by Gill Pringle
Pedro Almodovar had long been on Tilda Swinton’s wish-list of directors when her dream came true four years ago when he cast her in his short film, The Human Voice.
Today, she stars opposite Julianne Moore in the Spanish auteur’s debut English-language feature, The Room Next Door, set in upstate New York – although, of course, the director found a Spanish alternative to double for the US.
“One day, he sent me a proposal to make The Human Voice,” says Swinton. “We’d met briefly over the years, and I had kind of declared my love for him and said, ‘I’ll learn Spanish. I’ll be a mute, or a dog, or whatever’. And he just laughed, and I thought, ‘Well at least I’ve had the nerve to say it’.
“The Human Voice was a particularly wonderful experience because it was during COVID in the summer of 2020, and we shot it in nine days. And he wouldn’t mind me telling you that his English, at that stage, was much less fluent than it is now. But it was extremely enlightening to see how little language matters when you’re working with cinema. He really isn’t that hung up on the exact language you’re working in. He’s listening to the music. He’s watching for the emotion, and he’s also looking for the cinema in it. Since then, his English language has really progressed but, again, he’s not fixated on the language. He could make a film in Farsi or Japanese, and it would still be a Pedro Almodovar film,” she says.
The late great British filmmaker Derek Jarman cast Swinton in her debut film role, Caravaggio in 1986, and then virtually everything that he made until his death in 1994. Together, they discovered Almodovar, finding a parallel thread with their own sensibilities.
“What reminds me of Derek is simply the fact that when we first discovered Pedro in the ‘80s, he felt like a cousin to Derek and I and our friends. We felt that he was over there in Madrid, making work out of his own sensibility, as we were in London, in very different ways.
“We were always very admiring of, and possibly a little envious of the kind of un-marginalism that Pedro always enjoyed. We always felt we were up in the attic or down in the basement, and were treated as the underground. And that was true, because that’s to do with the culture we were working in. But Pedro was front and centre, and he’s still right in the heart of Spanish culture.
“For those of us who hadn’t been to Spain yet, I imagined Spain was like ‘Almodovia’, and I got a tiny disappointed when I first visited Spain and went, ‘No, it’s actually not all people running down the street in high heels, pulling off their wigs’,” she laughs in reference to the colorful writer/director celebrated for his films Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, High Heels and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!
“Pedro has been going strong for nearly 40 years through 23 features, and now he’s making this in another language,” Swinton says about The Room Next Door. “It’s quite astonishing. So that sense of purpose and self-definition reminds me of Derek. Absolutely,” she says lamenting the fact that the two filmmakers never met, describing them as “brothers”.
Reuniting with Almodovar for The Room Next Door was particularly bittersweet for Swinton – not just because she would have loved Jarman and Almodovar to have met but also because it’s a story about humane assisted death for the terminally ill.
When Almodovar asked if she would portray Martha, a terminal cancer patient who chooses to end her life on her own terms, she didn’t hesitate, immediately recalling Jarman’s death 30 years ago.
“This film, for me, is incredibly personal and a real blessing of a very profound nature,” she says.
And with Moore playing Martha’s friend Ingrid – who agrees to stay with Martha during her final days – she knew that she was in perfect company.
“I made no secret of the fact that I’ve had the privilege over the last few years to be in what I call the ‘Ingrid position’ quite a lot, and I’ve been so honoured to accompany several Marthas on their way.
“To put myself in that Martha position meant that I could put my own experience into the film. It gave me the opportunity to put myself in the shoes that I’ve been sitting beside for quite a long period of my life and I’m regularly sitting beside people in those shoes and learning from them.
“What I feel now is a sense of catharsis to actually translate that personal experience into a work of art. It is a good feeling. It feels like something’s added up,” says Swinton, 64.
“My first “Martha’ was my friend Derek [Jarman]. I was 28, very young, when he was diagnosed with HIV in 1989, and I knew at that time that he wasn’t going to be living for very long. Like Ingrid, I was very frightened at that time, but I learned from him an attitude of just total self-determination around the remaining years. And indeed, he did die not that long after in 1994,” recalls the actress who has said that she attended 43 AIDS-related funerals that same year.
“Derek was fortunate. He had three years of his life and that was what I completely downloaded, and I would say, is really part of me now, and I was able to ‘take to Martha’,” says Swinton.
Given her compassionate beliefs, it’s no surprise that she told the Guardian three years ago that she might re-train as a palliative carer, having witnessed the loving support her parents received from professional carers at the end of their lives.
A delightful eccentric with a huge heart, Swinton has featured in more than 60 films, earning both an Oscar and BAFTA for her role in legal thriller Michael Clayton.
After joining the Royal Shakespeare Company 40 years ago, she has appeared variously on stage, TV and film, with notable roles in Moonrise Kingdom, Orlando, The Grand Budapest Hotel and We Need to Talk about Kevin.
If The Room Next Door might seem like a depressing topic at first glance, she would argue otherwise. “I hope people will find it both surprising and nourishing. It’s about momentous things, possibly the most momentous thing of all, which is: How do we approach our end of life?
“But it’s done with such simplicity and lack of drama. That’s what one hopes for – to be very graceful about how we live at the end of our life. It’s not really about death at all. There’s very little interesting things one can say about death. It’s much, much less interesting than living. And this film is all about living,” she insists.
The Room Next Door is in cinemas Boxing Day 2024
