Tilda Swinton does not want to talk about the old man that she plays in Suspiria



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Swinton in a scene of Suspiria.

Alessio Bolzoni / Amazon Studios

When the big revelation came earlier this month, this unpredictable actress chameleon Tilda Swinton was playing an old german man Luca Guadagnino's trippy, lush remake of horror SuspiriaIn addition to her well-known role as a dance instructor, Madame Blanc, and another unpublished character whom we will let the public discover, she has met the kind of wondering curiosity that surrounds most of the things that Swinton does in her career unconventional. The entertainment reporters have supposed that Swinton would have been deeply inspired by the way she created this fragile man: an old psychoanalyst who, while mourning the loss of his wife, begins to investigate the mysterious events of the Helena Markos Dance Company. his patient (Chloë Grace Moretz) has disappeared. The film also has stars Dakota Johnson as an Ohio dancer who audition for the company, which turns out to be a facade for a group of witches seeking to exert their power over the innocent who enter his gates.

But a few days before SuspiriaThe film's debut Friday, the queries about Swinton's process and her attachment to that role were dismissed at the film's meeting, with the exception of some responses she sent by email. When asked how she had created this likeable character and what it meant for her – while she was putting on kilos of makeup and prosthetics every day, turning her bright skin into a canvas Shredded from old age – Swinton returned to the enigmatic way in which she had already answered similar questions: "As it is clearly stated, in the credits and in every mention of the film, Dr. Klemperer is played in Suspiria by Lutz Ebersdorf, a psychoanalyst who had never appeared in a film before, "she wrote. "It was always a very important idea for Luca and me, from the beginning, both the introduction of a new face for this role and an oblique and non-tacit connection between the three protagonists of the film: Madame Blanc, Madame Markos and Josef. Klemperer. It has always been our intention that Lutz Ebersdorf plays Klemperer and I play Lutz – and I have always intended never to speak about it publicly. Unfortunately, we have recently been put in a position where pursuing our long-standing plan would mean deliberately deceiving: our design was divulged by unspecified spoils, and rather than being driven to deal with false news and open lies. , I admit reluctantly close relationship between me and Ebersdorf. "

Guadagnino was a little more frank in his interpretation of the role, even suggesting that Swinton's reluctance to explain was related to the death of his father, who died earlier this month.

"I do not want to speak on behalf of Tilda, but we both have close emotional relationships with our aging fathers," he said. "Tilda's father died recently and my father is almost 88 years old. These fragile men of the last century have something very moving for her and for me. We were really invested in this poor old man who wears the hat and has to walk the streets of Berlin. . . We were thinking about his behavior in 1977 more than anything else, and the touching pleasure of playing that. "

Swinton and Guadagnino have known each other for 25 years and both admit to being obsessed with Dario Argento's 1977 Suspiria; their version of the film is like a climax of all their previous work, which includes 2015 A bigger glare and 2009 I am love. For Guadagnino, it was a chance to explore something that had haunted him since he first saw the film's poster at age 10, and to revisit a kind of youthful narrative to which he was attacked during the last Oscar nomination Call me by your name, but in an extravagant and strange way, which explores the power of women, but also studies the cost of violence experienced by both the victim and the perpetrator. "Every film I do, in some ways, deals with the process of change as people grow, by changing their bodies," he said. "I'm going back to the same grounds."

Swinton, for his part, credits their collaboration to some of his most daring roles. "[Luca is] One of my best friends and working in our company gives me a calm and relaxed place in which I can freely imagine new forms to launch and new adventures to tell, "she wrote.

Yet after working for almost two years on the Klemperer prosthesis with a makeup artist Mark Coulier-Who already turned Swinton into an old lady Wes Anderson The Grand Budapest Hotel– Guadagnino was always surprised by the incarnation of the character by Swinton.

"In the last chapter, you see the hesitant hand of the old man trying to do something to eliminate the decried presence of this woman in her room," said Guadagnino. "But also, the impossibility of him [doing anything]because there is no longer any strength in this body shell. . . I thought, "Oh, what a wonder." When I shot these scenes, I often cared so much about this old man, saying, "Oh, is he okay?" You know how to do with children and the elderly, you have to be sure that the process very heavy [of the scene] do not hit hard on them? [Tilda] I'm convinced. "

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