Tilda Swinton makes a case for so-called difficult people

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Tilda Swinton has some thoughts about so-called difficult people – difficult women, in particular. Now 63, she’s played a few.

“I’ve lived long enough to know that nobody wants to be difficult. Nobody,” she says in a video interview from her Manhattan hotel bed. She’s lounging against the paisley-upholstered headboard, wearing a silky, funnel-necked something in shiny amphibian green. It’s a thrill to hear her think aloud, a thrill to try to keep up.

“People are difficult for good reason, to them,” she continues. “An internal, American football helmet of defence gets built up over the ears, meaning one can’t hear anybody else particularly well. And God knows, doctor, since I’m lying down, how early it starts.”

The label “difficult” is usually ascribed to women, “though never in the mouth of the woman herself. So what does difficult mean? Difficult means not easy – to what? To railroad? It means visible. Not ignorable. Not biddable. Having to be dealt with. Having to be acknowledged. If one is expecting to go through life just rolling through everybody left and right – if one’s been given the impression as a young person that that’s all right, you can do that, you can bank on that – then yeah, you’re going to find some people very difficult. Because they’re going to exist. They’re going to just be there in front of you, breathing in and out. Difficult is in the eye of the beholder.”

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Oh, how I love this woman. In her new film, Problemista, written and directed by Julio Torres (Los Espookys), she plays the capital-D Difficult title character, a British-born, extremely marginal New York art critic named Elizabeth. Elizabeth is that person we all know, the one with whom you don’t make eye contact at a party, the one whose jagged energy comes at you a block away. “An open wound,” Swinton calls her, “teetering on the edge of all the edges.”

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Torres co-stars as Alejandro, a Salvadoran immigrant who aspires to design eccentric toys, whom Elizabeth hires as her assistant, to unleash her difficult-ness upon. But because Swinton never, ever communicates just one thing at a time, she fills Elizabeth’s eyes with a panicked pain that’s also recognizable.

Torres and Swinton’s first discussions were about Elizabeth’s hair, and if those were the only discussions they’d had about her, they would have been enough. Her hair is her psyche made manifest. On the sides, it’s dyed a hard magenta, frizzled and shoulder-length; on top, where it’s grown out four inches around the part, it’s straight and dishwater brown.

“It’s belaboured,” Torres says in a separate video interview. “Tilda and I e-mailed so many pictures to each other. It was important that the hair communicate that Elizabeth does not have things under control, but really tries to dominate the things she cannot control.”

Swinton won an Oscar for Michael Clayton; among her many other films, she’s made five each with Wes Anderson and Luca Guadagnino. She signed on to Problemista the way she does all her projects: collaborators first, project second, role third.

“That’s been my way from the beginning,” she says. “I didn’t train as a performer. I didn’t come into this with any skill to protect. I came in as a film fan with Derek Jarman” – Caravaggio, 1986 – “and kept working with him for nine years. I work alongside filmmakers, sometimes in the film, sometimes producing, or supporting them while they write their screenplays. I’m not on the hunt for a part. I’m not a proper actor in that way.”

Before they met, Torres had been “on my radar,” Swinton says. She loved his HBO special My Favorite Shapes, and the off-kilter sketches he wrote for Saturday Night Live (including “Customer Service,” in which Melania Trump bares her soul to a call-centre operator; and “Wells for Boys,” about dreamy kids who don’t fit in). She loved “his world-building and his mind.” She loved his Problemista script, and convinced him to make it his directorial debut.

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She had one concern, though: She didn’t want to play Elizabeth as an American, Karen-type. “Because the flavour of a Karen – which of course is a pejorative term for a difficult woman – is an entitlement, a certitude.” She saw Elizabeth as an immigrant like Alejandro, “and that’s when everything came alive for me. Elizabeth aspires to be entitled. But she’s not.”

Swinton gave her a West Country accent – “It could have been Bristol, but no, rural was better” – and a tragicomic backstory: After scaling the wall of the Glastonbury music festival, she became “a groupie of some very random Whitesnake-type band, and travelled with the drummer to the States, where she’s been a hanger-on all her life, an incomer, an outsider through and through. She’s just scrabbling, doggy-paddling, trying to keep her nose above water.”

Elizabeth and Alejandro “try to hide their predicament from each other,” Swinton says. “But each innately understands the other’s vibration of desperation.” Eventually, their colliding anxieties somehow cancel each other’s out.

Torres himself is “very attracted to difficult people,” he says. “People who are repellent to most, I’m moth to a flame. My therapist believes I’m addicted to anxiety. Whenever I hear, ‘Stay away from that person,’ I think, ‘Let me get in there.’ ”

He wrote Elizabeth as “a wild animal who’s being tased, a dog rescued from a dogfight. So having Tilda was such a dream. It unlocked all this potential and beauty. Her ability to be monstrous even when doing something completely mundane gives Elizabeth an otherworldly power that the movie needed.” (Watch for the moment when she signs a document; even her signature is bats.)

Writing for Swinton, and acting opposite her, “You get to do less,” Torres says. “She does that beautiful thing that powerful performers do, she communicates a lot at rest. I loved getting all that energy to react to – or not.”

Anger is a lonely emotion. Not everyone understands that, but Torres does. “Just recently,” he says, “I turned a corner on the street, and I almost bumped into a woman. Who scoffed and was so angry, even though it was 50/50 our fault. I became angry, too, marching away. Then I started imagining her life, what could have been going through her head. Now she’s in me forever. That’s the sentiment I like to bring to my work.”

By the end, we realize that everyone’s a Problemista, sometimes. “Everyone is up against it,” Swinton says. “Everyone is trapped in a predicament. Elizabeth and Alejandro are in a self-sabotage spiral, but somehow they help each other out of it. That’s really touching – the difficult person can end up being your saviour.”

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