The movie Tilda Swinton worked on for 17 years: “It’s the journey”
There is perhaps no modern actor as versatile and effortlessly fascinating as Tilda Swinton. In an industry that usually opts for playing it safe, Swinton is one of the few true creative forces who always work outside the box, playing characters that nobody else could play and selecting projects that always defy our expectations.
Whether it be her early collaborations with Luca Guadagnino as a voiceless rockstar or her infamous portrayal of the White Queen, the actor has never been one to take a safe route, discussing her creative philosophy at the SXSW festival and how true authenticity takes time to flourish, sometimes even decades.
One of Swinton’s greatest performances is in Memoria, directed by the great Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, following a woman who wakes up one night hearing a loud thudding noise that nobody else can hear. It’s a quietly haunting story about someone trying to make sense of life, pain and unanswerable tragedies, with collective memories from around the world manifesting in a noise that she cannot escape.
It’s a beautifully crafted project, with each shot looking like a standalone masterpiece that could be printed and framed in a gallery, with Swinton’s character gradually exploring how empathy is becoming a dying and rare quality, not quite fitting into the world because she feels more than the people around her who have blocked themselves off to the experiences of others. However, Jessica feels the memories of other people as if they are her own, and she is unable to detach from the lives of those who cross her path.
Despite being a masterpiece, Swinton described how the film took many years to come to fruition, and while many projects take a while to enter the world, Memoria took nearly 20 years. The patience required to wait this long is almost unfathomable, but Swinton adopted a very wise approach that helped enrich her performance once the time came.
When discussing this, Swinton shared how this lengthy chunk of time actually enhanced the story once it was eventually made, saying, “The film I made with Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Memoria, we talked about it for 17 years. It’s fine, it’s the journey, and it evolves during that. If you set yourself the task to write that novel in a year, or to write that album, put it out and win a Grammy, or whatever. Be careful because that stuff’s breakable. That’s shatterable. Keep your dreams soft and malleable and flexible and porous and fun. That’s what I say.”
It’s a lovely sentiment that shows just how precious our ideas truly are. We might think that we ought to rush and bring everything into the world as soon as it crosses our mind, but in reality, good art takes time to develop and turn into the thing it is supposed to be, only maturing the idea you have and allowing it to grow.
After many years in the business, Swinton is a fountain of knowledge, and while everyone might be rushing to become the next big thing, she recognises that time is not only beneficial but crucial to the creative process, leading us to become the artists we were always meant to be.
