Tilda Swinton has revealed she will take a break from what she called “merciless” movie-making.
The British actress, who won a best supporting actress Oscar for legal thriller Michael Clayton, was presented with the lifetime achievement prize at the Berlin International Film Festival on Thursday for a long career demonstrating “breathtaking” range.
Swinton has been working regularly for more than two decades, having made her debut in Derek Jarman-directed 1986 art film Caravaggio.
She told a press conference at the film festival on Friday: “I can tell you that when I go home on Monday to Scotland, I’m entering something that I’ve been looking forward to for about 15 years, which is a period of my life when I do something different.
“I can’t quite say what it is, but I can say I’m not shooting a film for the rest of this year.”
She said working on movies is a “merciless mistress”, and she has been “under the lash for a while”.
Swinton added: “I want time to develop projects, some are in cinema, some are not, but I need time.”
She also spoke about working in “industrial filmmaking”, big Hollywood projects, and claimed it is “difficult for them to relate to each other, as they’re kept away from each other”, in different areas of the set.
Swinton, who has been in Marvel movie Doctor Strange, supernatural movie Constantine with Keanu Reeves and drama The Beach with Leonardo DiCaprio, said people see it as “peculiar” to hang out with each other on set.
She also addressed comments she made while picking up the prize on Thursday, where she said governments are “greed addicted” and called out “the astonishing savagery of spite, state-perpetrated and internationally enabled mass murder” which she called “unacceptable to human society”.
Swinton clarified she was referring to “all the wars”, not just the conflict in Gaza, and was also asked about the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) which calls for a cultural boycott of Israel.
She said she is “a great admirer of and have a great deal of respect for BDS”, but added it was “more important” for her to come to the festival and not boycott it – which the organisation called for.
Swinton said she feels she will be “potentially more useful to all our causes” by being there, and called it a “personal judgment call, that I take full responsibility for”.
Her latest films include The Room Next Door with Julianne Moore, about two friends who reconnect as one of them goes through terminal cancer, and apocalyptic drama The End.
