« I never wanted to be an actress » – Diepresse.com

They recently got the honorary bears of the Berlin Film Festival. Congratulations, how great is the joy of this award?

Tilda Swinton: Thank you very much! Incidentally, I love what you wear there, the brooch on the jacket. I am a fan of brooches and medals. My father was general and I always admired him when he went out for official dinner. My father radiated the big glamor because he was wearing his uniform. I really liked that.

They are the one who always knows how to surprise with imaginative outfits. What is the motivation for this?

I would like to have the authorization to play with every form, every narrative, every identity. Because I look as I look, I made friends very early on how to act like a transition. The fact that I accepted this at a young age gave me freedom: I didn’t have to take identity to explore something else because I always hovered somewhere in between. I always felt this as one of the most fertile, most sensible and most honorable aspects of performing: to remain fluent in being a dog in one minute, in the next an old lady.

An honor is usually an occasion for a look into the past. Do you remember your first festival with the film « Caravaggio »?

Absolutely! I just had a wonderful experience. If you get an honorary bear, you can choose a film that is to be shown. And without hesitation I chose an almost forgotten film by Peter Wollen with the title « Friendship’s Death », from 1986. When I introduced it to the zoopalast, I realized that I was exactly in the same place as in 1986 with Derek Jarman when he presented « Caravaggio », which would be 40 years ago.

Then did you know that you wanted to be an actress?

I never wanted to be an actress. That is not what I stand for. I knew I wanted to make films and wanted to work with filmmakers. In the past 40 years I have mainly worked as a performing filmmaker and as a producer.

When did you first describe yourself as an actress?

I never have that. Because it doesn’t feel that way.

If I think of my origin, at that time with Derek Jarman, it wasn’t acting. My appearances in his home movies are absolutely autobiographical, improvised and written. So I don’t play, I’m not an actress.

You are also a writer. Is writing another facet of your creative connection that you have in filmmaking?

I was a writer and even got a place at the university because I was a poet. And as soon as I was at the university, I stopped writing. I had a crisis. At this point I met a number of friends who wrote to pieces interested in pieces or plays as authors, directed and played along. And they invited me to do the same. I staged a few pieces and started playing in it myself. So everything came. Sometimes I think that is my way of writing.

You can currently be seen in « The End », an end -time drama by Joshua Oppenheimer. What has she irritated about the figure of the supposedly perfect mother who has been sitting in a luxury bunker with her family for 25 years?

At first I was a great admirer of Joshua’s documentation. When he sent me the script, it caught me. The idea of ​​what the film could look like was like a seed grain that was more and more in mind.

You have made an allusion that you want to start a new project and have to pause for a year. Do you reveal what you do?

There are projects that I develop and that take up my time. I can’t do it on the side. I have to be at home and work on them, that doesn’t work while doing a film at the same time.

Do you feel that your responsibility is growing as an artist because you are in such a special position?

No. I am pretty instinctive. I don’t always do the right thing. It just felt like the right one that I could do at that moment.