Tilda Swinton brings Hollywood star power to a conversation on restoring classic films at Hong Kong’s M+

An onstage discussion about film conservation seems an unlikely big-ticket draw in Hong Kong a week before Lunar New Year. And yet a large crowd has arrived an hour early, to stand outside in what passes for winter here, wrapped up in scarves outside M+, in the West Kowloon Cultural District. Nearby, skateboarders pop ollies and young girls practice K-pop dance routines. Tourists pass the queue bewildered by all the fuss. Said fuss is the presence of Tilda Swinton, the Hollywood A-lister who will later be introduced onto the stage as “one of the greatest actresses, writers, curators, creative practitioners of all sorts of our time”. It’s quite the tally, but Swinton resists any aggrandisement. When I later allude to her status as a global icon, her head rears back and with a grin like the Cheshire Cat – “I like the way you dropped that so casually, ‘as a global icon’!” She laughs, but surely she’s used to such fawning? “Oh yes, I’ve got a mug at home with ‘global icon’ written on it.” Swinton engages in the kind of self-deprecation that only the truly famous can afford, but in my defence, it’s also not often Hong Kong attracts these sorts of stars. Such bona fides usually fly to Beijing or Shanghai to appeal to the mainland market, or hit Macau for some of that endorsement money. What Hong Kong does have, however, is an unmatched cinematic heritage. The facts are old but bear repeating, that at the height of the Hong Kong film industry, in the early 1990s, the tiny territory produced more films than any market besides Hollywood and Bollywood, exporting star power such as Wong Kar-wai and Jackie Chan. And long before that, Bruce Lee, and whatever came out of the legendary Shaw Brothers studios had inspired generations of filmmakers around the world. Given the paucity of A-listers visiting Hong Kong these days, perhaps the only surprise is that M+ didn’t need a bigger venue for its conversation with Tilda Swinton and Tang Shu-shuen. The Arch, a groundbreaking 1968 film directed by Tang, is to be one of the first included in M+ Restored, a new initiative that seeks to improve visibility of Hong Kong’s cinematic heritage, by restoring nine important and neglected works. Swinton’s presence has been supported by Chanel’s Culture Fund, which also supported M+’s “Film Course: Women Make Film” in 2022. The following year, it announced a three-year partnership that would include funding the position of “Chanel Lead Curator, Moving Image” at M+, and sponsoring the museum’s Asian Avant-Garde Film Festival. But this doesn’t mean brand-ambassador Swinton was parachuted in for pretty sound bites. She has a genuine record in this field, and in 2022 received the International Federation of Film Archives annual award, with its then president, Frederic Maire, citing how “over the years, she has advocated for the preservation and enhancement of film heritage, including publicly supporting the work of film archives, and promoting restored films”. Swinton doesn’t seem the type for PR stunts anyway. Throughout the talk with Tang – whose lively discourse belies her 80-plus years – Swinton repeatedly steers the conversation to the director’s own body of work. And it does not seem the British actor does this to shift the glare of her own spotlight – she is genuinely interested in cinema history, and the human connection films generate. Swinton references obscure works from the 1930s and 40s throughout our subsequent conversation, and at one point during the public talk she can’t help remark on the similarity between M+’s Grand Stair, where the talk is being held, and an escalator in the 1946 British film A Matter of Life and Death. Her ethereal presence – that White Witch energy she channelled so successfully in The Chronicles of Narnia films – seems to pull everything in, radiating a light of its own. But she lights up just as much when discussing how to remove dust particles from prints and the optimal storage temperature for celluloid. “A film in a canister in an archival vault is only half the story,” she says. “A roll of film is a roll of film; but once it’s projected, it then springs to life because it generates an energy between the audience and the screen. But you’re not going to get [the film] to the screen unless that is really diligently preserved and husbanded. “I come from a family that’s very lazy,” she says, maintaining an air of modesty about her noble ancestors, the Swintons of Kimmerghame, in Scotland. “They lived at the same place for hundreds of years. In the same house, in fact, and that house is full of old things.” While being an actor never crossed her mind as a child, having moved to Cambridge to study English, her ancestral home would provide constant inspiration, and it was there in some dusty attic or forgotten wardrobe that Swinton came across artefacts of one of her ancestors, a pioneering photographer from the early 20th century, and “being absolutely spellbound because there was the present”. “And you look at a film of someone in the late 19th century, 1896 or something, and they are moving in the same way that you do. And yes they are wearing slightly different clothes but you could go and dress up in costumes that are identical and be identical. There’s a way of connection and identification with old footage that’s really powerful because it means that you are, we are in a continuum. “The thing about cinema is it’s completely ageless. The spirit of film is absolutely eternal. Even more, I would suggest, than other art; even more than painting or sculpture.” Swinton has worked with auteurs such as Derek Jarman, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Pedro Almodóvar, and indie veterans Jim Jarmusch and the Coen Brothers, but she has also thrown herself into roles in Marvel’s Doctor Strange (2016) and 2005’s Constantine, long before comic-book adaptations dominated pop culture. “You cannot be a snob, you have to see everything and you have to find a way of being nourished by every film you see,” she says. “It would be a wonderful thing if everything could be preserved because snobbery is the very death of good art and a healthy culture.” She recalls watching a 3D film with one of her sons during the 3D craze, following the success of Avatar (2009) and Gravity (2013). When her son told her he didn’t enjoy the reliance on CGI, Swinton remembers he said, “because I couldn’t have done it myself”. Ever the cineaste, Swinton introduced her son to the films of Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell, and credits the practical effects in their movies for inspiring her son to become a props maker. “I think he would not have had access to that insight, about filmmaking, the aesthetic sense of what the craft and artisanal kind of heft of filmmaking really is, if he hadn’t looked at films from the 40s,” she says. The fact that “it is possible now for young kids not to see any films from the 40s or 50s or 60s or 70s or 80s or 90s”, because they will change channels or switch to a different streaming service, is one more reason why Swinton believes in the importance of restoration and preservation. However, “I do see in 10 years a younger generation infatuated with big screens in a way that doesn’t necessarily look likely right now,” she says. “People are getting sick of only watching things on the bottom of their beds. I mean we all do it just before going to sleep, but if you want to watch a movie, people are beginning to want to have the experience and it’s all about experience. “I think the future is bright if we imagine a really impassioned and curious younger audience. A cine-literate and cine-curious audience, and I do feel confident that that’s where we’re headed.”