Swinton Dives Into ‘Deep End’ Iconoclast Actress May Become Household Name With Noir Thriller by Ky N. Nguyen In New York and Los Angeles, it was the opening day of the American noir thriller "The Deep End." It has garnered generally rave reviews, focusing on Scottish-born Tilda Swinton’s mesmerizing, real portrayal of a soccer mom under siege. The early Oscar buzz has become a deafening roar, with many considering Swinton a shoo-in for a Best Actress nomination next February. On my drive to the interview, I hear Swinton’s co-star Goran Visnjic ("ER") promoting the film on the radio. At the St. Regis Hotel, Swinton spoke personably with controlled intelligence and wit, bearing a regal demeanor indicative of her privileged, upper-class background. Wearing a bright red dress, she has a striking presence with her long limbs, porcelain skin, emerald eyes, and sleek strawberry blonde hair. "My task was really to impersonate an American person," she said. To do so, she cut her trademark waist-length red hair for the first time in more than 20 years. When I notice it’s now even shorter than its shoulder length in the film, she responds playfully, "Oh yeah. I’m kind of sucking it inside. It’s going …" She makes a vacuum sound. "It’s going in … getting shorter all the time." In its limited opening, "The Deep End" earned the highest per-screen average of any film that week, making it an apparent commercial as well as critical success. At 40, Swinton is relatively unknown to mainstream American audiences, but she will soon become a household face. She appears in a trio of expected movies: Cameron Crowe’s "Vanilla Sky" (the remake of Alejandro Amenábar’s "Open Your Eyes"), Spike Jonze’s "Adaptation" with Nicolas Cage ("Captain Corelli’s Mandolin"), and "Teknolust" by Lynn Hershmann—who previously directed Swinton in "Conceiving Ada." Her American debut was in Susan Streitfeld‘s controversial "Female Perversions." An indie iconoclast, Swinton viewed her first Hollywood movie, Danny Boyle’s "The Beach," as "my experimental movie." She’s an art-house poster child primarily for her British work, best known as the androgynous time traveler in Sally Potter’s adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s "Orlando." Swinton made eight films with the late avant-garde Derek Jarman, including a portrayal of Queen Isabella in "Edward II," for which she won Best Actress at Venice. More recently, she’s repeatedly collaborated with John Mabry, notably in "Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon." While pregnant with her now 3-year-old twins, she played the mother in Tim Roth’s harrowing incest drama "The War Zone." In "The Deep End," Swinton plays Margaret Hall, a housewife raising a family in Lake Tahoe while her husband, a naval captain, is away at sea. She must deal alone with her teenage son’s budding homosexuality and the consequences of his dangerous relationship with a shady Reno club owner. It’s an update of Elizabeth Sanxay Holding’s book "The Blank Wall," adapted by Max Ophüls into 1949’s film "The Reckless Moment." Describing Scott McGehee and David Siegel ("Suture"), the writer-directors of "The Deep End," Swinton said: "It’s a film independently made by filmmakers who do want a lot of people to see their film and are sophisticated filmmakers. They want to look seriously and formally at a kind of classicism, film noir, melodrama—not in a flashy or fashionable way, but in really quite a consequent, modest way." Swinton added: "Most of this movie takes place inside Margaret’s head. She doesn’t act her way through this crisis, she thinks her way through it, as many women do. Yet she’s utterly alone, so there’s no one for her to voice her thoughts to. I was so thrilled that Scott, David a nd [cinematographer] Giles were interested in reviving close-up work in a whole new way." McGehee added in a different interview: "She has to express the depths of her emotion through her face, body and gestures more than her words. Tilda Swinton has a face that can move you in utter silence. Her eyes exude intelligence and passion." Siegel lavished his praise on Swinton, saying "Tilda brings an unusual combination of steeliness and sympathy to Margaret. She succeeds in making you believe in her strength, and yet your heart also breaks for her in the end." "Close-ups are really what I’m in it for," Swinton said. "That’s the intent technically. I do honestly believe that cinema has the capacity to do something for people—not exclusively—but most clearly, most powerfully conveyed in close-up." Swinton’s technical awareness stems from her "apprenticeship" in filmmaking. "I started to make films with Derek Jarman. I made films exclusively with him. We worked almost like a laboratory. Occasionally a film came out of it, but the process was the thing. There was a core of us; we worked consistently with Derek. The education of filmmaking being a process did make filmmakers of all of us. There’s no doubt. "That’s why I say—and people still don’t understand that I’m really serious about this—I don’t see myself as an actor. It’s not how I come in on it," she continued. "This doesn’t mean that I see myself as a director, either, because I am not. I’m a filmmaker in so far that this work with Derek Jarman made Simon Fisher Turner, who used to write the music for the films, a filmmaker. That’s what I mean." Jarman subscribed to French auteur Robert Bresson’s theory of screen "models": performers who "acted" as little as possible. Swinton noted: "My favorite film performance of all time is the donkey in [Bresson’s] ‘Au Hazard, Balthazar.’ And I’m really serious about that. Whether that donkey is a superb film performer or whether it’s just because it’s a donkey, the screen is fully dilated. You can project yourself onto that donkey. And that’s what I reckon is the task of a film performer: to invite the audience’s projections. It’s no place for acting. It’s certainly no place for the projections of the actor, the performer." Does Swinton consider her current work an example of Bresson’s models? She pondered and said, "Is what I’m doing now that? It’s certainly part of my endless inquiry into how it’s possible to achieve something like it. I don’t know how far it succeeds. In so far as playing Margaret Hall is an opportunity to show someone unwatched—yes, I think it is. She’s someone unwatched." Swinton continued: "I haven’t thought of it before, but I think that’s what Bresson is talking about when he talks about models. He’s looking for something not self-conscious. And that’s the challenge here with this film. The more sophisticated one becomes, one has to then become a sophisticated type to the nth degree in order actually to fake being unwatched. But that’s the task, it seems to me." Is it easier now than in the beginning of her career to pretend to be unseen? "Maybe … maybe it is, yeah," she said. "I’m getting clearer about the task." In contrasting with mainstream, "industrial" actors, Swinton said, "I don’t really know how industrial actors work. I’ve learned more in the last 10 days through people sitting in your position by the questions they ask and the kind of answers that I feel they’re expecting to hear about an actor’s life and what actors’ priorities tend to be. And one thing I know for sure is that it ain’t me. To be honest, I don’t know for sure what on Earth I’m doing, but I’m not doing that. I’m very interested—I would say passionately interested—in screen performance. And that feels to me like something I can contribute to the dialogue that I’m having with filmmakers." On these unique terms, Swinton acknowledged she’s been edging toward more mainstream projects. "Having been for a long time in the habit of working on devising projects with my colleagues and actually helping to make projects happen, I suppose—in a kind of drip-drip way—there are various filmmakers now who are more aware of what I can contribute and who I am. They offer me some good reasons to make these films with them. And these ideas are really getting better and better." Ky N. Nguyen is the film reviewer for The Washington Diplomat.