Tilda Swinton: «Uncertainty, chaos, turmoil»

He: (whispering, the microphone barely catches the words): «So, the day after I met you, I said to myself: “Oh God and if she really could be Alithea… ”».

She (looks at him as one would look at a lover who has just turned up at the door with a bouquet of roses)

He: «Then there was a beautiful moment when you called, after a very short while, it meant that you had read the screenplay in one go, and you said to me: “Yes, I will”».

The first moments, those that decree the birth of a work, a film, are often beautiful and poetic (then the lawyers come into play and the magic fades), but it is rare to see a correspondence of amorous senses as blatant as the one between George MillerAustralian, 77 years old, author of the trilogy (soon pentalogy) by Mad Max And Tilda Swinton62, British, interpreter – together with compatriot Idris Elba – from 3000 years of waiting (will be seen at the beginning of 2023) that Miller directed between one raid in the Australian desert and another (Furiouswith Anya Taylor-Joy, is almost ready).

A fairy tale for adults

Alithea, “container of many things”, in the words of Tilda Swintonwhich usually chooses them very carefully, is a lecturer of narratology with a classic name (means “truth”) who speaks dead languages ​​(impeccable ancient Greek), whom the viewer meets – suit, glasses and bob cut – in Istanbul where he participates in a literary conference.

An expert in the art of storytelling, she seems self-confident, also because she knows a lot about her field, and yet… «My name is Alithea. My story is true. I am a solitary creature by nature. I have no children, no brothers, no parents. I once had a husband » is her footnote that she writes about herself. And it’s a note that she resonates in the story of Katherine Matilda Swinton, born – third child and only girl – into a family of high lineage and long military tradition.

«Loving means not screwing up the loneliness of the other. And to avoid that the other fucks yours » she told us years ago and, when today we meet her again to talk about this « new chapter of my reflection – it is I’m writing a whole novel about lonelinessI added a flower to the bouquet», confirms that the only way to try to tell «one of the great taboos of Western society», could only be a fairy tale.

Fairy tale for adults, and with philosophy. Alithea in Istanbul makes an incautious purchase, a beautiful colored bottle that seems to have passed through many hands. The polish (with an electric toothbrush, it makes practical sense) and, surprised, but not so much, ends up freeing a jinna geniuswhich first struggles to adapt to the size of the hotel room (we are at Palas pearin room that hosted Agatha Christie while she wrote Murder on the Orient Express), then he revises his linguistic preferences and his own oversized dimensions, puts on the hotel bathrobe to cover up his shame and that’s where the fun begins: the dialogue, the story, the antidote to loneliness.

See through words

«There comes a time when we confuse what we have seen with what we have been told, what we have witnessed with what we know, what we know with what we have read (…) it is strange, all the stories one hears and sees during a lifetime at the cinema, on television, in the theatre, in newspapers, in novels, they all pile up and get mixed up. It’s amazing how most people still know what really happened to them.”

This is Javier Marias, Such a white heartbut it could also be George Miller who – when asked to recall the first moment in which the desire to tell a story arose in him and voluntarily lose sight of what really happened – leads the reporter to his «fifties, when as children, my brother and I – it was before TV – listened to a vinyl of The happy prince by Oscar Wilde, produced by Orson Welles: it was wonderful, I’m sure we put it on the turntable at least a thousand times. From that fairy tale I got the basic political notions, the idea of ​​what a heroic gesture is and where justice lies: it’s all in there and it’s thanks to that record that I learned to dream. The prince who deprives himself of his golden cover to help those in need finally asks the swallow to stay one more night to help him and the swallow, even if he has to go to Egypt, reach the flock, save himself from the coming winter in the end it stays. And it dies of cold.”

Every story has its own rules and stories jinn they make no difference: Alithea has the right, indeed the obligation, to express 3 wishes. The scholar does not fall for it: desiring is dangerous, better to stay in known territories. To convince the protagonist of a film that is «the cinematographic equivalent of a medieval Latin illuminated manuscript kept in a safe and can only be consulted by accredited scholars and, at the same time, it has the innocent, colorful exuberance of the Christmas movies of 30 or 40 years ago» (so the critic of the Guardian), the jinn has an infallible strategy: tell your story, 3000 years of desire – originally conceived by Antonia Susan Byatt in the novella The genius in the nightingale’s eye (in Italy the public Einaudi) – through the Middle East, from the meeting between King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba to the court intrigues of the Ottoman Empire. During her conferences, Alithea talked about them, but also about modern divinities like Batman and Superman, she explained how the new myths and those of the ancient world, the Old Testament, the A thousand and one nights and Marvel ultimately can be put in the same box.

Therefore, if you ask Tilda Swinton when her fantasy – certainly very precocious – started to work, she will answer: «There was no moment or story in particular, but there was a figure who told the stories, my grandmother, great storyteller. My brother and I have listened to hundreds of fairy tales told by her, and it is true that children love to hear the same stories repeated a thousand times – and we were no different – but she had a knack for making them more beautiful each time, and we were never bored. She could have read us the phone book and we would have been enchanted. And she did it especially before going to bed: my grandmother gave us wonderful dreams for years. She added sensory details, what the weather was like, what the colors were like, the smells, she taught us to see through words, and I think she influenced many of my future choices ». Tilda Swinton soon transferred that sensory experience into her life and work: he was 26 when he made his debut in Caravaggio by Derek Jarman; thus the former pupil of West Heat, a selective school for girls in Kent, attended in those same years by Diana Spencer, becomes part of a dirty, colorful and riotous world which in those years made England look like a beacon (“Derek’s was a creative laboratory in which we were all filmmakers, the actress, the costume designer, the set designer: together we contributed to a common project”).

I narrate ergo sum

«Everything can be told. Just put one word after another.’ It is still Javier Marías, and Tilda-Alithea has something to say about this too: «It is a mistake to think that narratology concerns only fiction, we are all narrating creatures, homo narrans rather than sapiens. We need stories all the time, in 15 minutes I’ll be telling another one to some of his colleagues» explains the artist who in the performance Embodying Pasoliniin Rome and (just finished) in Pariswore the clothes of a dozen Pasolini characters, from Anna Magnani to Mother Rome to teenagers of Salò.

«And what we have learned in two years of the pandemic is that all the narratives we believed in, like our fragile certainties, have collapsed. We had to assume that: “Maybe I won’t get married at the end of the summer”, “Maybe I won’t go to America to visit my son”. And sometimes they have been replaced by terrible narratives: “I want to be with my father when he dies” and instead it won’t be like this and he will only die in hospital from the covid. We have all experienced the trauma of the collapse of great narratives and of having to settle for only the small and everyday ones – “I have to go to the local store” – but that trauma made us realize to what extent we are addicted to them, because they give us meaning of perspective, they take us inside us or very far away from us. And then there are people all over the world who have heard the lack of cinemawho – with no more stories – felt poorer and more alone… The world is evolving and if I were to show my grandmother this film today and try to explain to her what it is rationally, she would tell me that what we have done are not special effects but magic. Our mythology has changed, and this is what strikes me: that the more we know about the past and about ourselves, the more the mystery deepens. Before we explained natural phenomena, the seasons, lightning with the gods, today we know that black holes are real, but we can hardly get close to their true nature. We have to look for new mythologies to explain them.”

Fall in love with genius

No certainty, no truth to hold on to in the eternal flow of time, then? «One, all female, is the one indicated by Alithea. I know true academics who have chosen to live like her, they have closed off certain areas of their lives to devote themselves entirely to work, we know it is possible, especially at certain times.
It’s not what I did, and in the end even the character I play understands that he can no longer be at peace with that decision, because his solitude does not exhaust the story. She understands that there is more to life and she understands this by talking to the jinn, falling in love with his speech. Then what does he do? It calls for chaos, uncertainty, turmoil. He finally makes his wish. He asks to lose control ».

He will do it. And it will be beautiful. Who said genes don’t exist?

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