DTilda Swinton, dressed in crisp whites with her hair pulled back from her forehead, looks as calm and transparent as one of the aliens from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Today, the mothership sets her up on a cream-striped sofa beneath a tree-lined window. “I’m in Scotland,” she tells me in a clear cheer, and then addresses the other face on our video call: Julio Torres, the writer-director and star of the surreal new comedy “Problemista,” who’s in Just returned to Brooklyn after filming the movie. “Julio, you may not know Where You are,” she said. “I am quite Of course, this is my apartment,” he replied, his youthful face and bronzed pixie cut filling the screen.
The relationship between Swinton, a 63-year-old art-world veteran and self-described “boyish, angular geek,” and Torres, a 37-year-old queer comedy genius and former “Saturday Night Live” writer The close relationship is evident in their approach. Trust me: You haven’t really lived until you hear Swinton painstakingly describe the old Austin Powers formula for two minutes, while Torres listens with wide eyes and rapt attention.
Photo: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy
They’ve gone from online friends to collaborators and now good friends (they were hanging out together at Glastonbury a week after we spoke). In between, they made “Problemista,” in which Torres transformed his experiences as a Salvadoran immigrant in New York City into a whirlwind comedic fantasy, with Jacques Tati, Terry Gilliam and Franz Kafka echoed. Torres’s own visa declares him an “alien with extraordinary abilities,” but the future looks even more precarious for his character, Alejandro, a budding toy designer who must Staying in the United States, he desperately needed a sponsor. Unsuccessful applicants immediately disappeared without a trace.
His potential savior is the emotionally unstable art critic Elizabeth, played by Swinton with her country-western burrs and curly scarlet dreads. She sees in the shuffling dog the ideal assistant to help her organize an exhibition of her cryogenically frozen late husband’s (played by Wu-Tang Clan member RZA) egg paintings. Her demands on Alejandro become increasingly onerous as she dangles sponsorship commitments. To put it mildly, she is a lot.
Swinton adored her. “One of the things I love about Elizabeth’s bossiness is that we’ve seen this kind of bossy behavior before, but never from such a person. confusion,” she said. “We’re used to the attitude of going from a perfect height, down a very clean slope, right into the esophagus. ” In fact, Elizabeth acts as if she’s Meryl Streep in “The Devil Wears Prada,” when in fact she’s more like Meryl Streep in “Iron Weed.” “She’s a wreck.” Video Everyone in it is full of this noise and they’re all struggling.
The character feels like a compendium of some of Swinton’s biggest hits: the Burshy magazine editor in Judd Apatow’s “Trainwreck,” the tyrannical deputy overlord in Bong Joon-ho’s “Snowpiercer,” and Eric ·The alcoholic kidnapper in Zonkha’s thriller “Julia”. (“Oh, she’s a hot Swinton agrees. “Not even a major villain,” she added, which made him chuckle widely.
Elizabeth was a sentimental woman; little things like the abundance of walnuts on the café menu would excite her. Well, it doesn’t get much better than Swindon. “I had no hope of asking for what I wanted,” she said. “I’ve never sent food back and I never will. I’ve been around people like this and it’s really humbling.
Torres trembled with sympathy. “Like, what do you do with your eyes?” he asked. “You just look down, right?” Swinton winced. “So, what’s going to come out of the kitchen?”
The only time I heard Swinton show any hint of Elizabethan tendencies was on the set of Sally Potter’s groundbreaking “Orlando” more than three decades ago. A mutual friend of ours, who happened to be American, mistakenly referred to Swindon as English rather than English or Scottish; she responded by slapping him. “Well, I’m going to pat myself on the back for that now,” she said. Then she developed a liking for the image of the headmistress. “I mean, he should know better, Ryan. You know these Americans: you have to teach them. Exactly!”
Other than that, she’s a coward. It was touching, for example, to hear her describe “Problemista” as a love story. “Elizabeth and Alejandro are exactly what each other needs, even though they are a nightmare for each other,” she said. They certainly lacked a supportive artistic community to nourish the actors who played them. Torres found his tribe on the stand-up circuit in Brooklyn: after spending his days filing files for the late painter John Herlick, he performed comedy routines in bars. “I would read abstract quips and stories from my notebook. Some of us were worlds apart, but we were drawn to each other. Today, he attracts Hollywood’s more adventurous talent: Emma Stone makes ” Problemista”; his new HBO series “Fantasmas,” starring Natasha Lyonne, Steve Buscemi and Paul Dano. Jon Hamm called him “unbelievably talented.”
For Swinton, becoming Derek Jarman’s muse and joining his inner circle made her feel like she belonged. After starring in Jarman’s 1986 masterpiece Caravaggio, she worked almost exclusively with Jarman until his death from AIDS in 1994. Talking is the most important thing. It’s like: “Oh, this year we’re doing Edward II,” “Next year, we’re doing Wittgenstein.” These works were born out of these conversations, which took place around the kitchen table, often in Dungeness. We made the movie, but we didn’t bother thinking about it. I think it’s healthy because we’re all interested in each other and the works are just leaves on the tree.
Torres was not yet born when Swinton met Jarmaine, but he has always been a fan of hers. In his 2019 live show “My Favorite Shape,” he even built a model of what he imagined her apartment to be like: there was a beehive for guests to sleep in, and a giant egg timer telling them what to do. time to leave. “As you can see, it’s pretty accurate,” she says now, rotating the laptop to reveal her cozy, non-sci-fi surroundings, complete with a pair of black-and-white springer spaniels. Torres’s pod-based fantasy, however, capitalized on her otherworldly aura. When he asked her if she couldn’t access the online link to watch Fantasia, she responded: “I have elves in my house who do it for me.”
Although Torres admired her, he was no expert. “I’m not good at understanding the lives of the people behind the things I love. Tilda to me is a wonderful actress and, frankly, a concept. She puts her hands on her face and laughs so hard her whole body shakes.” I wish my parents were still alive and I could tell them I was considered a concept,” she said, eliciting more laughter from Torres. “But I think that’s beautiful!he protested. “It’s better than: ‘Oh, she was that actress who dated that guy and then divorced the other guy and her kids. hatred she!
So what was her impression of him? After all, even before “Problemista,” there was ample evidence of Cuckoo’s sensibilities in his supernatural comedy series “Los Espookys” and in his “Saturday Night Live” sketches: Ryan Gosling on “Avatar” ” stars a man troubled by vulgar papyrus fonts; Emma Stone advertises Fisher-Price wishing fountains for sensitive boys; Harry Styles plays a lovelorn A social media junkie who posted lewd gay messages (“ruined my daddy”) on Sara Lee’s Instagram account, which he was supposed to manage.
“I was fascinated by Julio from the beginning,” Swinton said. “I think that’s good for all of us and good for his intellectual world. It’s so visionary and sophisticated.” Torres, hearing himself described as “sophisticated,” noted gently that he had Swinton in The role of toilet water in Fantasia reminded me again of his children’s book I Want to Be a Vase, which is about a toilet plunger with lofty dreams. “I do like the idea of a toilet. “He admitted. “Being a toilet is an inherently degrading job, so humanizing that excites me.”
Torres is like a good-natured David Lynch as he uncovers the whimsical underworld of secrets in our daily lives. But he insists that giving consciousness to inanimate objects – like the brash curtain on the plane that separates first class from economy in “My Favorite Shape” – is something we all do. “When we decide which outfit is ‘too much,’ which is appropriate, or whether a certain proportion of an outfit is serious or not, we’re projecting those qualities onto it, right?”
All of his work, including “Problemista,” is woven with a real fear of business and bureaucracy. Torres avoided credit his whole life and even went without a bank account for a while. How alienated is he today from the system he hates? “Well, that’s the comedy and tragedy. The more you try to untie yourself, the more you get stuck. It’s inevitable. Whenever I have to account for something, I feel like it’s a mission Impossible.
Swinton agrees: “It’s like that disgustingly brilliant episode of South Park where you end up sewing your lips to someone’s ass and then you have to eat shit because That’s in the small print, and you sign the form, but we need a certain level of connectivity, so we’re blind to it all or we’re going crazy.
On the company side, Torres sounded less forgiving, especially when the conversation turned to how companies only started displaying rainbow flags after they became fashionable. “The beauty of the queer community—and I use that term loosely—is our innate need for bite,” he said. Swinton had earlier used the term to refer to the enduring frisson and frontier of queerness. “I don’t think banks putting up pride flags appease us,” he continued. “I think we’d say: ‘You’re decades late, but thank you.'” Swinton nodded and provided Banks with her own addendum: “Keep going…”
“That’s right,” Torres said. “Next, what will make banks and businesses uncomfortable today? Because That That’s where the bite occurred. Any suggestions? “I think there are a million social problems. Companies will wait a year or two before investing in Those ones The flag is raised. For now, Swinton and Torres can only continue to fly their own freak flags. no problem.
