Tilda Swinton drew a sharp line between cinema and artificial intelligence at a Cannes Film Festival masterclass, arguing that AI poses a genuine threat only when filmmakers default to the predictable.
“I believe as long as what we’re not producing is formulaic and in some way tiring for the audience, AI doesn’t have a chance,” Swinton said during a wide-ranging on-stage conversation moderated by Didier Allouch. “But as long as we can continue to do that, then we have to watch out.”
She added: “What we need to do is what only humans can do: make messy, adventurous experiences so that an audience does not know what’s coming next and enjoys that experience.”
The argument, she insisted, was not simply about streaming versus theatrical but about the fundamental cost of boring an audience. Swinton conjured the specific frustration of a moviegoer who has paid for travel, a ticket and a meal only to recognize a film they feel they have already seen four times. “That’s what we have to watch out for,” she said.
Cinema, she argued, had survived every previous moment of supposed obsolescence – sound, color, television, video and streaming – and would survive this one, provided it remained in the hands of people willing to take risks. “She’s a human business,” she said. “Humans make cinema, right?”
Much of the session was given over to Swinton’s account of how that human business had shaped her own trajectory, beginning with the late British filmmaker Derek Jarman, with whom she made her first feature, “Caravaggio,” in 1985. The atmosphere on a Jarman set, she said, was one of radical collective ownership, captured in a dictum she attributed to the director: “You go to the set every day as if you’re going to a party. And as if you’re throwing a party.”
She described the practical effect of that ethos on collaborators who have since become major figures in their own fields. Costume designer Sandy Powell was 24 when Jarman handed her responsibility for the papal clergy scenes on “Caravaggio” – with roughly £500 and instructions to handle the assignment herself. Composer Simon Fisher Turner, brought in initially to cast extras from East End cafes, was told mid-production that he would be writing the film’s score. “He made filmmakers of all of us,” Swinton said. “I’m not saying that he necessarily made us directors, but he made us responsible for our work.”
Swinton also disclosed that previously unseen footage from the 1990 shoot of Jarman’s “Edward II,” recorded by then-camera-assistant Seamus McGarvey – now an established DoP – is being assembled into a documentary. The material came to light earlier this year and she gave no release timeline. Separately, a museum exhibition she recently mounted at the Onassis Foundation in Athens – following a run at the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam – incorporated newly recovered Super 8 footage from the Jarman archive alongside new work by eight of her long-term collaborators.
Jarman’s death in 1994, Swinton said, had left her at a genuine professional loss before she found new working families. The first of those she described in detail began at Cannes, when she invited Bong Joon Ho to breakfast at her hotel after encountering his early films, including “Memories of Murder” and “The Host.” When Bong said his next project had no obvious role for her, she let the matter rest. Weeks later he called back. “There is this one person in this script,” she recalled him saying, “but it’s written Minister Mason, a mild-mannered man in a suit.” Her response was immediate: “Leave it with me.” She is due to see Bong in Seoul next week.
Jim Jarmusch, she said, brought the instincts of a musician to the set – moving through production days unhurriedly, shooting late and rewriting in real time. Swinton recalled the pitch for their zombie project “The Dead Don’t Die”: “The next one is going to be a zombie film, and I’ve written a part for you – she’s called Zelda Winston and she’s a Scottish samurai sword-wielding funeral director who gets sucked up at the end into a spaceship.”
The Luca Guadagnino collaboration on “Suspiria” involved a different kind of experiment. She said Guadagnino told her: “My dream is that the only people in the film are women, are all played by women, including the man.” Swinton took on the film’s sole male role – the psychiatrist – accordingly.
With Wes Anderson, the game was physical transformation. Swinton described being asked to play a character in her 90s – a reference to her role as the elderly Madame D. in “The Grand Budapest Hotel” – then questioning whether casting a genuine nonagenarian film star might be the more economical solution. Anderson held firm. “I mean, I do it with him because I love him,” she said. “He’s a friend of mine.”
With Joanna Hogg, by contrast, the work begins without a script. “We improvise all our dialogue,” Swinton said, “which means that you have to start from a state of quietness in order for the words to rise up inside you.”
Swinton reflected at length on Sally Potter’s 1992 adaptation “Orlando,” describing the Virginia Woolf source text as containing “a nugget of kryptonite against bigotry” by virtue of its insistence on fluidity – of gender, class and nationhood alike. She pushed back against readings of the film as simply a story about gender transition, arguing that its real subject was fixed-less-ness in a broader sense. “It’s not just about a man turning into a woman – fixed,” she said. “It’s about fixed-less-ness.”
The film was made under considerable financial strain. She, Potter and producer Christopher Sheppard came to Cannes in 1989 with no backing, eating once a day and sharing a single hotel room between the three of them. Financiers remained uninterested until they pitched the project in Russia, where a newly independent St. Petersburg production company became the first to commit. “It was the first international co-production: Russian, Dutch, French, Italian, British, and German, I think,” Swinton said.
She also defended her 2004 Cannes jury vote – under president Quentin Tarantino – to award Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” the Palme d’Or, identifying herself as a vocal internal advocate. “It was a choice for the choice of cinema as a haven, as a refuge, and as a space where we all meet safely in order to have our minds changed,” she said.
Swinton confirmed she is currently working on two films with Apichatpong Weerasethakul. One — “Jengira’s Magnificent Dream,” in which she stars alongside Jenjira Pongpas, Sakda Kaewbuadee and Connor Jessup — was announced last year, with production set for Sri Lanka. A second project is also in development. She has now been without a completed feature for two years. “It’s a huge achievement,” she said.
The masterclass was introduced by Cannes artistic director Thierry Frémaux.
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