Problemista Walks Between Worlds
Inverse speaks with writer-director Julio Torres and co-star Tilda Swinton about their surreal chemistry.
I have a theory for Tilda Swinton. “I think the secret to how you transform with each of your roles lies in your hair,” I tell her over Zoom, ahead of the wide release of the surrealist comedy Problemista, where Swinton plays an erratic art critic with a shock of fire-hydrant red hair.
The color, though it’s fading near her scalp, is so bright it’s almost blinding, as are the clothes that range from boxy green blazers to ill-fitting leather trenchcoats. But the most blinding thing about Swinton’s character, Elizabeth, is her personality: demanding, irate, and constantly making blue-sky demands of her hapless new assistant, Alejandro (Julio Torres, who writes and directs), an immigrant from El Salvador who hopes this job will help him stay in the United States. She’s loud and she looks it, which Swinton confirms was the intention.
“Everything had to be wrong and somehow noisy. I mean, she’s exhausting to look at. You kind of need special sunglasses.”
“You look at her, and you’re trying to make it make sense,” Swinton tells Inverse. “I look at her, and I think, ‘You’ve got such fine features. Why would you dye your hair that color? It’s the wrong color for your skin.’ Everything had to be dissonant. Everything had to be wrong and somehow noisy. I mean, she’s exhausting to look at. You kind of need special sunglasses.”
So is the secret to Swinton’s chameleonic transformation from role to role actually in her hair? Yes, she enthusiastically confirms. “I always need to start with the look,” Swinton says. “It’s not just the look, it’s the shape. What kind of shape is this person going to make on the screen, in the frame? What kind of weight are they? You know what I mean? What are they going to weigh in the atmosphere of the film?
“You take the character and you sort of shake it by your ear and go, ‘What is it made of?’ And finding [answers], it’s everything for me.”
Elizabeth (Swinton) transforms into the monster of Alejandro’s (Julio Torres) nightmares.
Through her dedication to the look, Swinton manages to transform Elizabeth into one of the most dynamic and secretly terrifying villains of the year. She’s not a villain in the traditional sense, but she certainly acts like one Julio has to defeat in his quest to get a visa, at one point even transforming into a dragon in the absurd visions peppered throughout the film. It’s these striking visual flairs that make Problemista such a singularly surreal experience, but for Torres, that surreal approach was the only way he could accurately depict his personal experience of navigating the United States’ immigration system.
“I understood that the experiences I had gone through trying to get a work visa were a story that could be a movie,” Torres tells Inverse. “And I didn’t really feel artistically interested in that until I realized there was no reason why I couldn’t tell it in the kind of way that I’m comfortable telling stories, which is with humor, with metaphor, with elements of the fantastical.”
Inverse spoke with Torres and Swinton about building an instant chemistry for Problemista, the movie’s surreal fantasy world, and that time-twisting ending.
Julio Torres and Tilda Swinton struck up an instant chemistry while making Problemista.
Julio, when you wrote the script, did you have Tilda Swinton in mind for the role of Elizabeth, or was that just a happy turn of events?
Julio Torres: I did not know Tilda and I did not personally know anyone who could play this role. But then the project started getting real, and it’s like, “Well, now it’s time for a human being to play this role because it’s no longer a document on your computer.”
And I have obviously adored Tilda’s work for so long, not really knowing her or if we would get along, or anything other than the work I have seen. And we really hit it off. It was just magic. And it is truly the best-case scenario, just because you admire somebody’s work that doesn’t necessarily mean they will be the best fit for a collaboration. But this was.
“The world the screenplay conjures does this really, really fine thing, it describes something that I know to be real, but because it’s so detailed and because its focus is so sharp, it’s looking in all the cracks.”
Tilda, can you tell me what your first impression of Julio’s script was, and what made you sign on to the role of Elizabeth?
Tilda Swinton: Well, I was really wired to love it because I loved Julio’s work from the moment I saw it, and I’ve been a proper fan for a while. But I was so impressed with it. It’s his first screenplay, and it’s a complete thing. And the world the screenplay conjures does this really, really fine thing, it describes something that I know to be real, but because it’s so detailed and because its focus is so sharp, it’s looking in all the cracks. And it becomes fantastical. But the fantastical is a real fantasy.
It’s like he is looking through a pair of lenses that just bring up the colors that actually are there, but you were always wearing the wrong glasses. That neon yellow didn’t pop in the way that you know it does when you walk down the street. They were always dumbing it down or making it look too chic or something.
Alejandro and Elizabeth run an errand through New York City.
He just shows a New York and a society that I recognized. And that was incredibly rare, impressive. It’s got that magic that I love about my favorite filmmakers. They make their own worlds. And it’s really a sophisticated thing, that screenplay, and I was so longing to see the film as a fan. But I thought, “How can you fit me in?” I know I’m a fan, and I know we’ll probably like each other, but I don’t know, really. Am I this crazy American woman?
And then when he said to me, “She doesn’t have to be American...” I’m not saying I can’t play Americans, but I really wanted to understand this person, and I don’t know what kind of tutorial I would’ve had to go through to really understand how to play her as a convincing American person. When he said she could come from anywhere, then the whole thing fell into place for me because it makes her an alien too. And the whole chemistry between her and Alejandro made real sense to me.
“There’s the real world, and then there’s the fantastical world. But really, the fantastical world is there to explain the real world, they’re symbiotic.”
One of my favorite parts of this movie was the physical depictions of more abstract ideas, like the Craigslist demon and the maze of the immigration process. Julio, can you talk about what went into the manifestations of those ideas? How did you come around to those?
Torres: Our production designer, who I adore, Katie Byron, and I, one of our first conversations was how seemingly in the movie there’s two worlds. There’s the real world, and then there’s the fantastical world. But really, the fantastical world is there to explain the real world, they’re symbiotic. And the cave that Elizabeth and Alejandra fight in, the sort of Craiglist trash island, the maze, they should all feel like they are rooted in real emotion and they’re not there just to show off that we can make something interesting. They are there to explain the emotionality behind the actions that happen in reality.
And one of the things that I loved about Katie, she had just done the movie Zola. And in that movie, in every room, there’s so many plastic bags. And that is life in the United States. There’s just so many plastic bags everywhere. And when I saw that, I was like, “Yes. This is the world. This is our base. And then we can build out from that.”
Alejandro fends off the Craigslist demon.
I want to ask about the ending. For most of the movie, we get the impression that this cryogenics company is sort of a scam, but in the end it’s revealed your characters do succeed in waking up in the future. Was that always the intended ending?
Torres: I’m glad you felt that way because yes, picking the location and the production design of the cryogenics office at the beginning is deliberate. It needs to look like, “Oh no, they are pouring money down the drain here.” It looks like a dirty spa. Some of the references that I gave the production designer were those places you walk by and they have a plasma screen with eyebrow-threading videos. And it was like, “It needs to look like that. It needs to look like it’s a dirty eyebrow-threading place.”
Swinton: Oh, god. It’s not so confidence-inspiring.
Torres: Yeah, or around tax season, when TurboTax or whatever gets those popups. It needs to feel like that. It needs to feel like this place, a week from now, is not going to be there. And then lo and behold...
