On Movies | In suit-hairdo uniform, she becomes legal evil

TORONTO - Maybe it's the military lineage (she comes from a long line of generals), but

Tilda Swinton

is probably one of the few actresses working today who can slip

guy-rope

into her conversation and get away with it.

As in, "It's like when a project has a kind of guy-rope down into the culture, when you feel it tapping on a tradition. It may spin off and become incredibly modern or experimental in some way, but if it has a reference point in the culture, and really respects that reference point, then it has a particular vibration."

Swinton, of regal mien and Scottish heritage (all those generals, up to and including her dad, were in the Scots Guard), is a key player in Michael Clayton, the astonishingly good legal thriller (and then some) starring George Clooney in the title role.

Written and directed by Tony Gilroy, and set in the world of high-powered corporate law, and in sleazier precincts patrolled by a firm's "fixer" (Clooney), Michael Clayton is smart, suspenseful, almost Shakespearean in its study of ruined souls in search of redemption.

"This film is very classical, and that makes it ambitious," says Swinton, up in Toronto for Michael Clayton's film-festival premiere. The film, also starring Tom Wilkinson and Sydney Pollack, opened in Philadelphia at the Ritz Five on Friday, and expands into more theaters next Friday.

"It sits within a tradition, with the cinema of the '70s, that looks at this moral, political-thriller kind of trope," she says, thinking of The Verdict, of The Parallax View.

For Swinton, 46, the role of Karen Crowder, the in-house counsel for a giant agro-chemical concern that's been fighting off a potentially devastating lawsuit, was in some ways familiar, in some ways not. After all, she's played evil before - you can't get much more evil than the White Witch in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.

But a lawyer? This actress, with her art-house pedigree and chic, trendy couture, with a ticket to a Bjork concert happening later in the day, knew next to nothing about legal culture before signing on.

"I think more than anybody on the entire production, I needed to be convinced that this world really existed," she says with a laugh. "I realized that, generally speaking, the United States is much more clued-up. Maybe it's to do with Court TV, I don't know. But the man on the street seems to know more, and understand the jargon, in a way that I still don't understand, even if I had to spout it in the film.

"I still don't know what discovery means."

But with the part in hand, Swinton went on "spying missions" to New York firms. "I saw the suits. I checked the limited choice of jewelry and the choices of hairdo. I kind of got it down from there."

Gilroy films Swinton, as Karen Crowder, alone in her apartment, rehearsing her legal spiels, trying on the blouses, the suits.

"They're soldiers, and they follow flags and they have to wear uniforms, and they have to rise to the uniform and also suppress their resistance to the uniform," Swinton observes about these women. "I find it really fascinating and a blessing to just explore that, to think about that question which I see at the heart of the film, which is: How is it that inhuman acts may be perpetrated by human beings?

"And there's no answer. Tony Gilroy is too sophisticated a writer and director to give you any answers. But just to ask the question seems to be a really pertinent thing to do."

Swinton has been keeping exceptionally busy of late. She filmed The Man from London, for Béla Tarr. She filmed Julia (although the title may change), "about an alcoholic woman who abducts a child," for Erick Zonca, the man behind The Dream Life of Angels. She made The Curious Case of Benjamin Button with Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt, for director David Fincher. Right now, she's in the middle of Burn After Reading, with Clooney and Pitt again, and John Malkovich and Frances McDormand.

"I'm very spoiled," she says. "Very spoiled, and very lucky."

Gilroy was here. Being on a film set, working with actors and producers, all of that was nothing new for Tony Gilroy. His father, Frank D. Gilroy, won a Tony for his 1965 play The Subject Was Roses, turned into an Oscar-winning film. His three boys - Tony, Dan and John - grew up into the business: two screenwriters, and an editor (John).

Tony Gilroy's first produced screenplay was the 1992 tweenage ice-skating romance cult hit, The Cutting Edge. His name is on the scripts to three Taylor Hackford titles: Dolores Claiborne, The Devil's Advocate, and Proof of Life.

More significant, all three entries in the humongo Bourne franchise - The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy, and this summer's Bourne Ultimatum - were scripted by Tony Gilroy.

So, when it came time for his directing debut - with Michael Clayton - forgive the guy if he wasn't quaking with fear and uncertainty.

"The great advantage of not being 28 when you make your first movie is that you've seen a lot of movies made," says Gilroy, who just turned 51. "You know that if your script is OK, and you hire really good department heads, and you cast really well, and the one thing you communicate as you do that is that everybody's making the same movie - well, you're so far along.

"As for the acting part: Of all the directors that I've worked with, it's such a small fraction that really understand what actors do, anyway.

"It's a mystery. And if you understand what one actor does, it's useless with another actor. . . . I bet if I made 20 movies, I would never be able to take a performance apart and put it back together, and I don't think most directors can do that."

But if acting remains some alchemical puzzle, Gilroy knew that having talented practitioners on board was key. He had pitched Michael Clayton around the same time he started work on the first Bourne, but always with the caveat that he had to direct.

"All the way through trying to get the movie made, George was at the top of the list," he says, speaking of the guy in the title role, Clooney, who eventually, came in as a producer, too.

"I seem to want to write hero parts, so that list is a pretty short list of guys, and I couldn't get George," Gilroy recalls. "I couldn't get to him in the beginning, and when I finally did get to him, he read it and said he might be interested in directing it, loved it, wanted to do it, but he didn't want to work with a first-time director. So, it was two years later before I even got to meet him."

Gilroy, who lives in Manhattan with his wife and kids - and shot some key sequences of Michael Clayton not 500 yards from the Washingtonville, N.Y., house where he grew up - says that there were "real serious reasons" Clooney was his first choice and that they weren't all about the star's incredible box-office clout.

"I loved the idea of him ruined," Gilroy explains, "all that squandered promise. . . . I don't think that there's anything sadder, dramatically - and probably in life, but certainly dramatically. You can kill the family dog, you can have the kid dying of cancer, but I don't think there's anything sadder than 'too late. . . . Sorry, it's too late, you missed it.'

"And there's a tradition, you can navigate the movies every couple of years that really go after that idea - The Verdict is there, and Save the Tiger, The Entertainer - a whole tradition of that kind of film, somebody who has squandered something really valuable.

"It's a great motor."

And in the case of Michael Clayton, it's a great movie.