Tilda Swinton warned that cinema needs to avoid “formulaic” work and privilege “messy, adventurous experiences” to survive in the age of AI in an onstage conversation at the Cannes Film Festival on Thursday.
“As long as what we’re producing is not formulaic and in some way tiring for the audience, AI doesn’t have a chance, but as long as we continue to do that, then we have to watch out,” she said.
“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. I think that going personal is always a good way to start… ending up on the top of a medieval mountain with a dragon can still be a personal story.”
Cannes regular Swinton was speaking as a guest of the festival’s “Rendez-Vous With” strand. The Oscar winner reiterated her long held assertion that she never intended to be an actor and still does not consider herself to be one to this day.
“I still can’t describe myself as an actor. I get as far as describing myself as a performer, but I know some actors, and I’ve read, like you all have, actors talking about acting and talking about their lives, and I read them, and I hear them talking, and I think you’re describing a life that’s not mine,” she said.
The conversation trace her early trajectory from acting in student productions written by friends, who she then followed to the London stage, to the life-changing experience of working with UK director Derek Jarman, to appear in all his films from 1985 until his death in 1994.
“He made filmmakers of all of us, made us responsible for our work, and that was beyond rubies,” she said of his impact on her career and others who are now confirmed professionals such as Oscar-winning costume designer Sandy Powell (Shakespeare in Love) and composer and actor Simon Fisher-Turner (Mudlarking, With Hasan In Gaza).
“We all started on Caravaggio. We were kids. I was 24 and that was our first film. Derek would say to Sandy Powell, ‘We’re doing this scene, just dress the papal clergy, you know what to do, Sandy’. I don’t know, she’d get 500 pounds, just go away and do it and take responsibility for that department. The same with Simon, who came into the project in fact to cast extras. He was the guy who had to go down to the East End of London and go into all the Greek cafes and pulled people out of the tables, because they had good faces, like Pasolini used to do.”
She admitted to feeling adrift for a time after Jarman’s death in 1994, having spent the first decade of her cinematic career with him.
“I was really high and dry, because not only had I lost my best friend, but also I lost my way of working… this crazy, completely unformulated way of working, which was very co-authored. That’s the other thing I was there as a co-author. When he died, I thought, ‘Okay, what am I now? I’ve been working for nine years. Am I an actor? What do I do? Do I play parts in other people’s films?’,” she recalled.
“I did think that it was going to be a tall to continue as a performer but then the miracle is that I found these other families, the other people who want to work in this, with a very close way of communication and building things together, so I now have a number of families, I have family with Bong Joon Ho, who I’m going to see next week in Seoul, and I have a family with Jim Jarmusch, and I have a family with Luca Guadagnino and with Joanna Hogg, and it goes on. I’m so privileged, because you know, lightning struck once with Derek, but it seems to have gone striking for me, and I can’t even begin to count those blessings.”
Swinton, who has attended Cannes with close to 20 Official Selection films including Love Is The Devil, We Need To Talk About Kevin, Only Lovers Left Alive, Okja and most recently Asteroid City in 2023, touched on various markers in her career that happened at the festival.
She recalled how she had attended the festival in 1989 with Sally Potter to help raise the budget for Orlando, which would go on to be her breakthrough film.
“When we started putting it together, nobody made costume films really, or they certainly didn’t make political costume films. They made more conformist essays on class within costume dramas… this kind of transgressive take on history through a costume film was really new.”
“We came to Cannes trying to raise money for a film for that film… we had no money at all. We ate once a day and shared a room, all three of us, Sally Potter, our producer, Christopher Shepherd, and me. We got nowhere, unsurprisingly, but it’s a great experience to do that, to come and frankly beg, it’s all a good experience,” she said.
Swinton, who is known for dramatic red carpet appearances, was asked her opinion on this aspect of attending the festival.
“It’s like a massive wedding, every other person is a bridesmaid and everybody gets to choose their own dress. It’s a fiesta, sometimes it’s a fiasco, but the glamor is not there. Let’s be clear, this is not the glamor, the glamor is the moment, specifically in the Grand Palais with the Saint-Saens, the Aquarium, the dark. That’s the glamor,” she said. referring to the bars of music from Saint-Saens’s ‘Carnival of the Animals’ that precedes every festival screening.
