The Bite Magazine - Spring/Summer 2020 - Issue 27

bite actor spotlight than character. The character seems more of a theatre. And I don't like talking about characters, because again, it seems like you are talking about something that is fixed and I am just too wishy-washy for that. But this portrait [Minister Mason] is a portrait of the complete construct”. For those of you who haven't seen it, the film is about the world on the train after a terrible global catastrophe. The train engine goes forever around the world. It has different compartments: a tail section which is the slave quarters that goes all the way up. There's a revolution on the train and people move up to the front section which is the “ivy”. The actress described her role as the politician Mason. “If you put a politician in that kind of free, uncontactable, unregulated environment then the whole of hell breaks out of it. So I always had a fantasy that Mason is, in fact, a man; it started out as being a man and ended up like this [the version you see in the movie].” Tilda also describes her type of work as being a ‘farmer’. She explained by saying, “Planting different things and getting the timing right. Some things come up really fast, some take a long time, and some of them don’t come up at all. So you try and surf the wave, trying to get the timing right.” The actress shared they developed I Am Love over 12 years and for the movie Suspiria, they were talking with the director for nearly 20 years until it came to fruition. She also added that you have to appreciate every moment in preparation because that is very precious and detrimental to the making of the movie. At the end of the interview, Tilda was asked questions by emerg- ing filmmakers at BFI. What advice would you give to a director preparing to work with actors for the first time? I developed a little course that I’ve taught since. The numb of it is: contact that human and understand who they are, what their intelligence is, and how they are gonna be comfortable enough to do with you what you want to do together. And one of the things I do when I teach this course, I put these filmmaking directing students in their position. I do this very simple but corny exercise. I get a chair and I put them there and I put them at the end of the room and we go to the other side of the room and start judging them. And then afterward someone will go up to them and start asking them how they feel. [And the person would say] I was so para- noid that I wasn't looking good enough in the suit or you put the light in my face be- cause I wasn't bringing enough light into the room. And they all realise that this is a deal. It is a hard spot, it is not easy, and very often tweaks people’s nerves in weird ways and people can start resisting, just because they feel unsafe and the more you can think your way into that and really understand and, of course, ideally get to know them well enough so that they can share what they really think and feel. And you just find a way of engaging with their sense of relaxation. And then the next thing to do is work with your friends. Do you have any advice for directors transitioning from docu- mentary to fiction? You are very valuable because your taste and truth for the doc- umentary are really to be cherished. I am very happy for you to make narrative features because that's what we need. I per- sonally long for that, I long for the unwatched face. And what I love about the documentary is absolute transparency. When you look at humans when you look at people who are not used to being looked at, they have not prepared their face, they are not doing anything, they are just present, they have never seen themselves, and they have that sense of openness, and that's what I love in performance. That’s my sweet spot! And I think that’s real magic in it. I want to see translucent performance. People think that I'm flipping when I say that my favourite performance is the Donkey of the Balthazar, but I am very serious, that is my north star of the per- formance of the donkey called Balthazar. It's very rare that ac- tors, even very brilliant actors, can be translucent, so I am very happy to know that you are mixing it up. How important is it to you to work with emerging film direc- tors? It's my comfort zone, being in an experimental zone, experi- mental mode. Derek and I would always be making it up as we went along and we never knew what we were doing and so we were always improvising. And I have to say that even a few huge studio movies that I've made have been made in an experimen- tal mood as well. For example, the first studio movie that I made was Francis Lawrence’s Constantine which was completely made by nerds, and it was all this incredible technology that they were piping while we were shooting. I was the archangel Gabriel with amazing wings. We were very excited about creating. Even Andrew Adamson Film - Only Lovers Left Alive