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.
