Tilda Swinton on Translating Pedro Almodóvar Into English for Venice Winner ‘The Room Next Door’

Has Tilda Swinton ever given a bad performance? Through an astounding career that has ranged from avant-garde theater and experimental cinema to Marvel movies, the Scottish actress never fails to dazzle, delight and dumbfound.

So it is again with her turn in The Room Next Door, her second collaboration with Pedro Almodóvar (after the 2020 short The Human Voice) and the English feature debut of the Spanish cinema giant.

An adaptation of Sigrid Nunez’s novel What Are You Going Through, Almodóvar’s film follows best-selling writer Ingrid (Julianne Moore) and Martha (Swinton) as they rekindle their friendship after losing touch. As they immerse themselves in past memories, anecdotes, art, and movies, Martha, who is battling terminal cervical cancer, wants to die with dignity and asks Ingrid to be in the next room when she takes a euthanasia pill. As with Johanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter, Swinton takes on two roles, playing both Martha and her estranged daughter.

The Room Next Door premiered at the Venice Film Festival, where it won the Golden Lion for best film. The Hollywood Reporter caught up with Swinton at the Toronto Film Festival, where The Room Next Door celebrates its North American premiere.

The Room Next Door premiered in Venice where it got a 17-minute standing ovation, what was that like to experience?

18 1/2 if you please, Scott. Get it right! Apparently, that’s what it was. I mean, I’ve been blessed to be in the maelstrom of those long ovations before, but I’ve never felt quite such a thing. There was something like the feeling I felt for Pedro, like the audience was really invested in thanking him. I think it was really about the director. I was very touched by it, and I think he I think he deserves it, frankly.

It’s been a long journey for you to make a feature with Almodovar. Didn’t you say at one point you’d learn Spanish if necessary?

I told him: ‘Look, I’ll learn Spanish or make me a mute.’ But this was years ago when I first met him, because I knew he wasn’t going to work in English. It was an assumption of mine. And then, slowly, when he asked me to do [2020 English-language short] The Human Voice, his English was much less advanced, and it was a huge leap for him with so little English to take on something like that English-language monolog. Now his English is much better. He made the other short, the cowboy short [2023’s Strange Way of Life].

This film actually came together pretty fast, but yeah, what’s been coming a long while is him making an English-language feature. A reason for that, which is quite sophisticated, is that even his Spanish is not the Spanish people speak. His English, as you see in the film, is not really the English people speak. He’s a poet, in my view, and the music of what he writes is elevated, heightened, removed. It’s not exactly a kind of vernacular. It’s something very particular, Almodovar-ian. And I think he knew, for good reason, that if he was going to work in another language, whether it’s English or German or Italian or whether, he would have to find a way of having that elevation in it. And in my view, he found it with this.

I think I understand his reticence, his trepidatiousness [about working in English] because he knew his screenplay would have the right kind of music. It’s very interesting: When he is directing us, he’s very often talking about the music of the scene, even if his hearing, and he wouldn’t mind me saying this, his hearing is a little compromised, and sometimes he doesn’t exactly hear the words we’re saying. But he will be hearing the music, and I imagine that the music that he’s listening for is a music that’s quite similar to how it would be in Spanish.

What was it like for you and Julianne Moore to act in that style? Because I find your line-readings change quite dramatically from the first to the second half of the film. At first you are very formal, somewhat artificial, while the second half, your dialog becomes more intimate and more naturalistic. How did you develop that together?

It’s funny you should say that. Because the response from some [to the first section of the film] has been: ‘Huh?’ We knew that our task was to find out how to meet this text. We were working with a very precise text, not just a scenario, and the task was to bring it home into our own rhythm. We knew that.

I agree with you. I think the film is in roughly, not exactly two halves, but in terms of our relationship, there is this first section, almost a preamble, which is very Pedro, where people meet, and usually one of them just talks and fills the other in on what’s been going on in their life. And the other just listens. That’s chapter and verse in many, many, of his films, most recently in Pain and Glory.

His typical first scene is you meet two people in a cafe and one of them tells you what’s been going on with them recently. It’s almost Greek in that sense. And then, once the relationship develops, in our case when they go to the house together, everything else is kind of muffled. The outside world is muffled, certainly for Martha, because Ingrid is continuing this conversation with John Turturro’s character. Then it becomes much more of a conversation, rather than one of them, Julianne’s character, bearing witness to Martha’s account of her life. They start to really live together, they actually have a present to deal with, rather than just recounting the past.

We knew from the first that this shift was going to happen and we knew that we didn’t want to smudge it. We knew we didn’t want to go too early into something more naturalistic. We talked to Pedro about it. He was very clear: No, this beginning is a sort of introduction to the story and to the portraits, I don’t like the word characters, but just the portraits of these two women. There’s this formalism to it. They’re sitting in a hotel room, talking, and discussing around a table. Quite formal. And then once they get into the house in the woods, they start to live.

The themes of the film are about facing death and euthanasia. What did you tap into to explore your character, Martha?

First of all, I would rather we talk about death with dignity than euthanasia. I think euthanasia is a complex and potentially misleading term for what this film is really addressing, but for me, it was an extremely blessed experience because I have been in the Ingrid position a lot in my life. My first “Martha” was Derek Jarman [the British avant-garde director who died of an AIDS-related illness in 1994]. My second was [German theater director] Christoph Schlingensief [who died of cancer in 2010]. So to even look at this subject and to explore it, let alone play Martha, has been really a huge blessing for me, and really extraordinary opportunity. So, yeah, I feel very close to the subject matter.

How do you view Martha? I’ve talked to other people who see her as a very selfish figure because of how she’s lived and also with her request to Ingrid.

I mean, there’s selfishness. There are also two other versions of that concept: Self-determination or maybe self-centeredness. But absolutely. I think there are people who believe that people who take their lives into their own hands, take their dying into their own hands, are selfish. That’s real, and that’s in the film.

Having said that, Ingrid does agree. She’s invited to take part, to be in the room next door, and to bear witness, and she agrees to take it on. I think it’s particularly interesting that she is so frightened of death. You know that that is such a challenge for her. I think that’s a real grace note in the film, that the person who says yes [Ingrid] has just written a best-selling book about how frightened she is of death.

You don’t have to answer this, because we are talking about a movie, not your personal opinions, but can I ask your views on death with dignity and how the subject is being addressed in our society?

Well, it is addressed differently all over the world. I know that in Canada, as in some other European countries, there is a kind of respect for death with dignity. And that in 10 states, in the United States, there is a provision, where if you have two doctors’ approval, and if you are terminally ill, you have a Death with Dignity provision. But only in 10 states. In so many others, and in so many countries, it’s illegal.

There’s an organization that I that I know well in Germany, where it’s not necessary to be terminally ill either. It’s called the Humane Death Society, and if you make a case for why you want to end your life, and if it’s agreed to, you have a six-month kind of grace period and then you have a doctor and lawyer come to your house and help you. It’s not euthanasia. That’s why I feel the word euthanasia is a misleading term. Because euthanasia is when somebody else administers the dose. This is assisted dying, with doses being made available. But you, with an IV or by turning the switch yourself, do it. A lawyer is there to make sure all is done legally.

I’ve been in the privileged position of being around various people at the end of their lives in varying degrees of comfort and pain and I think anybody who’s had that privilege will think very seriously about the necessity for death with dignity. In our society, seems to be very strange that we allow our animals the grace to escape insufferable pain but not us.

I think I’m out of time but I have a final question. I’m wondering if you’re getting in trouble with SAG now because you keep taking away roles from young actresses who could be playing your daughter?

Or older ones playing my mother! [as Swinton played in Johanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter]. Well, I’m very cheap — you get two of me for the price of one. Or three or four. I’ve been doing this for a while. I think maybe first with Lynn Hirschman in, I think the year 2002, with a film we made called Teknolust, when I play a cyber specialist called Rosetta Stone, who cyber clones herself three times. So I played four people in that. It’s a thing I’ve always really enjoyed. I always think of it as one portrait but with four different or three different or two different aspects.

Now this is the second film in fairly quick succession, about a mother and a daughter, where I play both. In both instances, it felt very natural that both mother and daughter be played by the same person. Although this time it was Pedro’s suggestion, not mine. In The Eternal Daughter, it was my suggestion. And then it became the subject of the film, actually. But in this case, it was his. I did question it for a minute, but then I saw that in a way, it was a similar case, because it is sort of the subject of the film in a way. It’s about evolution, it’s about survival, it’s about the triumph of the future. So they had to be very alike, the mother and the daughter. And what better way than to have me play both?