Tilda Swinton on Suspiria and collaborating with Luca Guadagnino

Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria has been setting social media alight for the last few weeks and the buzz is about to reach fever pitch after the premiere at Venice Film festival. Cast and crew rolled into town to unleash this dark beast upon the Italian public. Those who have peeked at the trailer will have seen Tilda Swinton summoning all sorts of portent and darkness with her shadowy, mysterious Madame Blanc: the teacher of the hallowed Berlin ballet school that preys upon a young American student.

WORKING WITH LUCA – “I’ve known Luca a very, very long time and he’s one of my closest friends. Working with him, living alongside him is home for me, and it’s a great, great piece of luck as a filmmaker to find other filmmakers to work with where there’s this degree of ease. But beyond ease, there’s this sense of daring each other, which is really important when making art together.”

PUSHING EACH OTHER – “Filmmaking is entirely collaborative and when you know that the person standing next to you has got as low a boredom threshold as you do, and is going to be as uninterested in something they’ve seen before as you are, then you’re really safe, because you can keep amusing each other; pushing each other. For me, it’s not even a question of work. It’s a question of life working alongside Luca, and it’s my piece of luck.”

REFERENCES – “An important point of reference for me was the great creation of (Boris) Lermontov in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes played by the extraordinary Anton Walbrook. He’s a reference for everything we do, I think. For this, there’s that sense of ego, charisma and doubt, and a kind of perverse attachment to art above everything that was such a beautiful territory to step into.”