Tilda Swinton Quotations

I always think of the word 'abandonment' when I think of the character.

It may be unfair of me but I do feel I know it.

Faith is in the eye of the beholder.

I've been on the other side of the table many times, trying to get people to be sympathetic to projects, and I've been the victim of that kind of intense kindness masking extreme stupidity.

I knew Spike Jonze would do something really interesting with it.

I wasn't around when Nic was playing Donald. I was around with Charlie.

Nic's Charlie is something very particular. You can't really put them together. It's a phantasm.

What he's done is recognise the cinematic nature of the book. It's beautifully realised - it's a beat film.

She's not a talker, or an intellectual, and she's a woman at a certain stage of her life who's already made a certain amount of choices.

She's not a 'normal' mom, but who knows what that is anymore? ... But she learns I think the most important lesson of parenting. You have to tell your kids, 'I'm watching you.'

I felt clearly that the atmosphere of the film is about loneliness, and existentialist loneliness - in all the characters, including my own.

I was one of the very few people brought up on these islands who hadn't been given the books along with my mother's milk. So I came to it with a beginner's mind. I still haven't read them all, but I thought it was a good read, and I thought it would make a good film. So I was very happy to do it. When I met with Andrew Adamson I just thought he was the right person for the job.

Well, it's kind of what I do, to be honest with you,

till I was about 17. I can't remember why I stopped. I've tried (to suck my thumb) since, but it doesn't work anymore.

Don't you think... the festival has, I don't know, gone a little funny this year?

There's something radical about a coming-of-age story that's about everyone trying to come of age at the same time, ... It's not so much about growing up as growing on. There's something compassionate about parents not knowing what they're doing.

So we had this moment with the fly, and we all thought: 'Well, you can't hope to direct a fly. If it walks around a bit, that will be enough.'

And the idea of going through the back of a wardrobe into this parentless land where you're the only people who can prevail, I found really moving.

This film is all about questions and gracefully not about answers. This film steers away from that.

This film is about the fact that it's important for people, particularly families, to communicate with each other. But we're playing people who find it hard to communicate. You can't wrap the plot up into a tiny little sentence. So it was clear to me it was going to take some time to get the film made.

It's pretty much the best original screenplay I've ever read, for a start. Then there's the team - they're a fantastic group of people.

This is the launch of the Doctor Strange film interpretation, of - in my view - a classic, which has been interpreted many times by other graphic artists and this is just our graphic interpretation of The Ancient One. I would say the whole approach is about a kind of fluidity.

There are many graphic artists who have interpreted The Ancient One as a Tibetan Buddhist Lama, we're kind of shifting that a bit. We're trying not to be fixed, we're trying not to be fixed to any one thing, any one gender, any one spiritual discipline, and any one race even; we're just trying to wing it beyond that. So it's a new gesture really, just another interpretation.

We talked [with Scott Derrickson] about making it kind of muscular and practical. Yeah it's a fantasy but what's the difference between fantasy and reality really?

This film [Doctor Strange] kind of takes that everyday boring reality and really bursts it wide. So we talked a lot about that. In many ways there's something very practical about this world, the Kamar-Taj. It's - You know, we all look like samurai warriors, but actually there are iPads everywhere and there's a feeling that it's a practical possibility for this modern world that the Doctor Strange universe is functioning, and that we know it and it's around the corner for all of us.

I was just talking to Benedict [Cumberbatch] who's got a little baby and knows his father lives in his phone. We as humans are evolving really fast, so everyday we're hit with that.

It was an amazing performer. Very temperamental, it spent a lot of time in its trailer.

The people I'm working with tend to be people I know, who are my friends, and I like hanging out with them. There's nothing better than making a long-term project with your friends. It's just dreamy.

We're filling a big universe [in Doctor Strange], and so the look and the sort of plasticity of us is really important to us when we're striking poses here. It's very important, it's really great.

I follow my nose. It’s as simple as that.

I remember noticing, when I had my babies, how much I liked them, and not just loved them, but I was really into them. I knew I was going to be curious about them, and up for the mayhem ahead.

George [Clooney] and I do have the aim one day to be in a film where we say one nice thing to each other. Hopefully one day.

I am the only living person in the English speaking world who didn't have the Narnia books as a child.

I was always, and I still am to a certain extent, one of those lazy people who spends a lot of time with Italian friends and yet constantly says I don't speak Italian. Things slow down when I start speaking Italian.

The whole thing of working in collaboration with filmmakers is the thing that I love the most, and possibly the thing I do the best.

It's exotic for me to be given a script that's already written, and be given a pay cheque, and asked to dress up and play, and that's all.

The Ancient One, as you know, is the master, is the Sorcerer Supreme, and [Doctor] Strange comes to learn how to heal himself and The Ancient One has got the knowledge. And so what you're seeing today is a part of the whole training section when he's learning the moves and digging deep. So it's all about that, it's all about trying to push him to get there.

When I say that it's taken us [with Luca Guadagnino ] 11 years to make this film, what I mean is that it was 11 years ago that we started to talk about a kind of cinema that we wanted to make together.

I would say that I think the film [I am love] is absolutely about nature, it recommends human nature. You don't need to recommend change, that's inevitable, it's the only reliable thing we have.

I think that film festivals, we're very often given to understand, are about filmmakers and about films and about the industry of filmmaking. I don't believe that they are, I believe that film festivals are about film audiences, and about giving an audience the encouragement to feel really empowered and to stretch the elastic of their taste.

The last time I did anything like this [special powers] was with the Narnia film with two swords, the same but different.

Eleven years is a great length of time to prepare a movie, it would be wonderful to have 11 years of funded preparation.

Maybe it was my revenge on people who had been unkind to me as a child. But it was very easy and a thrill to freeze up children.

I would say, and this sounds like a rather immodest thing to say, but the truth is it's probably the most amazing thing of all, it's pretty much exactly what I thought we were going to make, what I hoped we'd make.

I'm just really old [in Doctor Strange]. Just really, really old. There is I suppose a sort of theme tune which I'm really interested in.

I think of great masters, like [Alfred] Hitchcock, for example, who works absolutely within this sensational realm. You feel like you can always tell what temperature a room is in a Hitchcock film because the people feel alive, they don't feel like they're just being filmed on a stage.

To be honest the work that a producer does is work that I've done for most of my working life. It's work that I started to do, for example, when I worked with Sally Potter on Orlando. We developed it together over five years.

I think that both Luca [ Guadagnino]and I have a kind of resistance to the idea of a film holding a moral message because that would exclude so many people from feeling that it was their film and it's important for a piece of work to feel owned by every member of the audience.

I'm very much drawn to these stories. This is a huge, great story [in Doctor Strange] about the possibility of living beyond everything, living beyond mortality, living beyond all the immortal confines, living beyond the planet as we know it. It's mind-blowingly no limits, and I think this is going to be something else.

The work is different in the sense that I haven't had to travel round the world raising money, or work from the genesis of the project. But the collaboration feels clear always, it's sort of my drug, I'm in it for the conversation. The conversation's the most important part of it.

I've only ever gone into studio films with people I really like.

I was not, and am not, officially a producer of that film [I am love] but the work of what a producer does I learned at that stage and to a certain extent I've been a producer ever since.

I mean, even in terms of the Marvel universe, this [Ancient One character] is going on a side street into a major piazza that Marvel hasn't even been to before, because it's all about creation and not so much about destruction and forestalling destruction, it's about your mind.

Years ago, when James Bulger was murdered, every newspaper front page was talking about evil. At that point, having suppressed it for years, I remembered when I was four or five, I tried to kill my own brother.

There's no need there to sit with the filmmaker for 11 years to develop the script, or go round the world raising money.

What very often happens when people make films about rich people, the camera is quite mesmerised by the opulence and quite theatrical in fact.

I think there's a dishonorable tradition in Hollywood to give the idea, particularly to children, that evil characters are dark.

I live a soldier's life when I'm working. That's how it feels to me, except I've got a slightly greater chance of survival.

About actors' lives... I'm not the person to ask. I don't live an actor's life and I really don't know. I probably read less about actors' lives than you all do. So, I'm in the dark about all of that, sorry.

I've been really happy to be in that conversation with Scott [Derrickson] for a few months now. We started chewing this cud a while ago. He is, as you probably know, an extremely erudite thinker in terms of religious philosophy and just thinking about a modern take on something really, really ancient, about how to imagine living beyond any physical bounds, which we're on the verge of now.

There's a thing I really mind hearing, when someone says: "That's not my kind of film, I don't want to go and see that..." I don't believe that, I don't believe that it's possible to write off a whole genre of filmmaking - "oh I don't like subtitled films", or "I don't like black and white films", or I don't like films made before or after, a certain date" - I don't believe that.

It was just me, naked as underneath my clothes right now, as all of you are.

I'm from the same planet as David Bowie.

One of the wonderful things that I've always loved as an art student, what I always loved about comics, was that they are interpreted differently by different graphic artists all the time, so now film is doing that thanks to Marvel Studios.

I would rather be handsome for an hour than pretty for a week.

I think that's true of all cinema, that's why cinema is the great humanistic art form. Whatever the film is, it doesn't matter what the film is about, or even whether it's a narrative or figurative film at all, it's an invitation to step into somebody else's shoes. Even if it's the filmmaker's shoes filming a landscape, you go into somebody else's shoes and you look out of their lens, you look out of their eyes and their imagination. That's what going to the pictures is all about.

This self-obsession is a waste of living. It could be spent on surviving things, appreciating nature, nurturing kindness and friendship, and dancing.

The story, it's really important to The Ancient One that Doctor Strange does cut it because The Ancient One needs a successor, or certainly needs - you could say - a son. So The Ancient One is really invested in Doctor Strange, it's a very kind of primal relationship.

It's a real comfort zone for me to feel alien.

What children, in fact all of us at any age, find frightening is unreliability and emotional coldness. The idea that you can't affect someone, that you can't see where they're coming from and can change tact at any moment.

How do we identify ourselves, and how do we settle into other people's expectations for our identity?

I'm a huge Marvel fan and the fact that they take the liberties that they do in filmmaking I think, if anything, that it dignifies the comics and it says, "Yeah. This is a strong enough, robust enough source. We can bend it, it's elastic. It's bouncy."

If we don't accept loneliness, then capitalism wins hands down. Because capitalism is all about trying to convince people that you can distract yourself, that you can make it better. And it ain't true.

Most of us live our whole lives without having an adventure to call our own. What is any life without the pursuit of a dream?

I think that a real film fan experience is about a kind of omnivorous experience.

I'm really interested in the idea of long, long life and transformation and immortality.

I never quite understand the way society decides who is beautiful and who is not. But an open face and a capacity for kindness always feel like reliable signifiers to me.

Art is good for my soul precisely because it reminds me that we have souls in the first place.

I believe that all great art holds the power to dissolve things: time, distance, difference, injustice, alienation, despair. I believe that all great art holds the power to mend things: join, comfort, inspire hope in fellowship, reconcile us to our selves. Art is good for my soul precisely because it reminds me that we have souls in the first place.