Tilda Swinton, Time 100 Gala - April 24, 2012
Tilda is wearing Celine.
Tilda Swinton prioritizes being over acting, presence over character. She is interested in the whole rather than the part and is happiest at the core of a film, embodying its deepest themes with the luminous, naked face for which she is known. In an agile, complex cinematic trajectory from Caravaggio and Michael Clayton to We Need to Talk About Kevin, she gives us unlimited space as viewers to gaze and wonder, to think and be moved. She trusts the image and, in giving herself up to its power, gives us its power.
In private, Tilda, 51, is voluble, wildly funny and affectionate. By inclination a collaborator, she likes nothing better than to be shoulder to shoulder with her companions on the long, perilous haul known as movie development. This greatly endears her to all who work with her. Tilda’s frequent stints on film juries and her knowledge of world cinema past and present give her work a breadth and openness that come from awareness of other stories, other languages, other ways of making movies. We feel the space of history around her when she works, a sense that there is more than this. This conjuring of the quiet magnitude of human experience is what partly explains her magic. She evokes the bigger picture and occupies its center.
Sally Potter on Tilda Swinton for Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People
Tilda Swinton - Photo by Peter Hapak, Time Magazine, February 2011
“It can be energetically extremely expensive to be photographed, the agreement to be fully present—not always the easiest contract to strike. There is a sort of essential dare set up, the challenge to stay open and “undefended”: basically not to run and hide. Sometimes this can feel like wrangling a hairnet on a jellyfish.” - Tilda Swinton, Time Magazine
Photos by Peter Hapak, Time Magazine, December 19, 2011
To me, Peter Hapak’s studio portraits resemble animal capture. This for me is a good thing: animal status being the high table. There is a plainness to Peter’s light which give all his images a sort of pioneer quality, somehow, as if the dust from long journeying is involved: his portraiture signifies—beyond a recording—a kind of reckoning. I feel a little bleached by his light here, not inappropriately, like something discovered under a hedge.” - Tilda Swinton, Time Magazine
Photos by Peter Hapak, Time Magazine, December 19, 2011
“I sometimes think that being photographed by a clicking still camera is infinitely more satisfying to me than shifting about for a whirring moving one. But in both cases, silence is grace. Still portraits operate their own code.” - Tilda Swinton, Time Magazine, December 19
Photos by Peter Hapak, Time Magazine, December 19, 2011
“The position of artist’s model is one in which I feel quite comfortable: frankly, were I able to choose, it would be a preferable description of my occupation—something between artist’s model and clown, for the sake of fuller disclosure.” - Tilda Swinton for Time Magazine, December 19
Photos by Peter Hapak, Time Magazine, December 19, 2011
Tilda Swinton - Photo by Peter Hapak, Time Magazine, December 2011
Tilda Swinton - Photo by Peter Hapak for Time, December 2011
