Tilda Swinton: A love less ordinary

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10 April 2012

Tilda Swinton has always been iconoclastic, with her androgynous hairdo, her experimental film-making and her radical politics (she was one of the last of the card-carrying Communists). Today, however, the taboo being broken is rather tame: we are opening a chocolate bunny before Easter. 'How very transgressive!' she trills, then divides its brown rump with scrupulous equality, using a knife. 'The thing that having twins teaches you,' she says, thinking of her 12-year-olds, Honor and Xavier, 'is that absolute fairness is the order of the day.'

We are sitting in Bryan Adams' photography studio in Chelsea and Swinton, who is dressed in a crepe burgundy shirt and severe knitted jerkin, so that she resembles a glamorous medieval knight, is telling me about her latest film, a glorious Italian-language picture called I Am Love. She plays a 'submerged' trophy wife who awakes, gradually, to the restorative properties of food, sex and nature. Swinton has a starring role, and a producing credit. She even managed to persuade the composer John Adams to allow them to use his music in the soundtrack, a first in film.

At 49, Swinton really does seem to have it all: art-house credibility and an Oscar; a young lover (artist Sandro Kopp, 32) and a good relationship with her older, doting ex-partner (writer John Byrne, 70) who is father to her twins. They all get on well, she says – of course they do. 'Love,' she says in her warm patrician voice, every syllable enunciated, 'is a soft thing. It's not a brittle business and things don't have to break, if they're for real.'

Home is in the wilds of the Highlands, in Nairn, above Inverness, and sounds extravagantly bohemian. Her son Xavier has not had a haircut for years, so his locks fall down to his waist. 'This whole question of cutting children's hair' she says, thinking aloud apropos of our discussion of a scene in I Am Love in which her character shears off her golden hair and with it her matriarchal identity. 'I just feel it's his hair, not mine to cut. Hair holds energy and history and it's always in the gift of the bearer. He doesn't ever talk about cutting it. His sister used to have very short hair, like a coconut...' She smiles and folds her arms. 'People being mistaken for a different gender is very common in my house.'

It would be rather wonderful having Tilda Swinton as your mother – until you watched the Narnia films and were traumatised by her petrifying turn as the White Witch. Actually, it would probably be best to wait a bit before watching her early, edgy work, too – such as Simon Fisher Turner's cinematic migraine, Blue, or some of the more lurid Derek Jarman productions, such as Edward II, in which, dressed in gorgeous New Look couture, she kills a man by biting out his carotid artery, a witty, powerfully unsettling performance that won her Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival 1991. She has always worked with auteurs, such as John Maybury, the Coen brothers and Sally Potter, who directed her in Orlando, her breakthrough role as Virginia Woolf's eponymous time-travelling, gender-switching nobleman – the part she was born to play.

Her closest collaborator and friend was Derek Jarman and from 1986 until his death from AIDS in 1994, she was his co-conspirator in out-there film-making. She also stopped off along the way to make performance art, sleeping in a glass case in the Serpentine Gallery for a week in a piece of work called The Maybe, devised jointly with Cornelia Parker and viewed by 30,000 visitors in 1995. 'I'm very idle and I love sleeping – it's what I'm best at,' she tells me. 'It's my resource. In times of transition, Orlando sleeps for a week, and I have done that. I'm not frightened of much but the idea of insomnia, of what I call bed-fear, really gets to me.'

None of this was the obvious career choice for Major-General Sir John Swinton's only daughter. But then Katherine Matilda Swinton has never done the obvious thing. She seems incapable of it. Her out-of-office email says: 'Hello, I am away till 01/01/2070.' Before our interview, I swotted up on art-house films, watching classics such as Caravaggio, in case she was shocked that I hadn't seen them. As it transpired, she was rather shocked that I hadn't seen a Pixar animation. 'Hermione!' she cried. 'You mean to say you haven't seen Ratatouille?'

She was born in 1960 of a family that claims to trace its history back to 886 and the court of Alfred the Great. Her father, Lord-Lieutenant of Berwickshire, was former head of the Queen's household division: top brass. She was sent to West Heath Girls' School, where she was in the same year as Diana Spencer, the Princess of Wales-to-be. 'I think my parents realised fairly early on that I wasn't going to marry a duke,' she once commented. Did she notice any tragic aura about the young Diana, I ask, half-joking. She splutters, mutters, 'Lord alive!' and goes pink in the face, so that she clashes somewhat with her hair. 'Nope,' she says, all tight-lipped. 'Nope. In many ways more extraordinary things have happened to other people.'

While Diana and many of her peers left West Heath for Swiss finishing schools with no qualifications apart from prizes for Best Kept Hamster, Tilda made it out with brain intact and went off to Fettes College and then Cambridge, where she read part one Social and Political Science, part two English Literature, sitting at the feet of Eric Hobsbawm, Margot Heinemann and Raymond Williams – 'fantastic Communist tutors going back to the 1930s. Being a part of that whole group really meant something to me. Meetings were, to me, like High Mass.' She still feels 'moved by the same radical spirit', still believes that all art is political, but is 'not at all attuned to what's going on in English politics at the moment. And sorry, but I'm not sure I want to be. As an adopted Highlander I'm a tourist and I don't know what's [she adopts a hick accent] goin awn down here.'

Swinton and Byrne, who became a couple in 1990 working on TV series Your Cheatin' Heart, which he wrote and she starred in, live near their children's Steiner school ('no, they are certainly not going to boarding school!'). They have a vegetable garden, springer spaniels, a pet tortoise and occasional garden visitors – a hare they call Gently and a hedgehog they call Slowly. Last year they organised a local film festival called the Ballerina Ballroom Cinema of Dreams, to which anyone who wore a kilt or brought a homemade cake gained free entry. It's clearly a great refuge from London, which she has always had an ambiguous relationship with, once saying: 'If you're tired in London, you can end up dead.'

Possessing no television ('What is More4?' she asks me earnestly) the family make their own fun. Sometimes she and the twins 'bulge and stretch' themselves on her laptop's Photo Booth function. The children have recently discovered how to make films on it, too. 'We were on Colonsay [island] and they disappeared to a room and came back with this hilarious sequence of films they'd made. I've no idea how.' Does she ever take part in their films? 'No, they're generally for my amusement, so it's very important that they're a secret until they're unveiled.'

The twins sound like quite a self-contained unit. 'Yes. They're very, very interesting to watch as a pair because they're complementary and they get a kick out of each other, which is very nice to see. Sometimes they laugh and they go up into that Mary Poppins laughter tunnel and you can't quite get them down, you just have to walk away for several hours. I have that sometimes with my brother who is closest to me in age [she has three] and we can still go there quite easily. That's a very privileged thing, to have a sibling who sends you' She mimes loopy-loo circles spiralling into the air.

Is she still in love with her boyfriend Sandro, who she met on the set of The Chronicles of Narnia (he was playing a centaur). 'My sweetheart? Yes, why wouldn't I be?' she says kittenishly. Now that John Byrne, her ex-partner, also has a girlfriend – 'his ladyfriend, yes' – and they all often spend time together, sometimes at home, do the children benefit from being doubly loved? 'Quadruply loved! Yes! Listen, what I find really amusing, although I'm not really aware of people's fantasies about us, but the thing that bemuses and amuses me, is that people assume that we're not talking about two monogamous relationships. Of course we are. John Byrne and I had these two extraordinary children together and couldn't be happier about it. We haven't been together as a couple for many years, since which time we both happily engaged in other relationships.

'And all of us just really like each other. Please tell me that's not really unusual, please tell me lots of people live in this way. Whenever people tell me it's extraordinary, it saddens my heart because it makes it sound like acrimony is the norm. That people not getting on with the parents of their children is the norm. Well, I don't believe it is. I think countless families live like we do, and life goes on. It's perfectly possible to love people you're not sleeping with. Everyone knows that.' And the people who pretend not to know that? 'They're just indulging in slightly adolescent prurience.'

I don't believe Swinton's domestic set-up is unusual, but I do think her conception of love is radical. As far as I can tell, love to her truly means never having to say you're sorry. 'It means going on loving people unconditionally whatever, whatever particular path and development they
follow.' Her latest film, I Am Love (Io Sono L'amore) embodies the philosophy of love she shares with the director and screenwriter, Luca Guadagnino. 'There's that scene in which Elizabetta [played beautifully by Alba Rohrwacher] comes out to her mother [as a lesbian] and as her mother I don't show even
a moment's reservation, not a flicker of resistance, there's just absolute welcome and witness to this new development in my daughter's life, and that, I would suggest, is love.'

By contrast, when Swinton's matriarchal character finds a very steamy kind of happiness, unexpectedly, with the hired chef (the film has, with some justification, been described as La Signora Chatterley) her husband rejects her. 'He chooses not to support the development of the woman he has had children with, and it's really, really tough. He denies her. He tells her she doesn't exist! And the original deal that was struck between them was exposed, the deal – possibly subconscious – that she would sit at the head of his table and bear his children and wear his jewels and keep their whole family together, and when she reveals that there's more to her than that, the contract is broken. He was obviously not in it to be there for her, wherever her life took her. And you could be quite brutal about it and say that he didn't ever love her, that it wasn't love because it was conditional.'

Most marital relationships are, I'd warrant, conditional, but not on Planet Swinton, which is a pure and rarefied place. She is, somehow, incorruptible, and this quality means she manages to get away with so much, personally and professionally. She has just launched her own perfume, which for other stars is the beginning of the sell-out, but she makes it work. The scent, a suitably blazing blend of ginger and immortelle, is made by the 'wonderful' cult Parisian parfumier Etat Libre d'Orange and is called Like This, after her favourite poem by Rumi, the Sufi poet of love. 'If anyone asks you how the perfect satisfaction of all our sexual wanting will look, lift your face and say, "Like this."' The poem is printed on a slip inside the perfume's packaging. 'I hope people will take it out and pin it to their glass,' she says, using the old-fashioned posh word for mirror.

Hollywood, despite all the odds, adores her, rewarding her turn in the thriller Michael Clayton with Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 2008. 'My relationship with Hollywood is well, we don't know each other very well. We're on very polite, nodding terms. I've been to other people's parties there, but I've never given my own party.'

I'm not sure if she means this literally or metaphorically – often, with Swinton, it's hard to tell; when we talk about Italy, she says, 'I've only ever worked in its kitchens, never stayed in its bedrooms.' Which is her way of saying she has not been there on holiday, only for work. Whether this is inspiring or vastly
pretentious depends on how you feel about her.

'It's deeply intriguing to me that I was ever in a Hollywood film,' she says carefully. 'If anyone out there wants me, it would have to be for something Tilda-shaped. I've never had any illusions I could fit in there otherwise. But look – Hollywood's a very interesting place. There's always been room for Europeans. Bertolt Brecht was there, Werner Herzog is there. Me and Luca Guadagnino, we would love to make a
Hollywood film with a Hollywood budget, in the way that Hitchcock did.'

Instead they have created an art-house gem in I Am Love. 'We were very blessed. We talked a lot about the democracy of weather, and from the first draft we always wanted a scene of Milan in the snow – Milano sotto la neve. Except it almost never snows in Milan, so there we were with awful ratty fake foam snow and Marisa Berenson in her Fendi fur costume in, you know, 90 degrees. And then in the middle of the edit, it snowed. It really, really snowed. Like a benediction.'

Signs and symbols are important to Tilda. 'If you're attuned properly, and looking in the right places, the universe gives you information. I'm a very idle person, and I think that if things are too hard, resisting too much, maybe you should re-route yourself. At the same time, if a door is opening, maybe you should go down that path.' The startling last image of I Am Love is a surreal subterranean vision of Swinton in a cave. At the same time that they shot the image, her friend and frequent collaborator, the artist Ryan McGinley, was making a sequence of cave photographs, and he would soon ask her to crawl through a cave-like castle window for his Pringle advertising campaign.

'There is such a thing as a communal unconscious,' she says matter-of-factly. 'And like-minded people are led down the same paths. Sometimes a cave is just where you have to end up. I've stopped being surprised by things like that. They're normal.' Maybe to her, but for most of us, such Swintonia is rather spooky.

Finally, would this former rebel ever accept a damehood? 'I think I'd rather be a knight,' she says, donning a butch black bovver cap and heading off into the street. 'Sir Tilda has a certain ring, don't you think?'

I Am Love (Io Sono L'amore) is out on 9 April

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