In her new movie, The Deep End, Tilda Swinton plays the kind of character that would have made even Alfred Hitchcock smile. Trapped, yet still resourceful. Beaten down, yet surprisingly resilient. Matriarchal, yet maniacal, when necessary. As the protective mother of three children, Swinton's Margaret Hall is pushed to the limit when a blackmail plot, involving her gay teenaged son and his dead lover, arises. The lengths to which Margaret goes says something about a mother's love for her children and a woman's ability to withstand the kind of pressure that would probably make the average man snap. Swinton's performance has an Oscar ring to it and is the main reason to see The Deep End.
Tilda Swinton in The Deep End.
Gregg Shapiro: The Deep End is a movie in which water figures prominently...metaphorically and physically. How did you feel about playing a character who was surrounded by water ( Lake Tahoe ) and who spends a great deal of time in the water?
Tilda Swinton: I like water. I'm made of it. It seems to me that she is suspended as a character, in so many ways. She's the one who's closeted and she's the one who's being brought to the surface by this crisis. There is a lot about water in the film, but there is also quite a lot about air, as well, and breathing. She'd told at one point to take a breath. All the characters who die in the film actually die because they are suffocated in some way. They have an anchor in the chest or they have their lungs crushed.
GS: Or strangulation.
TS: I think that the weight of that metaphor was very present.
GS: You see her swimming, and the whole idea of someone who smokes swimming and how that compromises her breathing.
TS: But she's a closeted smoker. She keeps her cigarettes in a drawer. He ( Alek Spera, played by Goran Visnjic ) sees it. He says, "I took you for a smoker." He's right. She's not out, and in that sense she's somehow not at ease with her breath. It's very easy for people to describe the story as being about a mother's sacrifice, for example. My suggestion there is that if one wants to look at that, then maybe to think about her sacrifice as having been made a long time before. The crisis brings the fact and the nature and the costs of the sacrifices to the surface.
GS: That's another water metaphor...bringing something to the surface.
TS: Absolutely, absolutely.
GS: What kind of personality traits do you think that the mother of a gay child needs to have that are different from those of a mother whose children are all heterosexual?
TS: Do you know, honestly, I can't think of a thing. The mother of any child at all is asked by nature to have and to find a way of having unconditional love. That's what nature sets down in the cards. A very strange thing happens when you become a mother, and I can tell you this because I have children myself. When you become a mother, it's as if another identity springs up, which is you as mother. The danger is this, and it must be there for every mother, that there is a danger of you lopping bits off yourself...which you have to do for a certain amount of time anyway...you have to lop certain bits off yourself or to say to one of your selves, the individuated, self-sufficient individual who is not the leader of a pack...you have to say "I'm just going to have to leave you for a bit and I will get back to you." The danger is that it's very easy with sleep deprivation and everything else, to not get back and forget where you left that part of yourself. For example, you get Margaret Hall, who has forgotten for 17 years where she left this part of herself. ... What happens with that is that a mother can forget so much about what it is to be an individual; to have an emergent sexuality; to need to forge connections with people; to have a sense of loneliness.
GS: There's a person inside.
TS: Yeah, really. She's a mother, not a moron, as they say in the film. Speaking as a mother and a sentient being, I can't think of what the mother of a gay child would need. She may require less in the sense that she requires to be clear of certain assumptions and attachments that the mother of heterosexual children might have. She needs to be clear of a kind of slightly inattentive assumption that her children will necessarily follow a certain pattern.
GS: As a parent, how would you react if, as teenagers, your son or daughter came out to you as gay or lesbian?
TS: If they came to me and said, "I'm really, really unhappy because I'm in love with a bit of a bastard ( laughs ) ." Then I would react in a certain way based on that.
GS: So the gender wouldn't matter?
TS: My mind is a blank on this subject.
GS: Perhaps if you hadn't the experience that you had with the gay culture...
TS: But the gay culture is in me too. I'm not a tourist here. I believe in sexuality. I've never been particularly comfortable...ever ...with these prefixes that we are constantly asked to deal in. I still don't understand why people feel the need to even make a word called "bisexual," because I don't see what's wrong with "sexual," and I never have. I think that's my answer ( laughs ) .
GS: You will be appearing in some films that signal a move for you from independent to mainstream cinema.
TS: The funny thing that I realized is that the real answer to that is that the move is not on my part, it's on the part of the people who have asked me to do the films ( laughs ) . Because that's the move. Mohammed is not going to the mountain, put it that way ( laughs ) .
GS: The mountain came to you.
TS: When Cameron Crowe asked me to do this little thing for him in Vanilla Sky, it's sort of a good idea that I should do it for all sorts of funny little jokey reasons. There's also sort of something wry about me being in Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman's film ( Adaptation ) , as well. Meanwhile, it's business as usual...I'm developing Medea.