Set of the day

I Am Love is a cinematic tour de force that explores the revolutionary power of love. The film is the result of a long-term collaboration between British actress Tilda Swinton (Orlando, Michael Clayton, The Chronicles of Narnia and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) and Italian writer and director Luca... more

I Am Love is a cinematic tour de force that explores the revolutionary power of love. The film is the result of a long-term collaboration between British actress Tilda Swinton (Orlando, Michael Clayton, The Chronicles of Narnia and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) and Italian writer and director Luca Guadagnino, who first worked with Swinton when she took the lead role in his 1999 feature-length debut, The Protagonists.

At the center of I Am Love, is Emma Recchi, played by Swinton. She's a trophy wife acquired by her Russian art-loving husband on a foray into the former socialist republic. By marriage, Emma is part of an Italian industrial dynasty that is born of fascism but embracing capitalism. But having served her primary purpose, giving birth to and raising those that will carry on the Recchi lineage, Emma is searching for a place in life beyond that at the end of a well-laid dinner table. At a point where she's at a crossroads in her own life, Antonio Biscaglia crosses her path. As a chef, he's below stairs and below her status, but he proves to be irresistible to her, and their passion ignites a chain of events that rocks the stability of the Recchi patriarchy.

Though I Am Love is a work of fiction, there are distinct parallels to Swinton's own life. "You're always playing yourself," the actress told The Observer newspaper back in 2005 while promoting the film Thumbsucker. "It's all autobiography, whatever you're doing. It's using them as a kind of prism through which to throw something real about yourself."

With luminous pale skin, Celtic coloring and disconcertingly vivid green eyes, Tilda is clearly not born of Italian capitalist / nouveau aristocratic stock. However she comes from one of the oldest feudal baronial families in the United Kingdom, and can trace her bloodline back to the ninth century, so understands what it is to be a woman in a grand family. The mother of twins by Scottish writer John Byrne, who is twenty years her senior, since 2004 Swinton has been in a much-speculated about relationship with German-born painter Sandro Kopp, who is her junior by 18 years. Though this love triangle has echoes of that in her latest film, ultimately the outcomes are very different. The choice Byrne made to give Swinton his blessing in order to preserve their love and family life for the sake of themselves and their children is as progressive as her partner's alternate choice in the film is archaic.

We sat down with Swinton at the Beverly Hills Four Seasons to talk about her philosophies on filmmaking and love.

Nicole Powers: What originally drew you to this project?

Tilda Swinton: Well Luca [Guadagnino] and I have been friends for a very long time. I say that we've been talking about this particular film for about eleven years but we started developing the story about seven years ago. The reason I can date it is because we made a film eleven and a half years ago and, as tends to happen when you have a long-term working relationship with someone, you make a piece of work and then as that film is being cut you start talking about the next one and it's usually 180 degrees from the one you've just made.

NP: What was the initial concept behind the story?

TS: Seven years ago we made a film, it was an interview. Luca interviewed me and he made a film out of the close-up of me as I talked. It was called The Love Factory and it was basically us having a conversation about life in general, but at a certain point we were talking about love. At the end of the process of making that film we turned to each other and said let's make that idea - the idea of the revolutionary aspect of love - the germ in the heart of the narrative of the film we make.

We'd already been talking about a kind of film, what we call a sense-sational film. For many years we even talked about the possibility of it being a silent film. A film that does things one hopes that the films we adore from [Luchino] Visconti, from [Alfred] Hitchcock, from John Huston do, which is to get you feeling and smelling and luxuriating. We'd been thinking, how is it possible for modern cinema to be sense-sational in that way? To actually be involving in that way, rather than being satisfying as a story or interesting as a concept or maybe overwhelming as a special effects experience. How is it possible to make a modern film that's sense-sational like these classic language-of-cinema films? So that's what we've been discussing for eleven years.

But when we started thinking about the story, we started with this idea of love that we decided to place at the heart of the story, the concept of the revolutionary aspect of love. From that we sort of went outwards. So this love story would happen in the heart of a woman who I would play. She has to be an alien in an environment which is breakable by that love. It has to be able to actually disrupt the status quo. Then like detectives we started to [think] what's that status quo going to be? What is antipathetic to that kind of volcanic love? And then we worked our way through all the possibilities and very quickly ended up in Milan.

NP: Working in Milan, that must have been...

TS: Hot - especially in the winter scenes. Milan was the only [place]. Milan is the subject if you like. Milan is where those families live and go about being very discreet about their lives and their great industrial wealth. The architecture of Milan is everything. You'll walk down what looks like a perfectly normal business street but behind every single door will be a courtyard with some exquisite palazzo inside that's lived in by some great family that made most of their money during the fascist era.

NP: And you refer to that in the movie.

TS: The story in a way is a fable, it's like a fairy story really. It's not a documentary. It's about tendencies, but it's not about any particular family. But the reason why it felt most productive for us to set it in Milan is because we wanted to explore this idea of love and this idea of nature being set, human nature and the bred-in tooth and claw element of natural progress...

And it occurred to us that we're not talking about the feudal aristocracy of Visconti's Leopard, which has much, much more latitude within itself to change, to be organic. It's a much more robust phenomenon the aristocracy because it's a social project. However exploitative feudalism might have been, there's always this sense that it's necessary to keep morphing and evolving as a beast, the whole aristocratic principle. Whereas this kind of high capitalism, you know, it's pretty brutal. It's very anti-natural. It's all based on the idea of denial.

If you're going to spend your days operating a house like that, operating a business like that, ordering countless Diptyque candles and getting more and more fittings for your Jil Sander wardrobes, you're going to have to be in denial about where that money comes from. You can't sit in a corner and worry about the workers who are living in high rises - they're actually earning the money that is keeping you in these Ferragamo shoes - you have to operate a kind of blinker system, and that makes you very vulnerable. It makes you vulnerable to the idea of real natural evolution and change.

NP: Which leads us to the glorious love scene, which sows the seed of change within the Recchi family, which is set within nature - Emma and Antonio are just like animals in the grass.

TS: Well it's all so democratic.

NP: You're stripped of your designer clothes and your pearls.

TS: Completely, it's an animal and mortal business. And of course we then intercut it with what I call these Dallas letters - "LONDON" - and come straight into an industrial London landscape and go back into the concrete world, which is manageable, and again breakable. I mean it is as much about nature as anything.

NP: That scene is so real, so tangible and tactile, and you talk about how you wanted almost to make a silent movie that involves the senses. Obviously the use of food plays an important part in the execution of that in this film, but I also love the way that you used sound and silence. So often when there's a stressful scene in a movie, it's so shrill and high volume that I'm repelled from it. But in this film, when you had those highly emotional scenes you turned the volume down so it actually draws you in, which is such a powerful device to use. The silences speak volumes.

TS: It's a very honorable tradition, and it's something that we learned from Hitchcock. Hitchcock is always talking about the style of a film being the content and the dialogue just being atmosphere. We knew always that we wanted to make a film where what people actually said to each other was not really that important. For that reason we decided that the woman, Emma, would be out of her own language. She's not an articulate person. She's not somebody that uses language, possibly not even in Russian. The most she speaks is when she's talking about her past to Antonio. She's not someone who relies on expressing herself verbally.

And we wanted to show behavior more. I remember saying very early on to Luca that I wanted to make a film where the way in which a woman would roll up a ribbon off an unwrapped present would tell you more than some long speech about her life. Just those details, which you don't often see in modern cinema - you still are able to look for that kind of detail in modern novels but you can't really look for it in modern cinema very often - we wanted to recoup that possibility.

NP: Right, there's not the texture there anymore.

TS: The texture and the observation, for the camera to observe that. For there to be both in the direction but also in the cinematography the possibility to go there and catch it, and not always be there and be listening to what's being said. To look at body language and to feel the way in which people fill space. To try and work out what they're thinking and feeling rather than just listening to what they're saying.

NP: The film also explores the idea of happiness. There's an amazing line that your daughter says in the movie where she talks about how happy is a very sad word. In cinema and literature there's always a price to be paid for happiness. We're always told that about happiness, and made to feel guilty about it.

TS: Well I think the idea of love as some kind of antidote to pain, the myth of romantic love, particularly two people in a romantic situation being joined together in such a union that they will never feel pain again, and they will never really need to be alone again, and in fact they will never experience anything alone again either, this kind of bondage forever, is something that we talked about in that film The Love Factory that was the genesis of the idea of this film.

What I was talking about in The Love Factory was a different kind of concept of love, which is that at the very heart of a real proper concept of love is an idea of loneliness. That if one is really, really in proper collusion with one's own loneliness then one is really in a fit state to love another person. And that's something that I think parenting has the opportunity to teach you, which is why Emma is presented as a really quite advanced mother. I mean the way that she is able to embrace her daughter coming out and they way that she gracefully absorbs her daughter's liberation, and the way in which her daughter comes out to her, there is absolutely no feeling of there being any schism for Emma at all.

It shows that she actually is quite an advanced mother. She's prepared for her children to leave. She understands enough about love in relation to the love of her children to know that she is alone from them. They have left her now and they are going on to live their own lives, and she's kind of cool with that. So the idea that to truly love another, whether it's in a romantic situation...I mean her husband has the opportunity to love her at the end when she says to him, "You no longer know who I am. I love Antonio." He has the opportunity to say, "That's fine." And, "On you go, my love. I will support you." For him to love her conditionally, so conditionally that he actually says to her, "You don't exist," that's a very archaic and breakable kind of concept of love I think.

NP: Going back to this idea of love being a cure for loneliness, I always think you should work on being as complete of a human being as you can on your own, then you'll likely find and attract other complete souls. But if you consider yourself to be half of a being and are set on looking for another half, all you'll find is another incomplete soul. Even if you find a partner under those conditions, instead of ever being whole you're destined to walk through life as two incomplete or broken souls.

TS: Well the idea that loneliness is either something that should be healed or could be healed is completely ridiculous. I think it's a modern construct, and it's something by the way I think that capitalism has co-opted very successfully. The idea that the second you feel lonely you have to go out and buy more stuff, and that you can actually be cured of your loneliness by buying more stuff is one of the ways that capitalism actually works...

Lonely people make the best company it seems to me. And there's a difference between alone-ness and loneliness. But really that existential loneliness of knowing that at the end of the day you are the only one on your particular path means that you can really properly communicate with somebody else who knows the same thing about themselves.

I mean, what do you do with the idea that you have to cut parts off yourself in order to be in communion with somebody else? Whether they're a lover, or whether they're a child, or whether they're a mother or a father or a brother or a sister, or even a friend, to sort of go, "Well, we're very close but I used to love to go raving, and I can't go raving anymore because he doesn't like it" or "I can't go raving anymore because my children wouldn't approve," that's kind of a terrible waste of life.


I Am Love opens in theaters on June 18.