resonates in Kevin, through which Swinton's character often wanders like a mute ghost. It also applies to Swinton's quietly charged performance in I Am Love (2009), in which she plays a Milanese wife whose insular world is shattered by the discovery of erotic love. Her character in that movie, a Russian in the alien world of Italian high society, is similarly withdrawn, living inside her head until a sensual awakening changes the pattern of her life. She says she is drawn to characters confronting these moments of crisis, when the trajectory of a life is radically altered. Swinton studied literature at Cambridge, where she wrote poetry. 'I slid sideways into the theatre, basically because of the company I was keeping,' she says, 'and a feeling of experimenting with friends who were really into theatre. I was totally undriven.'Early stage ventures, including a short stint with the Royal Shakespeare Company, convinced her that theatre 'wasn't the right trousers', as she idiomatically puts it. She slid on a new pair when she met the experimental film-maker Derek Jarman, forming an artistic collaboration that ended only with his death in 1994 from complications from Aids. They made films together - larger and smaller, scrappy and polished - although it was Swinton's role as the swashbuckling, gender-changing title character in Sally Potter's Orlando (1992), based on the Virginia Woolf novel, that brought her to international attention. 'The way I worked with Derek and Sally during those first nine years was really spoiling, really specific,' she remembers. 'And, I now realise, really rare. It put me up a gum tree. It didn't get me any closer to being a proper actor or involved with industrial cinema. It was where I learnt to work collectively and it's where I learnt what producing is and it's where I learnt at one remove the job of film-making. Those directors expected their team to all be film-makers. That's not an orthodox actor's training.' Her entry into industrial film-making came as haphazardly as her sideways tilt into an acting career. After her acclaimed performance in the independent movie The Deep End (2001), as the mother of a gay son she suspects has committed a murder, offers from film-makers from outside her family of collaborators started to come. But Swinton finds that there is a natural continuity between the two kinds of work. She says: 'The truth is, in 25 years I've made about only five or six true studio films, and to me all of them have been with experimental film-makers. It may be that David Fincher has $200 million or whatever to make a movie, but like the other directors I've worked with, he is always messing with the form and still working in a way that felt familiar to me.'She seems content to allow the flow of her career to unfold without conscious direction, caring primarily for the film-making company she keeps. She notes that friendships with both Luca Guadagnino, the director of I Am Love, and Ramsay, the Scottish director, preceded her collaborations with both. She and Guadagnino have hatched a plan to film a remake of Auntie Mame with Swinton in the title role. It is hard to picture Swinton, whose characters on screen often seem to be reverberating with repression, as the flamboyant celebrator of life in Patrick Dennis' novel. But she circles repeatedly back to the idea of all human behaviour as a kind of performance, an idea that the self-dramatising Mame might well espouse. What attracts her to acting is the mystery of what resides behind the masks people wear.'Starting to imagine or to notice how inscrutable we all are to one another, that's where my interest in wanting to be a performer came from,' she says. Referring to the central incident in We Need To Talk About Kevin, and perhaps to many another contemporary horror, she continues: 'People perpetrate atrocities and other people say, 'We didn't see it coming.' The idea that people actually wear themselves on their faces seems to me to be less real than what life actually is, which is a series of concealments and containments.'Warming to her theme, she continues: 'These surfaces and veils exist. We take off one for one person, and several for another. But there is always a difference between what you show to others and what you show to yourself in the mirror.'The actor's challenge, and it is one that Swinton meets with a rare clarity and precision, is to explore this process of concealment and revelation. Meanwhile those in the audience, gazing into the mirror of art, can perhaps come a little closer to seeing themselves. New York Times
