Listen in to what the David Lean Cinema has already described as “one of our all-time very best special events” – Tuesday night’s Q&A with Oscar-winner Tilda Swinton, conducted by the arthouse cinema’s patron, Joanna Scanlan.
Swinton was visiting the venue in the Croydon Clockhouse for the second time in six months, at the invitation of one of her oldest friends, Thick Of It/After Love star Scanlan.
Following a screening of one of Swinton’s latest collaborative projects, the eery and moving The Eternal Daughter, in which Swinton plays a mother and her doting daughter, the packed audience listened in to an hour-long discussion between the pair of actors, and put forward some of their own questions.
Inside Croydon was invited along for the event, and it now features as our first episode of Under The Flyover, our interviews podcast.
Croydon Council actually tried to close the place down once. The David Lean Cinema is now celebrating 10 years since its re-opening following a hugely successful people’s campaign inspired by Ronnie Corbett, no less, and which Inside Croydon helped to launch and support.
BAFTA-winner Scanlan has boundless enthusiasm for the David Lean Cinema and the Croydon arts scene, and this is one way in which she, and the volunteers who behind the David Lean Cinema Campaign, are trying to showcase their valuable work.
Swinton had flown in through the winter storms from her home in Scotland, and in her early remarks called the cosy, 60-odd-seat David Lean arts cinema “a beacon” for the arts and film in London.
In the discussion, as DLC officials explain, “The making of The Eternal Daughter with director Joanna Hogg (another old friend of Tilda’s) was covered in some detail, revealing there were many hours of improvised conversation featuring Tilda in her twin mother and daughter roles, before the final cut was assembled.
“We also learned of Tilda’s exceptional commitment to independent cinema, and the importance of Derek Jarman in her career, following her debut in Caravaggio in 1986.
“One extraordinary revelation was that she nearly appeared in a David Lean film. She auditioned for Nostromo, the feature that Lean was preparing in the second half of the 1980s, before it was sadly abandoned in 1990 due to his declining health.
“Tilda was struck by the resonance of referring to this ‘in his cinema’.”
Now you can listen in on the whole, hour-long Q&A session in our latest podcast – just by signing up as a subscriber to iC.
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