On Movies: Swinton finds rich role in world of wealthy

'It's really hairy, making films about rich people," says

Tilda Swinton

, who stars in, and produced, just such an item - the sumptuous, sensual

I Am Love

. In this turn-of-the-millennium melodrama, Swinton is Emma Recchi, a Russian who married into a wealthy Italian clan and oversees the operation of a museum-like villa in Milan. From the dresses (designed for the film by

Jil Sander

) to the jewelry, from the furnishings to the art, from the perfectly starched aprons of the maids to the pristine gleam of the automobiles, it's a rich and rarefied world.

"It's a very difficult thing, because it's a sort of mesmerism," Swinton says, wryly, on the phone from New York recently. "It's a very, very powerful drug." I Am Love opened Friday at the Ritz Five and the Rave Motion Pictures Ritz Center 16.

"People become involved in the fantasy of living a life like the life that Emma Recchi lives. What we tried to do was to find a way of setting alongside it something authentic, something about nature, something about a different kind of beauty. . . . So that you have this extremely expensive world - and I mean expensive in every sense - set against that idyllic Eden that Emma discovers, the natural elements of taste and smell and love."

Swinton's Emma discovers this Eden when she falls, precipitously, for her son's friend, a young chef named Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini). The adulterers' trysts in the caves and water pools of the hills of San Remo are, in the hands of director Luca Guadagnino, another sort of splendor.

"The whole concept of beauty is very important in the structure of the story," the actress says. "It's actually about a collector who goes collecting objects and finds his wife, and brings her back - this sort of golden thing. It's about the fetishization of that kind of beauty, and the trap of it."

In some respects, Swinton has addressed these themes before, in the groundbreaking 1992 Sally Potter film Orlando, which is about to be rereleased in theaters and on DVD.

"Something that these two films have in common," she says, "is that we set out to look at this beauty, look at this life, look at this idea of wealth, and deconstruct it, so that by the end one might actually want to get out of the house - in both films, the protagonist leaves the house and finds a life outside."

Swinton, 49, hails from one of the oldest family lines in Scotland. Her father is a retired British Army general, a lord, a knight of the realm. And while her accent and mien speak of boarding schools and Cambridge, Swinton can easily shed such things: For every regal and icy White Witch she has played (see The Chronicles of Narnia), there's a role like the one in Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers, where she's a biker's moll, or her work as a corporate lawyer caught up in litigation and nasty intrigue in Tony Gilroy's Michael Clayton.

The latter, by the way, won Swinton a supporting-actress Academy Award in 2008. She harbors some ambivalence about the trophy.

"I have a certain feeling of bashfulness about the fact that so many people set their sights at [winning] something that I feel was like a sort of car crash for me," she says, laughing. "A car crash in the nicest possible way. I don't regret it for an instant, but at the same time it was not on my agenda in any way, shape, or form."

Although I Am Love was shot two summers ago, the project has been a decade in the making. Director Guadagnino and Swinton had been plotting their collaboration, and struggling with financing, seemingly forever.

Guadagnino - who says he essentially stalked his way into Swinton's life after he saw her in the late-'80s films of Derek Jarman - made a short with the actress, "Love Factory," in which she addresses the camera head-on, musing about love and beauty. The seeds of I Am Love were sown.

In a separate interview, the director talks about how seeing Swinton in Jarman's Caravaggio, The Last of England, and Edward II made him want to work with her.

"No, I would say made me want to live with her," he adds, chuckling. "Really.

"When you see even some great actors and actresses, at the end of the film, sometimes you feel that you have seen everything. They are great, but there is no mystery.

"Tilda is so full of mystery, and this is something very cinematic to me. I feel that she is in the league of somebody like Garbo. . . . And also, even though my hero, Hitchcock, said that actors are beasts, I still feel that intelligence is something I like to have beside me. And you can see that there is an amazing cleverness - not snobbish cleverness, but real human cleverness - in Tilda. And Tilda is very warm. That's what I like in her. Even though she is very often playing very alarming, cold, distant roles, I see this amazing generosity in her."

While Swinton and Guadagnino are discussing future collaborations, she has also just completed another long-aborning project for which she served as one of the producers: We Need to Talk About Kevin, adapted from the Lionel Shriver novel about a teenager who goes on a deadly rampage, and how his mother struggles to come to terms with the horror committed by her son. The film, directed by Lynne Ramsay (Ratcatcher), with John C. Reilly as the estranged father, was shot this spring in Connecticut.

"It's one of those films that could easily have never happened, so I'm just so thrilled that we managed to do it," Swinton says, diving into a long analogy about schoolyard kids waiting in line to jump rope - and how you must wait for the perfect moment to step in and take your turn, or you tumble and fail.

"Finding the moment to make films like this . . . the timing, the financing . . . it can be an ordeal," Swinton says, adding that for Kevin the development process took just "four or five years" - half the time of I Am Love.

"But then once you've done it, you realize that if you had jumped earlier it wouldn't have been right. Even though 11 years can feel really torturous, the tenth year reveals a lot of fantastic stuff. Like people become the right age to play the part, you find the house, the pieces all come together."

The house in I Am Love, by the way, was in private hands when Guadagnino finally found it. Since production ended, Villa Necchi Campiglio has gone into the hands of a preservation trust and is open for tours to the public.

"It was exactly what we wanted," recalls Swinton of the opulent digs. "A big, important character in the story, of course. . . . It's a very interesting thing, the way a piece of architecture can dictate an atmosphere, dictate behavior in many ways. . . .

"And Luca and I think of it as our house. We're very dismissive of the fact that people can now go and walk around it."

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