Dressed in celestial white, her hair scraped back from her forehead, Tilda Swinton looks as serene and translucent as one of the aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The mothership has deposited her today on a striped cream sofa under a tree-filled window. “I’m in Scotland,” she tells me with crisply enunciated good cheer, before addressing the other face on our video call: Julio Torres, writer-director-star of the surreal new comedy Problemista, who just got back to Brooklyn after taking the film to Copenhagen and Guadalajara. “Julio, you probably don’t know where you are,” she says. “I’m fairly sure this is my apartment,” he replies, his youthful face and copper-tinted pixie-cut filling the screen.
The affinity between Swinton, the 63-year-old arthouse doyen and self-described “boyish, angular freak”, and Torres, the 37-year-old queer comic genius and ex-Saturday Night Live writer, is evident in the way they riff on each other’s gags, or swap favourite movie moments to mutual delight. Take it from me: you haven’t lived until you’ve heard Swinton spend two minutes painstakingly describing an old Austin Powers routine as Torres listens, wide-eyed and rapt.
They have gone from being online friends to collaborators and now besties (a week after our conversation, they are hanging out together at Glastonbury). Somewhere in between, they made Problemista, in which Torres transforms his experience of being a Salvadoran immigrant in New York City into a whirlwind comic fantasy with echoes of Jacques Tati, Terry Gilliam and Franz Kafka. Torres’s own visa declares him “an alien of extraordinary ability”, but the future looks shakier for his character, Alejandro, a budding toy designer who urgently needs a sponsor if he is to stay in the US. Failed applicants vanish instantly into thin air.
His potential saviour is the volatile art critic Elizabeth, played by Swinton with a West Country burr and a frizzy scarlet scare-do. She sees in this shuffling dogsbody the ideal assistant to help her mount an exhibition of egg paintings by her cryogenically-frozen late husband (played by Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA). As she dangles the promise of sponsorship, her demands on Alejandro become ever more onerous. She is, to put it mildly, a lot.
Swinton adores her. “One of the things I love about Elizabeth’s high-handedness is that we’ve seen this kind of autocratic behaviour before, but never out of the mouth of such a mess,” she says. “We’re used to that attitude coming from a perfect height, down a very clean slope, straight in the gullet.” Indeed, Elizabeth behaves as if she is Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada, when in fact she is more like Meryl Streep in Ironweed. “She’s a wreck. There’s this rackety-ness to everybody in the film. They’re all hanging on by their nails.”
The character feels like a compendium of some of Swinton’s greatest hits: the bolshie magazine editor in Judd Apatow’s Trainwreck, the tyrannical deputy overlord in Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer and the alcoholic kidnapper in Erick Zonca’s thriller Julia. (“Oh, she was a hot mess,” Swinton agrees.) When Torres points out that Problemista is essentially a film about “a secondary character and a villain”, Swinton embraces the idea. “Not even a primary villain,” she adds, much to his giggly amusement.
Elizabeth is a woman of many grievances; something as minor as an abundance of walnuts on a cafe menu can set her off. Nothing like Swinton, then. “I’m hopeless at asking for what I want,” she says. “I have never, ever sent food back, and I never would. I’ve been with people who have, and it is mortifying.”
Torres shudders in sympathy. “It’s like, what do you do with your eyes?” he asks. “You just have to look down, right?” Swinton cringes back: “And then, what’s going to come out of the kitchen?”
The only time I’ve heard of Swinton displaying any remotely Elizabeth-like tendencies was on the set of Sally Potter’s groundbreaking Orlando more than 30 years ago. A mutual friend of ours, who happens to be American, erroneously referred to Swinton as English rather than British or Scottish; she responded by slapping him. “Well, I’ll slap myself on the back for that now,” she says. Then she warms to the schoolmarm image. “I mean, he should know better, Ryan. And you know these Americans: you’ve got to teach them. Quite right!”
That aside, she is all pussycat. It’s touching, for instance, to hear her describe Problemista as a love story. “Elizabeth and Alejandro are both exactly what the other needs, even though they’re a nightmare for each other,” she says. They certainly lack the supportive artistic communities which have nourished the actors who play them. Torres found his own tribe on the Brooklyn standup circuit: after his day job archiving the papers of the late painter John Heliker, he performed comedy routines in bars. “I would read abstract one-liners and stories from a notebook. Some of us who were worlds unto ourselves gravitated toward one another.” Today, he is a magnet for Hollywood’s more adventurous talent: Emma Stone produced Problemista; Fantasmas, his darkly bizarre new HBO series, stars Natasha Lyonne, Steve Buscemi and Paul Dano; Jon Hamm has called him “phenomenally gifted”.
For Swinton, it was becoming a muse to Derek Jarman, and joining his coterie, that made her feel she belonged. After starring in his 1986 masterpiece Caravaggio, she collaborated with Jarman almost exclusively until his death from Aids in 1994. “It was a way of life, not just a way of working. The conversations were the most important things. It was like: ‘Oh, this year we’re going to do Edward II’ and ‘next year, we’re going to do Wittgenstein’. The works came out of those conversations, which were all engendered around a kitchen table, usually in Dungeness. We made the films, but we didn’t sweat them. I think it was healthy because we were all interested in each other, and the works were just leaves off the tree.”
Torres wasn’t even born when Swinton met Jarman, but he has long been a fan of hers. For his 2019 live show My Favourite Shapes, he even produced a model of what he imagined her apartment to be like: there was a hive of pods for her guests to sleep in, and a giant egg-timer to tell them when to leave. “As you can see, that’s very accurate,” she says now, swivelling the laptop around to reveal her cosy, non-sci-fi surroundings, and a pair of black-and-white springer spaniels. Torres’s pod-based fantasy, though, taps into her otherworldly aura. When he asks whether she had trouble accessing an online link to watch Fantasmas, she replies: “There are elves in my house who do that for me.”
Despite admiring her, Torres was no expert. “I’m inept at knowing the lives of the people behind the things I love. Tilda for me was a fantastic actor and, frankly, a concept.” She places a hand to her face, and trembles with laughter. “I wish my parents were still alive, and I could tell them that I’m considered a concept,” she says, prompting yet more giggles from Torres. “But I think that’s beautiful!” he protests. “Better that than, like: ‘Oh, she’s the actress who dated that person, then got a divorce from this other person, and her kids hate her!’” Swinton accepts the distinction (“Ah, true”) and glows appreciatively.
What was her impression, in turn, of him? Even prior to Problemista, after all, there was ample evidence of a cuckoo sensibility in his supernatural comedy series Los Espookys, and his SNL sketches: Ryan Gosling as a man haunted by the naff Papyrus font used in Avatar; Emma Stone advertising a Fisher-Price wishing-well for sensitive boys; Harry Styles as a lovelorn social-media wonk who posts horny gay messages (“Wreck me daddy”) on the Sara Lee Instagram account he is meant to be managing.
“I was enchanted by Julio from the beginning,” says Swinton. “It’s good for us all, I think, the world of his mind. It’s so visionary and sophisticated.” Hearing himself described as “sophisticated”, Torres gently points out that he cast Swinton in the role of Toilet Water in Fantasmas. That in turn reminds me of his book for children, I Want to Be a Vase, in part about a toilet plunger with lofty dreams. “I do like toilets as concepts,” he concedes. “Being a toilet is a job that’s inherently demeaning, so humanising that is exciting to me.”
In exposing the whimsical secret underworld of our daily lives, Torres is like a benign David Lynch. But he insists that lending consciousness to inanimate objects – such as the snooty curtain that divides first class from economy on a plane in My Favourite Shapes – is something we all do. “When we decide which outfit is ‘too much’ and which one is appropriate, or whether a dress of certain proportions is serious or unserious, we’re projecting those qualities on to it, right?”
Running through all his work, including Problemista, is an authentic dread of the corporate and bureaucratic. Torres has spent his life avoiding credit, and even lived for a while without a bank account. How estranged is he today from the systems he abhors? “Well, that’s the comedy and the tragedy. The more you try to disentangle yourself, the more tangled you get. It’s inescapable. Any time I have to make an account for something, it feels like an impossible task.”
Swinton concurs: “It’s like that disgusting and brilliant South Park episode where you end up with your lips sewn on to someone’s arse, and you’ve got to eat shit because that was in the small print, and you signed the form. But we need a certain amount of connectivity so we turn a relative blind eye to all that. Otherwise we’d go nuts.”
About the corporate side, Torres sounds less forgiving, especially when talk turns to how companies only began displaying rainbow flags once it became fashionable to do so. “The beautiful thing about queer people – and I use that term broadly – is our innate quest for the ‘bite’,” he says. It’s a word Swinton had used earlier to denote the enduring frisson of queerness, its cutting edge. “I think we are not pacified by a bank putting up a Pride flag,” he continues. “I think we say: ‘You’re decades late, but thank you.’” Swinton nods, and offers her own addendum to the banks: “Moving on …”
“Exactly,” Torres says. “Moving on, what would make the banks and the corporations uncomfortable today? Because that is where the bite is.” Any suggestions? “I think there’s a million social issues. Companies are going to wait a decade or two before they put those flags up.” For now, Swinton and Torres can just keep flying their own freak flags. No problemo.
• Problemista is available on digital platforms from 8 July
