Tilda Swinton quotes:

Faith is in the eye of the beholder.

To be honest the work that a producer does is work that I've done for most of my working life. It's work that I started to do, for example, when I worked with Sally Potter on Orlando. We developed it together over five years.

I wasn't around when Nic was playing Donald. I was around with Charlie.

I knew Spike Jonze would do something really interesting with it.

I've been on the other side of the table many times, trying to get people to be sympathetic to projects, and I've been the victim of that kind of intense kindness masking extreme stupidity.

This self-obsession is a waste of living. It could be spent on surviving things, appreciating nature, nurturing kindness and friendship, and dancing.

Nic's Charlie is something very particular. You can't really put them together. It's a phantasm.

It's exotic for me to be given a script that's already written, and be given a pay cheque, and asked to dress up and play, and that's all.

There's no need there to sit with the filmmaker for 11 years to develop the script, or go round the world raising money.

George [Clooney] and I do have the aim one day to be in a film where we say one nice thing to each other. Hopefully one day.

How do we identify ourselves, and how do we settle into other people's expectations for our identity?

I was always, and I still am to a certain extent, one of those lazy people who spends a lot of time with Italian friends and yet constantly says I don't speak Italian. Things slow down when I start speaking Italian.

What he's done is recognise the cinematic nature of the book. It's beautifully realised - it's a beat film.

I always think of the word 'abandonment' when I think of the character.

What children, in fact all of us at any age, find frightening is unreliability and emotional coldness. The idea that you can't affect someone, that you can't see where they're coming from and can change tact at any moment.

Eleven years is a great length of time to prepare a movie, it would be wonderful to have 11 years of funded preparation.

Alexander Trocchi was an existentialist. He was looking at an alienated artist in the post-war period. It's modern because it applies now as well.

Archetypes are always [in my film-making]. It's sometimes interesting to just flip them a little bit and see the underside.

Derek Jarman shared the responsibility for making the film. He didn't necessarily know what he wanted - he knew what he didn't want - but you had to keep coming up with stuff.

The people I'm working with tend to be people I know, who are my friends, and I like hanging out with them. There's nothing better than making a long-term project with your friends. It's just dreamy.

What very often happens when people make films about rich people, the camera is quite mesmerised by the opulence and quite theatrical in fact.

The work is different in the sense that I haven't had to travel round the world raising money, or work from the genesis of the project. But the collaboration feels clear always, it's sort of my drug, I'm in it for the conversation. The conversation's the most important part of it.

I believe that all great art holds the power to dissolve things: time, distance, difference, injustice, alienation, despair. I believe that all great art holds the power to mend things: join, comfort, inspire hope in fellowship, reconcile us to our selves. Art is good for my soul precisely because it reminds me that we have souls in the first place.

[My work] just develops and develops, and I'm very nicely served by the universe: just as I'm ready to take the conversation further with myself, some other individual pops up, like David McKenzie did, with this idea of making this film [Teknolust], and provides exactly the leap to the next adventure.

A large part of my filmmaking self has to do with my love of being in the cinema audience, and my relationships to what I want to see on the screen, what I have seen on the screen and what I don't want to see on the screen again.

About actors' lives... I'm not the person to ask. I don't live an actor's life and I really don't know. I probably read less about actors' lives than you all do. So, I'm in the dark about all of that, sorry.

Art is good for my soul precisely because it reminds me that we have souls in the first place.

As a performer, I'm constantly fascinated with the idea of being able to know what anybody else's experience is, and how misleading all informatives, like appearance, can be.

Even beyond sexuality, I'm generally interested in identity.

For me, sex is a refraction of the thing about identity. In the sexual contact, which is usually - but not exclusively - between two people, you do retain separate people.

I am the only living person in the English speaking world who didn't have the Narnia books as a child.

I follow my nose. It's as simple as that.

I have no problems with the NC-17 rating. I want more NC-17 films. More adult cinema!

I have this very strange relationship with my work, which is that it's like a conversation between me and it.

I live a soldier's life when I'm working. That's how it feels to me, except I've got a slightly greater chance of survival.

I made The War Zone when I had just given birth to twins, and my post-partum frame was very much on display there.

I mean, even in terms of the Marvel universe, this [Ancient One character] is going on a side street into a major piazza that Marvel hasn't even been to before, because it's all about creation and not so much about destruction and forestalling destruction, it's about your mind.

I never quite understand the way society decides who is beautiful and who is not. But an open face and a capacity for kindness always feel like reliable signifiers to me.

I remember noticing, when I had my babies, how much I liked them, and not just loved them, but I was really into them. I knew I was going to be curious about them, and up for the mayhem ahead.

I remember when I first started to be photographed, people couldn't understand how it was possible to go around with no eyelashes, no eyebrows. Now it's much more accepted for people not to wear eyelashes or lipstick or whatever they do, but then it was quite freaky. Um, a kind of boiled look.

I think of great masters, like [Alfred] Hitchcock, for example, who works absolutely within this sensational realm. You feel like you can always tell what temperature a room is in a Hitchcock film because the people feel alive, they don't feel like they're just being filmed on a stage.

I think that a real film fan experience is about a kind of omnivorous experience.

I think that both Luca [ Guadagnino]and I have a kind of resistance to the idea of a film holding a moral message because that would exclude so many people from feeling that it was their film and it's important for a piece of work to feel owned by every member of the audience.

I think that film festivals, we're very often given to understand, are about filmmakers and about films and about the industry of filmmaking. I don't believe that they are, I believe that film festivals are about film audiences, and about giving an audience the encouragement to feel really empowered and to stretch the elastic of their taste.

I think that's true of all cinema, that's why cinema is the great humanistic art form. Whatever the film is, it doesn't matter what the film is about, or even whether it's a narrative or figurative film at all, it's an invitation to step into somebody else's shoes. Even if it's the filmmaker's shoes filming a landscape, you go into somebody else's shoes and you look out of their lens, you look out of their eyes and their imagination. That's what going to the pictures is all about.

I think there's a dishonorable tradition in Hollywood to give the idea, particularly to children, that evil characters are dark.

I was just talking to Benedict [Cumberbatch] who's got a little baby and knows his father lives in his phone. We as humans are evolving really fast, so everyday we're hit with that.

I was not, and am not, officially a producer of that film [I am love] but the work of what a producer does I learned at that stage and to a certain extent I've been a producer ever since.

I would rather be handsome for an hour than pretty for a week.

I would say that I think the film [I am love] is absolutely about nature, it recommends human nature. You don't need to recommend change, that's inevitable, it's the only reliable thing we have.

I would say, and this sounds like a rather immodest thing to say, but the truth is it's probably the most amazing thing of all, it's pretty much exactly what I thought we were going to make, what I hoped we'd make.

If I'd been asked to play an Asian man [in Doctor Strange] I would've shown them Benedict Wong.

If we don't accept loneliness, then capitalism wins hands down. Because capitalism is all about trying to convince people that you can distract yourself, that you can make it better. And it ain't true.

I'll tell you one thing, and this is banal to say because it just makes it sound like it's all planned, and nothing is planned at all. But one link is with The Deep End, and one link is that I'm making a film later on that revolves around the relationship between an innocent party and a dead body.

I'm a huge Marvel fan and the fact that they take the liberties that they do in filmmaking I think, if anything, that it dignifies the comics and it says, "Yeah. This is a strong enough, robust enough source. We can bend it, it's elastic. It's bouncy."

I'm from the same planet as David Bowie.

I'm interested in that whole question of where we wear our identity and how can we see it.

I'm just really old [in Doctor Strange]. Just really, really old. There is I suppose a sort of theme tune which I'm really interested in.

I'm really interested in the idea of long, long life and transformation and immortality.

I'm very much drawn to these stories. This is a huge, great story [in Doctor Strange] about the possibility of living beyond everything, living beyond mortality, living beyond all the immortal confines, living beyond the planet as we know it. It's mind-blowingly no limits, and I think this is going to be something else.

In my house, a hot dog is a dog that's really hot.

In The Deep End, you have a woman who looks like a J. Crew mother who can manage it all. Then we begin to realize what's going on inside. Every time I see one of those women stuck at a stoplight with the children in the back of her car, I sort of think, "What have you just done? What's going on in your life?".

It was an amazing performer. Very temperamental, it spent a lot of time in its trailer.

It was just me, naked as underneath my clothes right now, as all of you are.

It's a real comfort zone for me to feel alien.

It's wonderful to actually have an opportunity to get real and show how complicated and fascinating sex is.

I've been really happy to be in that conversation with Scott [Derrickson] for a few months now. We started chewing this cud a while ago. He is, as you probably know, an extremely erudite thinker in terms of religious philosophy and just thinking about a modern take on something really, really ancient, about how to imagine living beyond any physical bounds, which we're on the verge of now.

I've only ever gone into studio films with people I really like.

Maybe it was my revenge on people who had been unkind to me as a child. But it was very easy and a thrill to freeze up children.

Most of us live our whole lives without having an adventure to call our own. What is any life without the pursuit of a dream?

One of the things about Derek Jarman was that he was a painter who worked alone when he painted, but I firmly believe that one of the reasons he made films was for the company. He made filmmakers of all of us, that's the truth. I don't mean he necessarily made directors, but he made us filmmakers. Because we lived in a state of mutual responsibility for what we made.

One of the wonderful things that I've always loved as an art student, what I always loved about comics, was that they are interpreted differently by different graphic artists all the time, so now film is doing that thanks to Marvel Studios.

Sexuality is, of course, a great way of having a conversation between people.

The Ancient One, as you know, is the master, is the Sorcerer Supreme, and [Doctor] Strange comes to learn how to heal himself and The Ancient One has got the knowledge. And so what you're seeing today is a part of the whole training section when he's learning the moves and digging deep. So it's all about that, it's all about trying to push him to get there.

The great news is that that sort of group of people and that sort of sensibility is beginning to become more active again. And I think partly it just has to do with the time. It has to do with the culture of resistance. The necessity is for us to pull together and to speak up and to make work and be visible.

The last time I did anything like this [special powers] was with the Narnia film with two swords, the same but different.

The only real struggle [in Doctor Strange] was casting spells - learning all these amazing things with fingers, and then remembering what to say at the same time. They would say, 'So you have to put your hands there, not there because the light is going to go [MAKES SOUND] so that kind of masks... but it was all good.

The problem for me is that I look like so many people in my family, so I can't really see anything. Except I could say that I look rather like my father without his mustache.

The story, it's really important to The Ancient One that Doctor Strange does cut it because The Ancient One needs a successor, or certainly needs - you could say - a son. So The Ancient One is really invested in Doctor Strange, it's a very kind of primal relationship.

The whole thing of working in collaboration with filmmakers is the thing that I love the most, and possibly the thing I do the best.

There are many graphic artists who have interpreted The Ancient One as a Tibetan Buddhist Lama, we're kind of shifting that a bit. We're trying not to be fixed, we're trying not to be fixed to any one thing, any one gender, any one spiritual discipline, and any one race even; we're just trying to wing it beyond that. So it's a new gesture really, just another interpretation.

There's a thing I really mind hearing, when someone says: "That's not my kind of film, I don't want to go and see that..." I don't believe that, I don't believe that it's possible to write off a whole genre of filmmaking - "oh I don't like subtitled films", or "I don't like black and white films", or I don't like films made before or after, a certain date" - I don't believe that.

There's an alarm bell that goes off in my head if I can sense that I'm making a mistake.

There's nothing I'm particularly keen to hide about my humanity.

This film [Doctor Strange] kind of takes that everyday boring reality and really bursts it wide. So we talked a lot about that. In many ways there's something very practical about this world, the Kamar-Taj. It's - You know, we all look like samurai warriors, but actually there are iPads everywhere and there's a feeling that it's a practical possibility for this modern world that the Doctor Strange universe is functioning, and that we know it and it's around the corner for all of us.

This film [Teknolust] in particular, showing the way in which having a sexual dialogue with someone can be something developing and changeable and maybe uncomfortable and complicated. Just complicated and human, no more and no less.

This is the launch of the Doctor Strange film interpretation, of - in my view - a classic, which has been interpreted many times by other graphic artists and this is just our graphic interpretation of The Ancient One. I would say the whole approach is about a kind of fluidity.

Very, very often in movie sex you see this fiction about unity. A union. That somehow these two thinking beings become one, and there's one action and they're sort of perfectly in sync, and the lighting's perfect, and they've got their eyes closed, and they're gone, you know? And then you cut to someone having a cigarette. And it's all so much Novocain. Meanwhile, those of us us watching it are going "I'm never going to tell anybody, but I never have sex like that".

We [ with Ewan McGregor] decided exactly what we would do at every moment, what the texture would be.

We also knew [ me and Ewan McGregor] that, on a practical level, if there was going to be that much sex in the film [Young Adam] - which there clearly had to be because sex is the meat and potatoes of the thing - it had to be varied for the audience, because it's important to keep the audience living in it.

We must hang on to the idea that we can actually change things. That's the sort of environment that Joe finds himself in, in Young Adam.

We talked [with Scott Derrickson] about making it kind of muscular and practical. Yeah it's a fantasy but what's the difference between fantasy and reality really?

We were very clear that this film's [Young Adam] so much about a relationship that's borne out through the sexual contact, and that that's the way they communicate.

Well the truth is, everybody, when they die, leaves a void that cannot be filled.

Well you know, the comic strip [Doctor Strange]... yeah, was an Asian man, in fact, a very ancient Tibetan man living on the top of a mountain. The film script that I was given wasn't an Asian man, so I wasn't asked to play an Asian man - I was asked to play an ancient Celtic person.

We're filling a big universe [in Doctor Strange], and so the look and the sort of plasticity of us is really important to us when we're striking poses here. It's very important, it's really great.

We're like the raw food movement in cinema - so determined to give people things that do some good, that they recognize as real.

We're living in a new Beat time, in my view. And it's very difficult for us to hang on.

What bothers me is that the cinema - what Fox News calls the "wholesome cinema that our children are supposed to be able to see" - is so violent. I'm not even talking about the content. I'm talking about the way in which it's cut.

When I say that it's taken us [with Luca Guadagnino ] 11 years to make this film, what I mean is that it was 11 years ago that we started to talk about a kind of cinema that we wanted to make together.

When I'm in northern Italy, I walk about feeling slightly less of a freak.

Years ago, when James Bulger was murdered, every newspaper front page was talking about evil. At that point, having suppressed it for years, I remembered when I was four or five, I tried to kill my own brother.

You can sit next to somebody on the underground, and you can look at them quite intensely, but you can never, ever know what they're wearing under their clothes.