Tilda Swinton Discusses "I Am Love"

MakingOf: So how did you get involved with this project?

(Tilda Swinton): I sat around with my great friend Luca Guadagnino and I drank red wine, and we dreamt it up.  Over the last 11 years we'd been sort of thinking up a film that we really wanted to see.  A modern film that drew on a lot of the classical references that we love in the films of Fisconti, Douglas Sirk, John Houston, and Alfred Hitchcock.

MO: Do you find it's easier for you to work with directors that you've worked with before?

(TS): I've always worked with people I like a lot.  Some of them I've known for many years.  It's sort of the way I started.  I started working with a filmmaker who I worked alongside for nine years on seven different films and so I learned early on that working with your friends is unbeatable.  I find it hard to imagine working with people that you don't know.  I know people do it all the hard and I'm not sure that I have the skin for it (laughs).

MO: What was it like on set while you were shooting this film?

(TS): It was a big family.  A film about rich people always tends to look like a rich film but this was very hand-knit.  We kind of all made it with paper and string really.  And we all had to pull together.  We worked very hard, we more or less lived together while we shot it.  But we are all very good friends and we've known each other for such a long time we are like a sort of extended family.

MO: Who do collaborate with most closely on set?

(TS): I suppose Luca, I mean, Luca and I produced this film together.  We generated the idea ourselves.  In many ways though the days would go by when we were shooting and we realized that we'd never really had any time together because, you know, when the juggernaut starts  rolling you have to look after other people.  We were the co-hosts of the party I would say.  We were the parents.

MO: What did this movie allow you to explore that you hadn't previously?

(TS): Speaking Italian with a Russian accent maybe, I've not quite touched that before.  There was something about playing this particular woman who has this particular life, you know, sitting at the head of a table, being the mistress of a house like that.  It was a very interesting thing to just sort of download.  I've never put myself in that situation before.  It's not somewhere I'd really like to go myself again (laughs).  It's very hard work.

MO: Do you find that most of the choices you make creatively are things that you wouldn't necessarily do yourself?

(TS): Ahh, interesting.  Possibly, I had not thought of that before, but I suppose one's looking for a sort of adventure.  When it's so organic, you know, you just dream something up, and you dream up a place you'd like to go.  Recently in America I've been asked to be in films that I didn't dream up, you know, films that other people dreamed up themselves very well like Tony Gilroy, or the Cohen brothers, or David Fincher and I'll go and play with them on their sets for a minute.  Maybe they tend to ask me to do things that they might've seen me approach before.  But when I'm dreaming something up for myself it's probably good to morph into another skin.

MO: What's your favorite part of being on set?

(TS): Just the comradeship.  I love the smoke and mirrors of making films.  I love the technical aspect of it, I love the fact that it's a group thing.  And that's true also if you're working on a big film with 1500 people having lunch every day, there's this sense that I still find really amazing about a group of that many people all working towards the moment when the director says action and then everything goes quiet, and everybody waits, and then they say cut.

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