So, what I want to say, regarding having Tilda for a mum, is rather what I think you’d expect, in that it was not your standard mother child relationship, and that it both defied convention and succeeded in a kind of bravura, if emotionally tight, performance.
I mean that, and I love Tildie, but if you know her, or rather, if you’ve seen her films, you know that she takes herself, and by extension her work, quite seriously. The role of mother was no different.
The amount of research and preparation she did before I was even conceived, I think, to a lot of people, would be excessive, but as Tilda always told me about acting, which was pretty much the only thing she was ever really interested in talking to me about, never boys, or god forbid-my feelings, was that if you find yourself, as an actor, in a situation, where you have to make choices, then you haven’t bloody well done your homework now have you? Because if you had, she’d say, and I think this was after she’d spent seven weeks living as a flamingo in sub-Saharan Africa, in preparation, I believe, for a Matthew Barney advert she was doing, than you wouldn’t bloody well be having to make any choices now would you? You’d just be.
I believe she studied termites when she was thinking about having me. She told me that she’d been very struck by the performance of the alien queen in that American exploitation film directed by that Hyper misogynist Titanic bloke, Cameron I believe, but I get him confused for the previous PM, the one that drug us into this whole bloody Brexit mess. Mum, of course, is all for it, Brexit, always the contrarian, given that she thinks, as a Scot, that it’s the only way Scotland can finally break off from the crown, which she’s been fierce about since she was in her nappies. She was so keen on it she even made me watch, unbelievably, I know, Braveheart, once a year growing up. We sat in front of the telly with both our faces painted blue and cheered every time that crazy Papist anti-Semite and woman-beater Gibson stabbed a punter in his guts with an antler. “England will fall,” she would tell me, at random times during the film, which is unsettling, for a young girl, who was raised mostly in England. “England will fall. The crown must pay.”
I think what she liked best about the Alien Queen was the big egg sack she had, and how it was not clear that a man had anything to do with her ability to create life or her fierceness to protect it. Tilda was especially keen on that given that she raised me alone and insists that the egg I came from was never fertilized with male semen. Was it some kind of immaculate birth then I asked her once, when I got older. “No dearie, there wasn’t a damn clean thing about it,” which, given that she’s never explained anything more, is queer at best. But you only know what you have and what I had was Tilda for a mum, so I bet I’m a bit queer myself.
So Naked Mole Rats are hairless and sightless and they live in colonies underground and they burrow and have enormous front teeth like beavers, except the creatures themselves are much smaller, about a medium small rat you might mind about by the bin after a bender.
You can imagine her excitement when Tilda, two months preggers with me, and, being nearly hairless and sightless herself (comes with being so pale, she’s on the spectrum for albinism, runs in the family, though lucky my eyesight is strong) and pretty toothy, first come across these creatures at new exhibition in The a Royal Academy of Sciences.
After coming home, inspired as she was, Tilda immediately went about digging around in the back of our flat on Tottenham, to get ready for the gestation period, of having me, but her being nude and all and popping in and out from under the dirt in the common yard didn’t go as well as she planned, being that she was still more the artsy-fart than the quirky actress at this point, and far from posh. The housing board sent a letter, and Tilda, being Tilda, packed us up immediately.
She changed also decided to change it up from mole-rat to river eel and just swam a lot in the Thames, and then the River Clyde during the last few months after moving back to me Gran’s place outside Glasgow for the delivery. No English doctor would let her birth me in the Thames, but even though the Clyde is much colder and every Scot doctor she talked to declined, the old glass eyed river witch was willing to assist with the birth in exchange for a few drops of my infant blood, and the placenta, which Tildie thought was a right square deal. She’d already gone and had the crotch end of the wetsuit that she lived in a an as an eel cut out for the birth. And the river witch was one of the few people not spooked by the full black eye contacts Mum insisted on wearing, so all in all, it was a successful birth, except for the leaches, and the fact that I came out green do to all the chemicals in the river, being that it was down water from the tartan mills and all, but I came back to baby color by about age two it looks like in the pictures.
What else is unique about being Tilda Swinton’s daughter? I suppose all the the sleepovers at Uncle Wes’s house might seem a bit mad, given all the talk about Michael Jackson these days. And I imagine Uncle Wes and Jacko would have gotten on smashingly, given their child like personas and penchant for elaborately built fantasy worlds. But Uncle Wes he never slept in the bed with me, and he certainly didn’t touch me, I’m not sure he’s touched anyone in years. You certainly weren’t allowed to hug him, I’m mean he’s just so brittle, and the Korean interns would shit themselves if you even tried to take his hand. No Uncle Wes was lovely. He’d have my measurements taken while I slept and would have little outfits made for me. And then he’d play old songs for me, and any that I would like he’d have pressed on new vinyl, and before I went home he’d have the interns print on the lithograph a custom album sleeve for me. I think of those as marvelous times, and not at all what those children went through at Neverland.
The only spot of bother I ran into was during the filming of Fantastic Mr Fox. Tildie originally had Meryl’s role as Mrs Fox, for which, well, you can imagine her preparation, but Uncle thought, in the recording studio, that it sounded a bit odd with the Brit twinge Tildie has, even though her American was bees knees, when the rest of the foxes were all Yanks, and even more confusing was that the humans in the film were all Brits, and anyway even though Tildie can do an amazing American accent, George-king of the world-full of himself-Clooney, had already phoned Meryl, and Uncle thought that Meryl’s deeper tones were a better match for George’s, which they were, both Tildie and I agree, but it stung a bit for mum, though she and uncle patched things up quick. But what I meant to say about Uncle and the bother was that I got a little too close to the set one day, I must have been ten at the time, and I just stroked, I mean I barely touched l, one of the Fox family maniquee’s, but whatever I did it brushed the hair out of continuity and three interns were sacked because of it and one of them upped and offed herself on the studio lot, which made Uncle Wes terribly depressed. It was that intern that inspired Moonrise, I believe.
And yes, I know, you don’t have to tell me, Tilda’s first credited film with Uncle was in fact Moonrise, but they’d been keen on each other she did all of the choreography for the fish animation in Life Aquatic and served as an acting and movement coach for Adrian Brody, who was just having a terrifically hard time on Darjeeling. Not a good fit really, a bit mental, that’s why he hasn’t been back like the rest of them have. Uncle Wes may not like to be touched, but being an only child and all he treats his actors and crew like a family. The Royal Tanenbaums was actually about his relationship with a gaffer. Anyhoo, Mum liked Brody well enough, but she always likes the thin odd-looking ones.
School was intermittent as you might imagine. Tilda’d learned a lot from David Bowie regarding schooling. David’s son Cosmo (or Duncan as I believe he bills himself in the trades), well not many know that David himself raised Cosmo. And Tildie, being already keen on David from early on, not just keen on David, but keen on being David, and David being David was of course keen on Tildie being David, so she spent a good bit of time with him, he was lovely really, and she chatted him up quite a bit on what to do with me. David gave great advice, really. He told Tildie to make what you can normal, and make what you can’t non-mysterious. Regarding the drugs, sex, and genderbending, David said, don’t normalize it but don’t pretend it’s not happening. And keep them in the cleats as often as you can. Nothing keeps children sane like sport. And Cosmo’s done terrificly well and I’d like to think I have too. Tilda even assistant-coached when she had that long engagement with the London Reparatory as a featured player. She’d only played rugby, but she taught us all to move with our hips, and it helped quite a bit. Our team even traveled to Spain for a tournament. Those were honestly some of my favorite times with her. I always liked it best when she was on stage at not film. She took up cooking for a while back then, though she herself never ate. To this day I have never seen her chew food come to think of it. She does drink a lot of water though. And vitamins, always keen on those.
Mostly what I’ve learned from being Tildie’s daughter is that dreams require work, and that if you can learn to sleep long enough in one go, you can get to the kind of REM sleep that will produce dreams. It’s only been in the last year that I’ve been able to do it. But it’s been grand. I feel like I’ve learned a lot from my subconscious through dreaming. I told Tilda about it but she remains uninterested. She still swears by the polyphasic sleeps cycles she enforced on me for most of my growing up, never getting more than two hours at a stretch, though often getting at least six in total, which pretty much prevented any dreaming I might have done. She kept the practice up in part to avoid direct sunlight but also to be able to dip into a kind of non-human mindset she said. DeNiro famously studied the movements of gorillas in the zoo for Raging Bull, but for Tilda that’s too shallow, and the polyphasic sleep, she says is key to accessing that old animal brain at the back of our cortex. She picks a different animal (or insect, also increasingly landscapes) to study to inform her characters. For that Marvel role she did recently she lived with yaks in Mongolia. Yak milk was a primary food for the Tibetan people, and in order to understand the source of their culture, she felt the yak was key. I went out to visit her after, when they were filming in Nepal, and she arranged for us to attend a sky burial. Tildie was so keen on it I thought she wasn’t going to leave. She had the translator ask if he could arrange for her an apprenticeship, but they refused. Thankfully.
How awful that wouldn’t have been.
Could you imagine your mother, bald headed and wearing robes, cutting up the dead on top of towers and feeding them to vultures? Well I can and I’m afraid she might never have wanted to come back.
I’m also glad we were finally able to do a little film together. We played mother and daughter. Can you believe it? An indie, just a little film. I’ve been acting a bit now, I didn’t intend to, but ladies football wasn’t calling, and acting, even if its not what I wanted to do, it’s what I know. I just wish, well, and I should have known this, was that mum, Tildie, I just wish that for this role, for us acting together, well, I just wish that it had been me she wanted to study with. I mean, trading lines. Running scenes. 80 percent of the coverage is us. And yet she adopts a boy from Senegal three months before shooting because she doesn’t feel that her experience with me was quite enough to know being a mother is. She tells the director, even though she birthed me, that I was always like her little sister. Her litttle second. And that for this role, she needed some “otherness.”
Not just motherness, otherness.
It shouldn’t have hurt, really. I mean it shouldn’t. I know what she’s like. I know who she is. She isn’t a normal mother. And I never wanted that. I love her for who she is. I do. It’s just. Barathunde. He’s lovely really. Really lovely. It’s just. Well. I don’t know. I feel replaced. I do. I felt more like a colleague on set. It affected my performance even. Truly. I left in tears. Twice.
Oh Tilda. Tilda, Tilda, Tilda. You won’t change, will you? I don’t think i can do another film with you. You’ve taught me so much. But I think I’ve had it really. I need to give up this acting thing and take up something else. Sport commentary perhaps. On the Telly. In Australia, maybe. That’d be mad I think. But also maybe just what I need. I hope you go see it