Do you think that’s why you seem to connect with such visually inventive directors?
I think so. That’s what I’m in it for, that’s why I started. I started with Derek Jarman, Sally Potter, Peter Warren. These are filmmakers who work within a frame. And the interesting thing is that for many years – I don’t think they would really mind me saying – is that for a long time I worked with filmmakers who would not have claimed to be great writers. They were filmmakers. Actually, for a long time, I worked with filmmakers who were principally painters. And then Jim of course is, not principally, but he’s also a musician. So, there’s this sort of hyphenated sort of relationship somehow. I don’t think I’ve worked very often with … well, the Coen Brothers work with a lot of actors who work in the theater, me being not one, but Ethan writes plays sometimes. So I suppose they’re the closest I’ve come to filmmakers who have kind of a relationship with theater. I don’t tend to have that. The whole motivation thing? I don’t tend to work with actors who do that thing. I don’t really know what it is.
I wanted to ask you about two other films. First of all, “The Souvenir.” I don’t know if you secretly ever check out social media, but it seems like a day doesn’t go by that a critic who wasn’t at Sundance…
Were you at Sundance?
Yeah, “The Souvenir” was the last movie I saw, actually. It was amazing. And they are, you know, every day I see someone else raving about it.
Oh good, I’m so glad.
What was that experience like and why should people be excited about Joanna Hogg as a filmmaker?
Well, I mean, Joanna is literally my oldest friend in that she’s the person I’ve known the longest in my life who I’m not related to. We met when we were 10 and I have been with her through her whole life, including the events that “The Souvenir: is about. In fact, I’m actually in the film. I’m that best friend who she’s talking to on the couch and I’m the one who’s in her student films.
I did not realize this.
So it’s very, very close to home. I know her mother very well so she came to me and said, “I’m going to make a film about this period in my life that you remember very well and I want you to play my mother” or rather, “the mother,” but I think we all know the reality [of the situation]. She’s being very generous with being honest about that, being candid, I should say because she’s not deceiving anybody but it’s a big thing for her to be generous like that. And then as luck would have it, she’s looking for someone who’s not an actress, who doesn’t want to be an actress, who’s more comfortable behind the camera than in front of it and we’re looking, looking, looking, and lo and behold, the perfect person is my daughter Honor who stepped in front of the frame and was the perfect choice and that’s that. And so it’s been quite extraordinary. It’s been a little bit “Synecdoche, New York.” I won’t tell a lie. I mean, when she recreated the apartment exactly –
Oh really?
Exactly. And what was really interesting is that we weren’t allowed back into the old apartment, the new owner wouldn’t let us go. So, she recreated it with her production designer from memories and photographs. And she had been taking so many photographs and photographs of the vistas out of the windows, so you do slightly wonder if the filmmaker in her wasn’t unconsciously like storing nuts for the winter 30 years later.
O.K., that is honestly impressive.
Isn’t that amazing? But she is, back to your second question, the reason people should be really interested in Joanna Hogg is because she is the real deal. She is a new auteur in cinema and has a new way of working. I mean, there are, I’m sure, other people who work this way, but she has a very precise way of interpreting it. She works without a screenplay, without a script of any kind. We improvise. There is a document that’s like a sort of short story which some people see and not everybody, and she works in chronological order.
So, when you get a call list, “Okay, we’re shooting on Monday or Tuesday or whatever,”…
Well, I was in a slightly privileged position because I knew what happens because I was living through it, so I did know what the arc was and I knew what certain scenes were. But for example, Honor knew nothing. Absolutely nothing. She did not know. So when a certain piece of news was broken to her at the dinner table, that is her not knowing anything. When a certain piece of news is broken to her by her mother, that was news to her. It’s pretty intense. And there are only a few details towards the end of the film more than the beginning and the middle, towards the end it becomes more precise. Those scenes at the end, I think the words that the mother says on the stairs at a certain very important moment are the words that were said in reality. And there’s a scene at the end in the bedroom with the mother and the daughter that is an exact the recreation of what happened. But most other things are riffs because the film is so much about memory. What’s her memory? What’s my memory of 30 years ago? I don’t know how accurate we are. She doesn’t know how accurate we are. We’ve kind of made a stab at it. But it’s a very interesting thing.
There’s a scene where your character is showing up at her apartment I think with luggage or something. This sounds minuscule, but on that day does is it actually just Joanna going, “O.K., so you’re going to be arriving,” and the D.P is just like, “How should we shoot this?”
Yeah, it’s a little bit like that. And then what happens is she’s going, “You’re going to be arriving and you’ve been shopping.” And I actually for that moment did say to Joanna, “You know, something that…” because we’re sort of thinking of how to just put in these little strands of information about tips of the iceberg of big relationship arcs that we know we’re not going to show. We’re just showing the tip. There was a thing that my sainted mother used to do. There was a while when I stopped squatting when I was living in a flat that she owned in London. And I said to Joanna, “She used to bring odd pieces of furniture down from Scotland that didn’t fit in the flat at all, and like an occasional table or something and say, ‘Daddy was going to and I think this might be good.” To be unfair, I would say that it was a slightly proprietorial way of [my mother] saying “This is my flat and I’m going to populate it with this if I want to.” But it was also sort of a way of showing a mismatch of what I needed because I needed to be in a squat with my friends. So she said, “Great. Let’s do that.” And then we went into the prop store and I’m already in costume and I go, “What is that here?” “What about this lamp?” “Okay, let’s do it with this lamp. Let’s do it with the light. Let’s do it and take one.” And the dogs are there and the lovely thing about the dogs is that, and my daughter, it’s kind of chaos. We love a little bit of mess and chaos, so that’s how it works. And then Honor didn’t know I was going to arrive with the lamp. So then “Oh, where are we going to do with this?” She doesn’t know.
On to a completely different subject, you also happened to return as the Ancient One in “Avengers: Endgame.” How long ago did you shoot that and was that the hardest secret you’ve had to keep quiet about in your career?
I was amazed that eventually the secret was actually let out by one of the producers who was being asked a while ago about how difficult it was to schedule everybody in “Endgame.” And he said, “Oh, it was very difficult. For example, Tilda Swinton was only going to be available for a day.” And apparently, the internet went. There’s a funny answer to that question. I actually shot it twice. We shot the first the summer before last in something like July and then I went back last September to re-shoot it because there was some tiny, well, now that we’ve seen the film, we realize how crucial[the] plot clarifications about the stones having to be put back [were]. And that had to be just re-clarified. So I went back over a year later to shoot that scene to make sure that that was absolutely precise.
Was Mark Ruffalo also in that reshoot?
Yeah, yeah. There we were again more than a year later.
And just really quickly, you’ve already been in some big hits but this one might be…
I think they say the biggest.
Isn’t that sort of crazy to think it might be?
You are talking about “The Dead Don’t Die,” aren’t you?
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Touche, Ms. Swinton. Touche.
“The Dead Don’t Die” opens in theaters on June 14. “The Souvenir” opens in limited release in New York and Los Angeles tomorrow.