Interview: Tilda Swinton

Published on Monday 3 August 2009 21:27

WHY would an Oscar-winning actress and a noted author and filmmaker pull a 37-tonne lorry across the Highlands for nine days for the express purpose of screening films such as Brigadoon, Throne of Blood, and Burden of Dreams in a Tardis-like mobile cinema?

Well, why not, asked Mark Cousins when he announced the launch of A Pilgrimage in July. Following on from last August's popular Ballerina Ballroom Cinema of Dreams in Nairn, he and Tilda Swinton decided to take this year's show on the road.

"The reason we are pulling a cinema across Scotland is because it feels natural – like dancing is natural… It's our state of mind. It says how much we love movies and the Scottish horizon and the open road and the open heart."

But when it came time to actually pull, with rain lashing his face and a great rope slung over his shoulder, he wound up staring at the tarmac, concentrating on putting one foot in front of another. "I was totally focussed on the effort. Then Tilda leaned over and said: 'This is bliss.' That made me look up. I caught sight of this breathtakingly beautiful silvery watercolour landscape, and realised, 'this is as good as it gets.'"

Indeed, despite foul weather, despite clouds of midges, the men, women and children labouring to pull the Screen Machine into its berth at Kinlochleven, exude bonhomie.

Most were strangers until meeting on the train platform at Bridge of Orchy, and you couldn't ask for a more varied crowd. An Italian journalist pulls next to a young American filmmaker, there's a mental health expert and a fashion stylist, a visitor from Abu Dhabi and renowned French photographer Brigitte Lacombe, who hopped a last-minute flight from the US to be here. Brian Cox and his family are due later in the week.

A Pilgrimage is the third collaboration between Cousins and Swinton, who's here with her 11-year-old twins, Honour and Xavier, and the family dog, Rosie.

"Mark and I kept saying, 'Oh, we must do something together.' And then I'd think what does that mean? What could we possibly do?"

Then in 2006, Swinton was asked to give the State of Cinema address at the San Francisco Film Festival. Her speech, A Letter to a Boy From His Mother, was widely reprinted and prompted Cousins to publish a supportive response.

"I spoke about the idea of there being a state of cinema, a geographical boundary where we can go to. I was inspired by my son asking: 'What were people's dreams like before cinema was invented?' Mark responded with enthusiasm, and we came up with the concept of the 8 Foundation." Their foundation, through its website, offers all children aged eight and a half the chance to choose a film that "will give a peek into other worlds."

That was the age when each of them fell in love with movies. It's an age when, Cousins says, "your mind is very responsive and open. It's a great age to glimpse new worlds and cultures and the magic and heights that imagination can take you to."

When they first discussed the idea Swinton took Cousins to see Nairn's Ballerina Ballroom, and in a lightbulb overhead moment, they decided it was the perfect venue for a homespun film festival. In March they brought Cinema of Dreams to China, and now they're towing a banner-bedecked lorry across the Highlands.

"We're doing something very romantic and passionate here," wrote Cousins. "We'll get hot and sweaty, or drenched with rain . . . but we'll show flickering, splendid dreammovies as we go, in a cockeyed caravan, like clowns or dafties or kids."

That's all very well, but surely, given their busy schedules, a project of this magnitude is a bit de trop? "This isn't on top of other work," says Swinton emphatically. " All other work has shifted to one side. This idea, not only of reaching children in a particular way, but also making a place where all of us can download that feeling of wonder, that one can have access to at the cinema, but often doesn't, say, when one takes the movie home on DVD or watches it in a multiplex. This has become the most compelling project for me and for Mark. We are very good – or bad, depending on how you look at it – at egging each other on."

They've come remarkably far, remarkably fast. "We did the Ballerina and then China, and the Scottish Government have already expressed an interest in having us do another Cinema of Dreams in India. We're very committed to making our 8 Foundation a global thing," says Swinton.

Then she giggles. "I learned the most fantastic piece of jargon yesterday from the man telling me that I need a new boiler for my house. He's talking about 'future-proofing' it.

"We believe that on top of its status as art, cinema is a social project. Cinema can keep you company. There are very few people who, at some point in their life, don't experience a profound sense of existential loneliness.

"If they know that there is the capacity of a room somewhere that can actually hold them, and that there are artists who can really hold them – not just scare them or offer some kind of visceral response, but really hold them with tenderness and compassion – then that's future-proofing their joy.

"And there's also this idea of putting yourself in someone else's shoes. More and more people are talking about the potential to fund aggressive tendencies in Iran.

If we show people the most extraordinary films about Iranian life, how much more difficult is it to have these kinds of aggressive, unfeeling responses? It's more than political, it's a spiritual subject."

Last year, she recalls, a friend brought a group of disaffected 15-year-old boys to Nairn. "These were real tough guys, not impressed by anything, and we showed Iranian director Mohammad Ali-Talebi's film, The Boot. It's the story of a wee girl who pesters her mum for a pair of red boots and then loses one in the course of a bus journey. No explosions or special effects, just a gripping tale of childhood. And those boys were absolutely disarmed and opened up by it. It was not just the film; it was also the situation in which it was projected. The fact that we played The Smiths beforehand and they all got up and danced, the fact that they were fed free fairy cakes by people dressed up as aliens."

This year there are no alien antennae, rather, it's hiking boots and mechanics overalls, thanks to a bus breakdown. But despite today's setbacks, Swinton is thrilled. "Number one, people turned up. Number two, we were able to pull that thing – I was a little bit shocked!"

And the point of pulling is what, precisely? After all, in the main, the truck must be driven between destinations, for reasons of safety and expedience. "It's about putting it into people's hands," she explains. "They're having to work and there will be a shared experience of physical effort." Is she saying that participants will feel it's their cinema, their experience, their movie? "Yes! Exactly!"

Outside in the gloaming, repairs are being made by torchlight and bedraggled campers mill in clusters. They are hungry and they are soaked through, but every last one is grinning from ear to ear.

www.a-pilgrimage.org