Title: ACHIEVING a STATE of LIMITLESSNESS , By: West, Dennis, West, Joan M

Title: ACHIEVING A STATE OF LIMITLESSNESS , By: West, Dennis, West, Joan M., Cineaste, 00097004, Jul93, Vol. 20, Issue 1 Database: MAS Ultra - School Edition ACHIEVING A STATE OF LIMITLESSNESS

An Interview with Tilda Swinton

Thirty-one-year-old actress Tilda Swinton, a Cambridge University graduate in Social and Political Science, is best known for her work with British director Derek Jarman, with whom she worked on Caravaggio (1986), The last of England (1987), War Requiem (1988), The Garden (1990), and Edward II (1991), for which Swinton received Best Actress Award at the Venice Film Festival. In addition to several other film roles in BFI and BBC productions, Swinton has performed on stage with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Travers Theater in Edinburgh. She recently recreated her stage role in Manfred Karge's Man to Man for a forthcoming film by John Maybury. Swinton was interviewed in June by Dennis West and Joan M. West at the Seattle International Film Festival.

Cineaste: Do you consider yourself a political person, and, if so, how did your politics affect your accepting this role?

Tilda Swinton: I can easily answer that because I did not accept this role, I devised this project with Sally Potter, and so it wasn't a matter of giving an answer but of asking a question.

Cineaste: How and when was the project conceived?

Swinton: In the beginning of 1988 I was working on the second of now three projects that I've made about, broadly speaking, gender issues. The first piece was Mozart and Salieri, a live performance in which I played Mozart and looked at the androgyny of genius. The second piece was Man to Man, a one woman show which used a monologue text by Manfred Karge, an East German writer, about a woman in Germany in the Thirties. When her husband dies, she takes on his identity because she needs his job, and then lives out the rest of her life as a man. Incidentally, this piece is now being made into a film which I hope will be released after Orlando. While I was performing Man to Man, I began to think again of Orlando, a book that I'd read when I was fifteen. It seemed to provide for me another angle at which to come at the problem of gender specification, which was not to examine an occluded gender--it's a question of sort of sublimated identity--but an idea of limitlessness through the concept of immortality.

I was beginning to have these thoughts when Sally Potter came to see my show. She rang me up afterwards, invited me to tea, and over tea asked me, "Have you ever thought of making a film of Orlando?" I said, "Funny you should say so," and she said, "Well, bingo." At the very beginning, for about eighteen months, it was just the two of us, the idea, and the book. There was no script, no money, and no producer. Those things came slowly. It wasn't apparent to us at the beginning in which order they should appear. We started to go after the money first. Because of the scope of the project, we decided that we wanted to make a film with a budget that neither of us had dealt with before, because we'd both been working in a very low budget, experimental area up until that point. We decided that these lush orchids of cash were going to come from America, so we came to the United States on a magical mystery tour looking for money.

Cineaste: Did you have any familiarity with Virginia Woolf before making the film apart from having read Orlando when you were fifteen?

Swinton: Oh, yes. Orlando was my first experience of Virginia Woolf, but afterwards I became quite devoted to her as a writer because I felt so personally addressed by Orlando, and I read as much of her as I possibly could. I still have particularly great affection for A Room of One's Own, which I read when I was a student at Cambridge and studied in depth.

Cineaste: What particular relevance do you think the character and the role have for women in Great Britain and the West today? And why is your daughter used in the motorcycle scene at the end, instead of a boy, as in the novel?

Swinton: Well, first of all, that's not my daughter; it's my brother's child, my niece. But I hope that the nature of this character has things to say not only to women but also to men, because the text of the film is crucially not only about the liberation of women but also about the liberation of men. In fact, in that it's about the liberation of humans from inherited wealth, it's absolutely, essentially, about the liberation of men.

Cineaste: Does the ending of the film suggest that the end of patriarchal society might be somewhere in foreseeable future, or that women in patriarchal society have to lose everything, like Orlando, when she loses her property?? And does the little girl in the sidecar look to the new woman of the future?

Swinton: I must remind us that this is the adaptation of a novel by Virginia Woolf which was written for a specific reason. It was written as a love letter to Vita Sackville-West, who'd been born as an aristocrat of female gender and, as such, was not able to inherit the house which she loved and which she considered to be hers. Virginia Woolf's poetic biography was written specifically with the intention of giving back Vita her house, which of course never happened in life. This was something that from the outset both myself, particularly, and Sally Potter were determined to overturn. It was very important to us that Orlando be divested of her wealth because it seems to both of us that the true way to human liberation is through liberation from occluded wealth.

It also seems to me, incidentally, that the Vita Sackville-West subtext is a hindrance to the novel and to Virginia, did she but know it, and that the writer in Virginia is occasionally interrupted and earthbound by the lover in Virginia. The great scope that Virginia takes on and enjoys so much in drawing this character and in exploring this limitlessness is actually confined by her attention, occasionally and sometimes abruptly in midflight, to actual biographical details. When Orlando marries a man, for example, we know in fact that it is because Vita Sackville- West married Harold Nicholson. And when Orlando has a child--which is an extremely sort of amorphous area in the novel which very few people remember--I can only believe in the way that the section is constructed that this was Virginia doing her duty by the facts of the case. Also, of course, it was essential that Vita have a son, coincidentally as she did, in order for her to inherit the house, and so Orlando inherits the house through her male child.

Now because we had decided to divest Orlando of the house she could not have a son, but since from the beginning we wished to place at the center of the film the great thrust of the novel through the past into the present moment, we knew that we were going to have to update the film, as it were, to update the novel anyway, because Virginia and Vita's present moment was 1928, and our present moment...well, originally it was 1988, and now it's a bit later. So we knew we had to update it.

In what I actually see to be a very faithful adaptation of the narrative of the novel, there was a momentum growing around the point of the birth of the son in the book. For all sorts of reasons that I couldn't possibly remember, let alone go into over four years of putting this adaptation together, we decided that we would retain the birth but change the gender because we had set up that Orlando could inherit the house through a son and so it seemed absolutely natural to make the child a female.

Cineaste: Does the film suggest that there may be an end in sight for patriarchal society?

Swinton: I wouldn't say precisely that it's suggesting that, except that I would hope that it's perceivable that the spirit of the film is optimistic. It takes very much as its center the idea that we must all live not dependent either on the past or on the future, but in the present, and so it tries not to make a projection into the future. What I think we do want to say, and what I hope we have made clear, is that we believe human liberation and the possibility for mortals to truly live a centered and limitless existence depends on the giving up of inherited wealth.

Cineaste: The film starts with a writer under a tree and more or less ends in a publisher's office, and with a daughter with a camcorder. Is this a reference to a new type of writing now available to new men and women?

Swinton: Orlando is crucially a novel about writing, and this was one of the really thorny problems that we had in attempting this adaptation because it's so crucially about the development of a writer's voice and a writer's consciousness, and we tackled it repeatedly. We became aware that we could not make this a film about film making in the same way that this is a novel about writing. Relatively late on, actually, we made the decision to retain the central theme of Orlando as an artist. That may sound surprising because it's so centrally about the development of an artist's sensibility, but during those four years of adaptation one tries everything, and it was quite a stretch when we were trying to fight free of it.

As anyone who's ever attempted an adaptation of a classic text of any kind knows--and I've now tackled this situation several times because Edward II, the film I made with Derek Jarman, is an adaptation of a play by Marlowe, and Man to Man is a film taken from a text meant to be spoken from the stage--the first rule of adaptation is to be as ruthless as one possibly can because one needs to test one's own sense of what the heart, the spirit, of the original piece of work is, and one can only find that out by chopping off its limbs to see which organs it cannot live without. By experimenting over these four years, we began to notice what we felt were essential organs for the survival of the spirit.

Cineaste: Why was the nationality of the Shelmerdine character changed to an American in the film? Does this have to do with America's rising economic power in the twentieth century? Also, what does the angel--which is not present in the novel--at the end of the film represent?

Swinton: Both of these things, as is everything in the film and in every other film, are exactly what you choose to make of them. I can make some suggestions, however. For example, there was something that appealed to us about Orlando, as a symbol of an English sensibility and an English history, having a love affair both with a Russian and with an American. That tickled us. The angel I would be even more loath to comment upon simply because I think it is the kind of image that is so subjective that it is really up to viewers what they make of it. One thing I would suggest, for my own purposes, is that the angel can be read as being present in moments of mortality, moments of death. The angel is seen at the beginning around the Queen and at the end around Orlando who has now been divested of her house.

In the novel, the immortality question is, in my opinion, very vague and amorphous and seems arbitrary. There is no specific reason why Orlando lives for 400 years. He/she just does. The same, of course, is true of the sex change. Both of these questions we decided to make quite specifically motivated. The question of immortality, of course, is motivated, practically, by Orlando's inheritance of the house, or rather Orlando being given the house by Queen Elizabeth, as she says, "for you and for your heirs." So this ties Orlando to the future, practically, the Queen says, on one condition--"Do not fade, do not wither, do not grow old." Orlando, having at the end of the film given up the house, or rather the house having given her up, is now in a sense free of her immortality, free of her practical or fleshly immortality, as it were, so maybe this is why the angel appears. The words of the song, which may be indistinct, include the phrase, "I am born and I am dying," so the idea may be that in this moment Orlando is truly mortal, that not only is she able to live for the first time but also that she's able to die.

Cineaste: Shifting sexual identity appears to be a key theme in contemporary world cinema. Do you think this theme i particularly relevant now?

Swinton: To be brutally frank, I think it's a distraction. I'm beginning to think that gender politics in principle have become a distraction. What I mean by that--a contentious statement--is that what we're really concerned with now, whether we know i or not, are more pressing questions of mortality. You speak of kind of global consciousness and recent films about gender identity, but I perceive that trend to be quite old now. I remember when I started to make work around these matter and mainstream Hollywood--which is as good a barometer a any, it seems to me, in measuring some kind of globe sensibibility--was bringing out all those `convincing man' an `convincing woman' films. You know, "Could you be considered a convincing woman if you had a baby?" or "Could you considered a convincing man if you liked a baby?" And, yes, have had some of what the tabloid press loves to call `gender bending'--it's interesting that they call them `gender bending' and not `gender blending'-- roles.

But it seems to me that we're now in the middle of a are rash of films of all shapes and sizes dealing with immortality and the search for eternal life. We've had Dracula, Death Becomes Her, Forever Young, and there's also Groundhog Day, which think is a very interesting film and which is probably the close kin to Orlando in that it's about living in the present and making choices about your life.

I don't mean to be be dismissive of the gender question, but I think we can do better than that. I think we can do better than looking at our differences and look at our similarities, and the greatest similarity we share is that we're all going to die, and most of us are dying sooner than we need at the moment. This Western bit of civilization we live in is entirely death-phobic. We have a great opportunity at the moment, because we are under siege, to face this question and to really wonder what it would be like for people of my generation to have known only a couple of people who had died--you know, our grandparents and maybe a college friend in a car crash. This is not a scenario anymore. My mother remarked to me in an unguarded moment not long ago that I'm at more funerals these days than she is.

Cineaste: At one point in the film, Orlando says that he/she is "the same person, just a different sex." In your characterization, did you attempt to distinguish the two incarnations of Orlando by gender?

Swinton: Actually not. If anything, my attention was on laying down something constant because so much changes in the film that it seemed to me the center would have to be this close-up, and the dose-up, although it alter and develops, would have to be recognizably the same human nature. Besides, as I've said, I don't believe in `convincing men' or `convincing women,' so I was really happy not to worry about that at all.

Even if you do know about the Vita Sackville-West subtext, the novel is about a young man who becomes a woman, while our film is about a young man played by a woman who becomes, in essence, a woman played by a man. For example, when Orlando goes to the tea party and experiences misogyny for the first time, this is a shock the likes of which no woman who'd reached the age of thirty could ever feel. This is a male sensibility that experiences this shock. So we are dealing with a state of grace, a state of...I'm trying to fight free of using the word androgyny because I think it's beginning to be misunderstood, so I'd rather look for another term. It's just a state of limitlessness, so that Orlando at every moment is both, and neither.

Cineaste: The character of Orlando seems rather cold and distant, rather impenetrable, as he/she moves through the different historical vignettes. Are viewers to interpret Orlando primarily as a symbol rather than a realistic character, and, if so, as a symbol of what?

Swinton: First of all, I would repeat that viewers are to make of the film and the character whatever they wish to, and I'm chary of implying that anything is intended because, of course, everything is intended and nothing is intended. It always distresses me when people come up after a film and say, "I saw this, was I right?" I was once present when I heard a filmmaker I say, "No, you're not, you're wrong." I felt this was really a sacrilege and so I wouldn't wish to imply that I'm interested in doing that.

Orlando is in a state of isolation and is looking for company and, as such, throughout the course of the film has a series of rather difficult encounters with other human beings. It's only when she meets the adventurer, Shelmerdine, that there is a meeting of souls, if you like, and also a meeting of minds. The film is, as I see it, crucially about performance. This is delicate for me to talk about because I'm loath to even articulate it to myself, but in that it's about a human spirit looking for peace and not finding it until, at the end of the film, she finds herself the film is about the limitations of human communication. Orlando in communication with other characters throughout most of the film is always at odds in some way.

What I should also talk about are the moments when Orlando speaks to the camera, or looks into the camera, because this is something that I've been developing for a while. In fact, I've always had a predilection for addressing the camera, at least to make eye contact with the audience. I don't know what this is due to--probably too much Brecht when at school--but it's also something to do with a feeling of subverting the idea of being gazed upon--as a woman, I think, but it's hard for me to know. The fact is that I've looked into the camera in pretty well every film I've ever made. Even Man to Man is a monologue addressed entirely to the audience, and this was made just before Orlando. So when Sally Potter and I were juggling the issue of how to make the central character identifiable--given that the quest is a lonely quest, and a quest for company--we asked ourselves, how can we identify with this historical character, this aristocrat moving through time, how can we make the character modern, and how can we make the film as funny as we possibly can? It seemed absolutely obvious from the very beginning that this was a serious justification for me doing what I've been doing for a while [laughs], which was to make contact. That look into the camera is a look of complicity, a look of safety; it's that moment when one really addresses oneself and comes to one's own defense. It's like looking into the mirror, only without judgment but with love. The last shot of the film, looking into the camera at the very end, was something that both Sally and I knew from the outset was the end image. So we felt that the best way to build up to it was to look into the camera throughout the film, but at different moments.

Cineaste: I take it you're English. Swinton: I'm actually Scottish. I have an English voice because I was unfortunately brought up much like Orlando in a big house in Scotland. The children of people who own big houses in Scotland are sent to be educated in England so that they can come back to Scotland and not understand the people they're oppressing.

Cineaste: Would you care to say anything specifically about the role of British aristocracy in society?

Swinton: Happily, I'd love to, it's my subject. This is a very personal film for me. I hope it's perceivable as the story of a very ordinary life that anyone can identify with. There's nothing that Orlando experiences that everyone doesn't experience--big houses and 400 years and portraits on the Walls and costumes and changing sex notwithstanding--everything that Orlando experiences we all experience, especially when we're young and growing up. We all have an early experience of death, of falling in love, of rejection in love, of writing poetry and being made a fool of through the poetry, and we all have an early experience of going abroad and treading on toes and realizing that somehow we've managed to ingest some kind of racist habits. And all of these things, it seems to me, have to do with growing up and anyone can see their own lives in the film.

Having said that, one of the things that drew me back to the book was not only the gender question but also the political question of how to survive an owning class childhood. Even though Orlando in Virginia Woolf's novel does not survive, as I would see it, because she inherits her house. As far as I'm concerned, this is not survival, this is illusion, and another sidestepping of the issue.

Having been in a privileged position of being born female, questions of inheritance have never been a problem for me, but I have grown up witnessing in my three brothers the disparate sense of confusion about how to live in the world for oneself and not for the sake of people who have been or people who are coming. I also experience it in witnessing my father's life. It's something that matters a great deal to me but, as far as I can see, it's hardly ever spoken about, simply because owning class artists are almost a contradiction in terms. They're the only people who can genuinely and, in my opinion, should really address these questions of people who have experienced the way this whole atmosphere operates. There are so few owning class artists because there are so few owning class people who survive. I consider myself to be privileged beyond all worth in that I've been, with this film, given an opportunity to say something about it, to begin to address the issues, and certainly to gain courage for myself in doing so.

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Tilda Swinton

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Tilda Swinton as the young English nobleman Orlando.

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Orlando (Tilda Swinton) strolls on her family estate with Queen Elizabeth I (Quentin Crisp) in this scene from Sally Potter's Orlando.

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Orlando (Tilda Swinton), as a young woman in the eighteenth century, learns that she must marry and have male heirs or lose her family estate.

~~~~~~~~ by Dennis West and Joan M. West

Copyright of Cineaste is the property of Cineaste and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. Source: Cineaste, Jul93, Vol. 20 Issue 1, p18, 4p Item: 9709061315