Since September 28, Amsterdam’s Eye Filmmuseum has been hosting Tilda Swinton — Ongoing, a forty-year-spanning exhibition dedicated to the artist that, rather than aiming for the chronological exhaustiveness of a retrospective, offers visitors tangible traces of her creative partnerships, shared imaginaries and visual memory.

Along the way, Swinton is joined by Luca Guadagnino, Joanna Hogg, Derek Jarman, Jim Jarmusch, Olivier Saillard, Tim Walker, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Pedro Almodóvar—eight close friends and long-time collaborators who have shared Swinton’s rhythm across texts, frames, stages, and life itself. Through newly conceived works created specifically for this exhibition, each revisits and reimagines their creative partnerships with Swinton.

Guadagnino’s contribution, for instance, takes the form of a short film and a sculpture, while Joanna Hogg strolls down memory lane with Flat 19, a mnemonic reconstruction of the London apartment she shared with Swinton in the 1980s. Conceived in collaboration with fashion historian Olivier Saillard, A Biographical Wardrobe weaves a narrative through film costumes, red carpet dresses, and family heirlooms.

Visitors to the exhibition can also experience Pedro Almodóvar’s medium-length film The Human Voice, repurposed for an exhibition space for the first time Swinton’s first —and one of her most beloved—collaborators, Derek Jarman, is naturally not forgotten. On the occasion of the exhibition, which runs until March 15, we met Tilda Swinton in Amsterdam to discuss her creative partnerships and how they shaped the vision behind Ongoing.

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“In some partnerships, for example with Derek (Jarman), I am co-authoring, and in those Super 8 films there’s no mask, there’s no character. I don’t like the word character anyway—it feels like it belongs to the theatre.”

Last night, I was flipping through Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature, in search of a sign, a feeling that could resonate between our meeting and what Jarman was doing in December 1989. Then I stumbled upon a passage in which he wrote, “Gerard rang me in a panic about another houseboat in Amsterdam. I threw caution to the winds and bought it […]” I thought the image of the houseboat particularly suited the theme of this exhibition—something you inhabit, while also being in motion.

That’s really charming. I’ll tell you a lovely thing: that very entry is something I’m going to draw on when we do our Bliss concert on Tuesday. I said to Simon (Turner) last week, let’s look into Modern Nature and see what was happening in December, and I found exactly that entry. I think a houseboat is a really beautiful idea. It’s a kind of emblem for the way I’m living my life—even the idea of being in a cozy state, but on the move.

I’m happy you mentioned Bliss, because I think it’s one of the most exciting events connected to this exhibition. How does it feel to perform this unique work after so many years? And in what ways does it dialogue with the exhibition?

This entire experience of making this exhibition, and of Bliss being a part of it, makes me excited in a very particular way. It’s not just archaeology but also integration. It has given me the opportunity to put my house in order; to look back and fully understand that nothing changes for me, and that all those years are with me all the time. And don’t mean that in a mysterious or impractical way. 

For example, I was showing the exhibition to Pedro (Almodóvar) the other day. I hadn’t seen it for a month, so I was seeing it again for the first time. Starting with those Super 8 films we shot with Derek and their absolutely intimate atmosphere, and then going fairly soon to the film I made with Luca (Guadagnino) in the summer—it’s the same gesture. Only the year is 2025, and it’s him and me with his iPhone. It’s still me in a natural environment, looking into the camera in relation to my filmmaker friend and making shapes—it’s also the same with the work that I’m making with Apichatpong (Weerasethakul).

To go back to Bliss, as you probably already know, Blue was never going to be a film. It was an improvised happening that Simon Turner, I, and various other artists made at the great Lumiere Cinema on St Martin’s Lane, which is now, of course, a hotel, like so many great cinemas. Performing Bliss again—it’s not going back; it’s bringing the past forward. It’s an excavation, but it’s really about integration. And the fact that Simon Turner and I are still incredibly close friends, and that I still work with Sandy Powell and Joanna Hogg—it’s a really beautiful opportunity for me to accept and celebrate the consistency of the houseboat.

As a concept, Ongoing seems to work in two ways: it offers potential openings for future collaborations while also allowing you to revisit your path. I hope this doesn’t sound too abstract, but while preparing this exhibition, I’m curious whether you discovered something about your work that you hadn’t known or noticed before.

No, it is a good question, because this is the new part for me. I was, of course, inside all of these experiences. We’re talking about 40 years now, but going back and looking—particularly at the early work with Derek—and understanding what I was doing in a way that I don’t think I understood at the time: I was making a way of being in front of the camera. He was allowing me that space. I’m like a wild animal in those early fragments that we’d never shown before. It’s so raw and so behavioral; it’s like a wildlife film.

First of all, it explains to me why it was absolutely right for me to always resist being described as an actor, because it has nothing to do with acting or narrative; it has to do with experience and shape-making. I understand that properly now, in a way that I don’t think I did for years. Although it wasn’t conscious for me at the time—maybe it was conscious for Derek—now, as someone older than he was then, I look at this young person trying to find their shape. Maybe he saw it, but I certainly didn’t.

When you talk about your various collaborations with artists and filmmakers, you bring up the term performance quite a lot, but there’s also incarnation, evocation, or even gesture that could qualify your work. Which one do you think describes them best?

I think it can be any of those. I introduced The Grand Budapest Hotel earlier today. Now, my work with Wes Anderson is very particular, and there are all sorts of things that can be said about my work with other fellows that are not true of my work with Wes. They’re not all co-authored in the same way. Maybe it’s important to remember that I started my life as a writer, and I was always going to be a writer. And in many ways, now that I’m writing again, I realize that I’ve never stopped writing—I was performing, and that was the way of my writing.

In some partnerships, for example with Derek, I am co-authoring, and in those Super 8 films there’s no mask, there’s no character. I don’t like the word character anyway—it feels like it belongs to the theatre. But there’s no persona that I’m really employing at all when I’m rolling around in the stones. I may be dressed as Mother Mary, but I’m reacting as a woman from 1990, as myself in fact. Then in the 35mm films we made with him, I may be performing Queen Isabella, but it has a kind of height to it. It does operate with a sort of mask, but it still feels authored, because the choice of that subject came out of a conversation around a kitchen table, [as we were discussing] what kind of film we could make in opposition to Section 28 being brought in by Thatcher’s government, and we had thought of Edward II. It’s really packed—it’s like a chocolate full of the filling of the time. But the shell is Christopher Marlowe. It feels like a highly stylized pose, but it’s packed with a very authored spirit.

There are also other partnerships. Very interestingly, my relationship with Joanna Hogg feels very close to autobiography—autobiography at one remove—because in The Souvenir films and in The Eternal Daughter, I play someone who’s really close to my mother and Joanna’s mother, a sort of combination of the two. It is someone I know really well, and I’m improvising what she’s saying, so it’s really coming from within. That is a form of incarnation, if that’s not too mystical a thought. Then, in The Eternal Daughter, I’m also playing her daughter, who is a version of a cross between me, Joanna, and my own daughter, who played her in The Souvenir films. So the tooth-comb with Joanna is very fine.

Then you have somebody like Pedro Almodóvar, which is a completely different issue, because when I step into his world, it’s the closest I come to really leaving myself behind—especially in The Human Voice. The Human Voice is me playing an Almodóvar woman. There’s actually very little of my own rhythm in there. There’s much more of my own rhythm in later work, because by then we knew each other and he wrote that part with my rhythm in mind. I don’t know if any of that makes sense, but it’s like a cake we can cut in many different ways.

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“I think that the practice of inviting life into the work is really important.”

It does make sense, because when we look at the forms each work has been crafted in, and the space they occupy within the exhibition, they also reflect the nature of these collaborations.

I think it’s right, and we end up in a cinema with [The Human Voice], which happens to be half an hour long, so we watch it from beginning to end, with the credits. It has this sense of fakeness around it because [Pedro] works with artifice, and I’m literally playing the part of an actress. So it’s a real disguise, if you like. From the beginning of the exhibition, you’re starting with no carapace at all, and you’re creeping through various environments—through the work with Apichatpong in my own home, through my wardrobe. Then we go into a zombie movie with Jim Jarmusch, and then we end up in the cinema. We could extend it—there are other people whom I hope, at some point, would be part of that panorama as well. I was with Bong Joon-ho a couple of days ago in Marrakech, and he said that if we take the exhibition to Korea, he will make a piece with me. It’ll be interesting, because the way we work with the grotesque is a whole different story.

I was deeply moved by Flat 19, the piece you created with Joanna Hogg. It truly feels like a time machine—going into that space and hearing your voice. The piece offers such an intimate interaction, which is really difficult to achieve through a second-hand experience. With all the sounds, textures, and details, it feels as though, as visitors, we had lived there as well. I know it mostly comes from you, but since it’s the fruit of a collaborative process, I’m interested in knowing how you and Joanna worked on this piece.

Joanna and I always work hand in glove. When we were thinking about what we might make for this exhibition, we were going to make a little film, and then we suddenly decided to jump ship and make an environment. And the only environment it could be was this chrysalis environment. She had already remade her first flat for The Souvenir films—it was called Flat L. She drew on many photographs she had of that flat. In fact, I remember at the time, all those years ago, that she took photographs out of the windows of the flat, and it was almost as if she knew that forty years later she would make a film, replicate it, and need the vistas out of all the windows. But the thing about Flat 19 is that I took no photographs at all during that time and the whole thing came out of my memory. You’re right—it’s an experience, it’s not an object.

Once we’d hit on this particular idea, we really were so happy, because it is, as I say, a chrysalis. I went into that flat after university, before I started working, and left years later having met Derek Jarman, started working in filmmaking, Derek having died, having made Orlando, having had twins, and having gone off to the Highlands. I thought I would never enter that flat again, and when I finally stepped into it just before the exhibition opened—since we had agreed that I wouldn’t go inside until that moment—it was a truly remarkable experience.

Because I was prepared to step into a set—that’s not a set. That is a space that I still was in yesterday; I cannot believe it’s not in West London. It’s so precise, and the atmosphere is so exact. Friends of mine who knew it have had the same experience. It’s a real time warp, and I’ve heard from some people that it resonates with their own first flat. Your first flat—whether it’s a student flat, or a first flat when you go into a city, or a room in a house—is always a very important space.

It also operates as a proxy for our creativity, because we create something in these spaces from scratch as well.

Exactly. One interesting thing is that I made two mistakes—two mistakes that I only noticed when I walked into space. Because everything else was so completely accurate, I really did feel like I was stepping back in time, and yet they popped out amid all that accuracy and genuine presence. I quite love those mistakes, because they’re simply failures of my memory. And I’m torn between whether to tweak them and make them correct, or just leave them as they are.

I believe it’s better this way. There are inaccuracies in the present too—it’s impossible to correct everything.

That’s the thing. And the whole idea of memory—I remember when Joanna was preparing to make The Souvenir; she’d been wanting to make a film about that story forever. Yet she was delaying it because she was waiting for her memory to be sharp enough. I remember having a conversation with her and saying that the memory was just a fantasy. It’s not like waiting for the focus on a lens to become sharp—you’re never going to get there. Just go for it, go with the fantasy.

With that in mind, how does idleness apply to your work? You highlight this concept in your interviews, and given the artistic environment we’re accustomed to, it feels like an impossible idea to hold on to. How does one stop when everyone else is pushing them forward?

I love that you mention idleness; it’s a very dear concept for me. There’s a great essay by Robert Louis Stevenson, An Apology for Idlers. It’s like a manifesto for idleness and its relationship with creativity. But rather than creativity, I’d like to talk about responsiveness, because within idleness, responsiveness grows. That flat represents a kind of idling. It’s like a pit stop on a racetrack. I was in abeyance. I talk on the soundtracks of the rooms about waiting for my life to begin. Do you remember that? Did you have a period of time when you were waiting for your life to begin? Maybe you’re too young, or maybe it’s a luxury that my generation was afforded.

I think it also depends on where you come from—what culture or family you grow up in. I’ve gradually started to appreciate the idea of giving myself more time and patience. And it’s something that’s also reflected in your friendships and creative partnerships—with Luca Guadagnino and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, for instance; they thrive on maturity.

The subject of the exhibition really grows out of an image I have, which is very practical. The relationship is the trunk of the tree, and that’s the part that is “ongoing.” Out of it grow the particular conversations—which might be a conversation with Luca starting in 1994, and then, years later, out of that same conversation, we make I Am Love (2009), which is just the leaf. The important part is not the leaf but the trunk. You can have many conversations growing out of that trunk over the course of forty or fifty years. Those long conversations are what I’m really interested in.

Of course, it all started with Derek. I mentioned the kitchen table earlier. We would all sit around the kitchen table in Dungeness, or sit on his bed in Phoenix House in London, and dream up the next idea—that whole feeling of life coming first, and then, out of life, these particular conversations emerging.

A lot of filmmakers are struck by my filmography. They might make a film in eighteen months from start to finish. I’ve been customarily making films over decades. The last film I made, which is going to be shown in Rotterdam, is Cynthia Beatt’s film, [Heart of Light: Eleven Songs for Fiji] which we started talking about in 1986. We made it in Fiji the year before last, and it’s just finished. That’s how long it takes, and I don’t regret a year of it. I know there were some years for her that were very frustrating, but it simply needed that length of time to be made.

The same is true of all these long gestations. Memoria came out of seventeen years of conversations back and forth. In the meantime, we were making little films together and co-curating festivals—we had a long, developing relationship. But during that time, things happened to us: Joe (Apichatpong Weerasthekaul) experiencing exploding head syndrome, me looking after my parents and being bereaved. All of that fed into the film. So I think that the practice of inviting life into the work is really important.

Have you ever given thought to imaginary partnerships—with people you would never be able to work with, but whose vision, whose art, you nonetheless feel a strong kinship with? Mine would be with Chris Marker, for instance.

When we respond to an artist, they become our comrade, they become our partner. I feel that very strongly. The last time I was here, I went to the Van Gogh Museum. When you stand in front of his paintings, there’s something about the energy of the paint. When you’re standing where he stood, you can imagine your own arm rising, your own fist going toward the paint and making that shape in it. You are collaborating somehow.

If you respond to a work, there’s a joining. I think art is about connection, and it’s a very, very intimate connection when we respond. If you respond, as I also do, to Chris Marker, he becomes our collaborator. That’s what he wants—he wants us to join him.