Tilda Swinton on ‘Complicity’ With Pedro Almodóvar, Julianne Moore and Embracing ‘Unguardedness’

VENICE — An instant connection can work in a funny way: sparking suddenly, often unexpectedly, it can sweeten a simple moment in life or forever shape one’s path.

Its simpler aspect was the case Sunday for two chefs enjoying their dinner break seated on one of the docks lining the Grand Canal here. Dressed in pristine uniforms, plates on their laps, they were so deep in conversation they barely registered behind them the ethereal appearance of Tilda Swinton wrapped in a billowing Chanel gown and posing for WWD’s camera (one just glanced, suspicious she might be just a look-alike).

The bigger type of connection informed Swinton’s new project, the much-awaited movie “The Room Next Door” that premiered Monday as part of the 81st edition of the Venice Film Festival. The premiere, which marks Pedro Almodóvar’s feature-length, English-language debut and sees Swinton playing opposite Julianne Moore, further enriched the star-studded festival, which so far has drawn to the Lagoon the likes of Tim Burton, Cate Blanchett, Angelina Jolie, Nicole Kidman, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Adrien Brody, Jude Law, Taylor Russell, Jenna Ortega, Winona Ryder and Monica Bellucci, among many others.

“The Room Next Door” is the sophomore collaboration between Swinton and the legendary Spanish director. The two worked together on “The Human Voice,” a short film that was presented in Venice in 2020 and is loosely based on Jean Cocteau’s 1930 stage play of the same name. At the time of their first project, the duo was already thinking of doing a long feature, which happened sooner than Swinton expected, she said on the eve of the premiere.

Calling herself an “ardent worshipper in his church” since she was a student, Swinton first met Almodóvar in what she described as “amusing circumstances.”

“We were both at some, for me, very rare Hollywood party. And it can’t have been recently, because I haven’t been to any of those in years, so I’d say around and about 2008,” she recalled. “We were both standing in the outskirts and the party was going on, we were like spectators. Like there [was] Liza Minnelli over there, Julia Roberts is over there and I don’t know who else….We were absorbing this and we were both silent. Standing. Watching. And then we caught each other’s eye. And there was a moment of complicity. Instant complicity.

“Then when I did come to speak to him another time I met him, I said, ‘Listen, I don’t speak Spanish. Either I’ll learn Spanish or I’ll be a mute, but please, can we find something [to work together on]?’ And he laughed and I never ever thought that it would come to anything, but I had to ask,” Swinton said.

A friendship is also at the core of the new movie’s plot. In the film, Swinton and Moore play Martha and Ingrid, respectively, who were close friends when they worked together at the same magazine in their youth. Ingrid went on to become an autofiction novelist, Martha became a war reporter and circumstances of life separated them until they reconnect in an extreme situation after years of being out of touch.

“It really follows a trajectory for Pedro. For me, it’s clearly an evolution from ‘Pain and Glory.’ In that, once again it looks at the territory of old friendship and that’s such a beautiful territory and relatively unexplored. That’s something we’re very proud of,” Swinton said.

She referenced the film’s investigation of “what that old bond can allow you to do and how compassionate it can make us, because we’ve known someone since they were very young, we’ve seen them through all their whole topography of their development, and then we came back and realized that there’s something unshakable.”

It also proved an experience Swinton relished, since she went “unguarded” in deep-diving into the role. “I had the opportunity with Pedro to look at a story about a woman at a particular precipice in her life….And because of the nature of her predicament, she’s completely unfiltered and completely present and for me that was a real gift, to be given the opportunity to be that way,” she said. “Those moments don’t come along very often. Certainly haven’t for me. I like to play with disguise, to play with a kind of mask, but this was about being mask-less, sinking down into something very close to myself, so that was a real honor….I took it on with relief because I realized I’ve sort of been looking for this kind of unguardedness for a long time.”

In a statement presenting the film, Almodóvar praised Swinton and Moore for being a “spectacle” and carrying “the weight of the whole film on their shoulders.”

“I have been fortunate in that both give a veritable recital. At times during shooting, both the crew and I were on the verge of tears watching them. It was a very moving shoot and, in some way, blessed,” the director said.

“Another blessing” is how Swinton defined her relationship with Moore. She underscored they didn’t know each other before working on the movie, having met only briefly a few times. 

“We’d said that we were drawn to find time to do something together and we couldn’t have dreamed of anything more fulfilling than this. And again, the film looks at the landscape of old friendship: well, Julianne and I aren’t old friends, but we became close friends immediately,” Swinton said with a snap of fingers to stress the instant connection. “We’re pretty much exactly the same age and so we have a whole frame of reference that is very harmonious and very easy for us to imagine having been friends for 30 years.”

The language of cinema and its references have been at the core of Swinton’s relationship with Almodóvar, even when it initially came with a linguistic barrier, the actress said. “We are always talking about cinema between each other…even before his English became so good and my Spanish is really not good enough to have a proper conversation,” she said, pointing as example to a poignant scene of her putting on a red lipstick, and homage to the late legendary director Michael Powell.

“There’s a moment in ‘Black Narcissus’ [1947 movie] when Sister Ruth paints her lips in exactly the same way and I showed it to Pedro and while we were on the set, we pulled it up and we replicated it,” she said. “Pedro has a very clear eye and a very particular kind of milieu, and it continues with this film: his sense of bright colors — particularly red, of course — is always there. Like with some of the greatest filmmakers from Martin Scorsese to Powell, red is always there and Pedro is preeminent among them.” 

When asked if fashion also played a role in the movie, Swinton said she “wouldn’t call it fashion, though, but I think what Pedro understands about style in general is that it’s a sort of lubricant for the eye to take you into another world.”

“This is not naturalism. It’s not even realism. It’s another world. It’s a Pedro world,” Swinton said. “The world of his cinema is particular. This is one of the reasons why the colors, the shapes even and a certain sense of style — the furniture, the vases, the paintings, the posters — they continue from film to film. Each one of his pieces of work is a continuation from the other…and of course fashion plays a part in it, but it’s not really the fashion that leads it. The fashion comes along behind really.”

As for her, the Oscar winner has a track record of memorable red carpet looks, with her bold choices standing the test of time. For the premiere, she honored her long-standing affiliation with Chanel, which also supported her latest release “The End,” a long-gestating musical about the end of the world directed by Joshua Oppenheimer that premiered at the Telluride Film Festival last weekend. For it, the brand designed 10 costumes in collaboration with Frauke Firl.

Further strengthening its ties with cinema, in Venice Chanel also supported “Allégorie Citadine,” a short movie Italian director Alice Rohrwacher co-created with artist JR. Inspired by Platon’s “Allegory of the Cavern” and incorporating elements from the “Chiroptera” show presented by JR last fall on the facade of the Palais Garnier opera theater in Paris, it premiered out-of-competition on Sunday. 

Later that day, Rohrwacher and JR joined Swinton at the annual soirée the fashion house traditionally hosts at Harry’s Bar. Other guests included Luca Guadagnino, who will unveil his new movie “Queer” fronted by Daniel Craig on Tuesday; fellow directors and festival jury members James Gray and Julia Von Heinz, as well as young actresses Raffey Cassidy, Lyna Khoudri, Fotini Peluso, Gaia Girace, Carlotta Gamba and Sara Serraiocco.