Tilda Swinton Says Fahrenheit 9/11’s Palme d’Or Win Was a ‘Political Choice’

Tilda Swinton sat down for a chat at Cannes on Thursday afternoon, lessening the blow of Barbra Streisand canceling her scheduled appearance at the festival due to a knee injury. It’s not that Swinton and Streisand occupy the same sphere of celebrity — in fact, it is almost impossible to imagine them interacting — but both women exist outside of traditional space-time and are immune to the laws of physics (minus the knee thing). Why was Swinton at Cannes, despite having no projects to promote? I don’t know and it’s none of my business. 

She wore a striped dress and her hair was poufed a bit up top. After a career montage that prominently featured the clip from Orlando in which Orlando explains that English people “don’t like learning other languages” and instead of speaking in a foreign tongue will “just speak English louder,” moderator Didier Allouch said Swinton promised him that next time they’d do their interview in French. “I’ve been saying that to you for about 20 years,” she said. “One day, I will be speaking French. I’m not English, but Scottish, and we’re Europeans, so it’s time I learned French.” Everyone applauded.

Swinton had some sage words to offer about the idea that cinema is in crisi: “I think this game of counting numbers, obviously it’s important, but the rest of us should give it a rest. The truth is, it’s not about the numbers. Cinema was always in flux. That’s the nature of what cinema is.” She launched into a soothing tale: “I remember when COVID struck us all down and into our own houses and we all reached for our own films and books, and I reached once again for the autobiography of Michael Powell, who was born pretty much the same year as cinema and came up through the growth of silent cinema.” She talked about how the advent of sound, color, television, video, DVDs, and streaming all heralded the “death of cinema.” 

Allouch reminded Swinton she’d been on the Cannes jury in 2004 and asked her to spill the secrets of her jury, which was led by Quentin Tarantino and gave the Palme d’Or to Fahrenheit 9/11. At the time, there were murmurs that it was a politically motivated prize. “I’m very proud of that prize,” Swinton said. “I was a very vocal advocate of that film getting the Palme d’Or. For a very specific reason, which was a political reason. Not necessarily party political, but my argument was, at that time, Michael Moore was making extremely important statements that were not admissible in any other medium. He wasn’t able to speak on the radio or on TV. He chose cinema to make the statements and to open up the territory that he wanted us to look at. It was cinema that came to his aid. For this reason, and I believe cinema is political, this was a political choice. It was cinema as a haven, as a refuge, a space where we all meet safely in order to have our lives changed. And to develop our own thinking. And that’s why I was very proud of that prize. I stand by it.”

She spoke about how she never actually intended to become an actor, but rather, a writer; it’s a staggering concept, the idea of Tilda Swinton walking around as a normal citizen: “I went to university as a writer; I got my place there as a writer, and then I stopped writing. It’s a point of great embarrassment for me. I had friends writing and directing plays, and I started performing in their plays. And when I left, I rather lazily fell into performing in the theater; I just followed them. And after two years, I thought, No, I’m not interested in the theater or being an actor. But I was interested in cinema.”

She touched briefly on some of her most beloved projects, including Orlando, whose staying power as a film she attributes to the book’s author, Virginia Woolf. She called the book “her phenomenal masterpiece, in which I believe there’s a nugget of kryptonite against bigotry.” She went on: “My fantasy about the book is, if she had written another 200 pages, at a certain point, Orlando, having started life as a boy and then become a woman, would actually become a spaniel, or maybe an oak tree, or a chair. This feeling of evolution is all the way through that book. So there’s something very simplistic that’s often said about the book but also the film: that it’s gender-bending. This is a reduction. It’s not just about a man turning into a woman. It’s about fixedlessness. About gender, class, nationhood. And by the way, this is an immortal who lives for 400 years, so it’s also about mortality. We need this atmosphere more and more. And that film does look and feel as if it were made this morning. It’s so fresh.”

She recalled coming to Cannes in 1989, trying to fund the film: “We had no money at all. We ate once a day here in Cannes. We shared a room, the three of us: Sally Potter; our producer, Christopher Shepherd; and me. We got nowhere, unsurprisingly. But listen. Keep going. It’s a great experience to come and, frankly, beg.” 

At a more recent Cannes, when Swinton was in town promoting We Need to Talk About Kevin, the most disturbing movie I’ve ever seen in my life, she met Bong Joon Ho: “I wanted to meet him and invited him to breakfast in my hotel room. Tiny tip: Ask! And if somebody says ‘no.’ Fine! But they might say ‘yes.’ And he said ‘Yes! I’ll come.’ We just became friends like that. And we said, of course we must work together. I’d seen The Host and Memories of Murder. And Man Bites Dog as well, which is worth looking for, even though he tries hiding it from us. He said, ‘The next film I’m working on, there isn’t anything for you, but let’s keep talking.’ A few weeks later, he said, ‘You know I’ve been thinking, there is this one person in this script, but it’s written as Minister Mason, a mild-mannered man in a suit.’ I said, ‘Leave it with me.’ And we just started to chew it. Then we had an exquisite moment when he came to my house in Scotland and we started playing with clothes like 8-year-olds. And we created what you saw a scrap of in Snowpiercer. It all started here.”

Asked about working with acclaimed directors like Pedro Almodóvar and Jim Jarmusch, Swinton described the latter as a “musician.” “For the first 12 to 15 years of my life, the filmmakers I worked with were all painters. Jim Jarmusch is a musician. It’s like you’re in a band together. He moves through the day like a musician. You wake up very late, you shoot very late. He is a vampire.” She explained that he encourages his actors to trust their rhythms, to “just wait for the vibe.” “It’s 2 a.m. And Jim is waiting for the scene. He’s rewriting it, probably. He’s asking you to say the line again, and he goes, Hmm. Oh man. And is rewriting it again. You just keep chewing it away together and trying it out. It’s like jamming. It’s finding the riff, finding the vibe, and not stopping until you do. Not going, That’s okay. Let’s go to bed and have a good night’s sleep.” Almodóvar, she added, works in an entirely different way, with very detailed and specific instructions: “He doesn’t sleep when we’re shooting, and he comes to the set having watched the rushes over and over again … He tells you exactly how and when you’re going to do it. The trick is to make the very explicit instructions feel natural. There are a few directors I’ve worked with who have seen the film already and he’s just reporting back. It’s like he just came from the cinema. ‘I’ve seen that scene, and in that scene, you do this.’ And you do it.

At the end of the chat, Allouch asked Swinton for her thoughts on the Oscars’ new rules about “proving you’re a human person” and “proving your script was written by a human person.” She was visibly disturbed. “I have to stop you!” she said. “The thing I can’t get past you saying is to prove that you are a human. I feel this should be the byline for the festival of Cannes. All cultural festivals and endeavors. Let’s prove that we’re humans. That’s what we’re here to do. It’s our task to prove that we’re human and also to prove that we can improve on AI. Which, by the way, is not going to be hard. We just have to put our minds to it. But how do you prove that you’re human?” 

She added of AI, “I believe as long as what we’re not producing is formulaic and in some way tiring for the audience, AI doesn’t have a chance. But as long as we can continue to do that, then we have to watch out. What we need to do is what only humans can do: make messy, adventurous experiences so that an audience does not know what’s coming next and enjoys that experience.”