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Tilda Swinton Takes On an Intense Dual Role in Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter

In her first film since concluding her Souvenir duology, Hogg cast Swinton in one of two lead roles. Then, they decided she should play both.
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Tilda Swinton as Julie in The Eternal Daughter. By Sandro Kopp/A24.

Memories are a funny thing in Joanna Hogg’s movies—as in, the British filmmaker often struggles to separate fiction from her actual life. Hogg spent the last few years immersed in her award-winning The Souvenir duology, a semi-autobiographical account of a young woman’s experiences in film school, covering doomed romances, blossoming friendships, and one grand artistic awakening. “I worry that my actual memories of my time as a film student and of my relationships have been replaced by those films,” Hogg tells me. “I haven’t watched them since they were finished—once was enough for me to think of certain elements of those films as my reality. And they absolutely weren’t.”

Maybe that’s why she made a ghost story next. While in post-production on The Souvenir: Part II, Hogg felt an urge to dive into something fresh right away—a project far removed from the bone-deep realism of her last two films. She wanted to do genre, “to engage in that space of the imagination.” But this is a director for whom, again and again, cinema and life prove thrillingly intertwined. So we have the resulting film, The Eternal Daughter (premiering next week at the Venice Film Festival), a ghost story to be sure—then rooted, to some degree, in Hogg’s relationship with her own late mother, then expanded into a more otherworldly, slippery, expressionistic take on the fraught and powerful bonds between mother and daughter.

She’d actually first had the idea to explore the topic, in an even more memoiristic vein, more than a decade ago, but backed off from an outline after feeling too guilty about making such a movie while her mother was still alive. In the intervening years, her profile rose—Exhibition and Archipelago, which preceded the Souvenir films, also earned critical acclaim—and more importantly, she reconnected with Tilda Swinton, who starred in Hogg’s first short back in 1986. Swinton played a smaller role in the two Souvenir movies—though their lead actress, Honor Swinton Byrne, is Tilda’s daughter—but she’d got to talking with Hogg again, specifically about mothers and daughters, while shooting them. And so it only made sense for Hogg to cast Swinton as Julie, a filmmaker—of course—who takes her elderly mother on a getaway to a Welsh hotel suffused with family memories, where the past comes to feel disorientingly, hauntingly present.

Hogg and Swinton playfully explored how The Eternal Daughter could come together, with the shorthand of knowing each other for decades. They had the freedom of genre—to move beyond the relatively naturalistic constraints of a project like The Souvenir—and, with that, they had endless possibilities. Hogg doesn’t write dialogue for her movies, either, instead collaborating with her actors once they’re cast. So Swinton was already in the trenches with her director, sculpting Julie and, in turn, the character’s relationship with her mother from the ground up. Out of that, Swinton threw out a wild idea—or perhaps not so wild, if you know anything at all about this Oscar-winning actor. What if she played mother and daughter?

Swinton in The Eternal Daughter.

Sandro Kopp/A24

Tilda Swinton has done this before, sort of. Let’s not forget Suspiria, Luca Guadagnino’s arty horror remake from 2018 in which we all thought she was portraying two distinct characters, until it was revealed that no, actually, she’d been playing a third too. But whereas that bloody thriller leaned harder into the scary and the supernatural, The Eternal Daughter considers its ghosts—and the characters walking among them—in a more plaintive sense. Swinton taking on the two lead roles proves less an exercise of cinematic trickery, and more one of emotional intensity.

“It was the most unusually tender, rich experience,” Swinton says. “Even though the film takes place in this kind of dreamscape of mist and gargoyles, it felt absolutely real to me and to Joanna because we were working through thoughts and feelings we’ve already shared as friends.” As Julie, Swinton wanders through the hotel’s corridors with a quiet, crushing guilt, choosing an artist’s life over motherhood and facing her mother’s unhappiness as a consequence; as Julie’s mother, Rosalind—yes, you should notice, the same name as Swinton’s Souvenir character—the actor turns very reserved, as if she’s holding some kind of secret.

Reuniting with DP Ed Rutherford for the first time since 2013’s Exhibition, Hogg found Swinton’s dual performance profoundly moving. Very rarely do the two characters appear in the same frame—“It’s completely without gimmicks,” Hogg says—as Hogg, Rutherford, and Swinton focused on the unique thematic terrain of mother and daughter sharing this core part of each other. “I wanted to be able to have a really straightforward and deep conversation with Tilda in these two roles, where we weren’t having to do gymnastics to try and get it to work for the camera,” Hogg says. “We made some really bold decisions in how to shoot it.”

Hogg reveals to me an enduring fear of the dark, held since childhood, and wanting to lean into that here. “There’s something about after night falls that’s still at my age sometimes quite scary,” she says. “It’s not only fear of the dark or fear of ghosts, it’s fear of one’s self in a way, and then connecting with family.” Early in the process, she asked executive producer Martin Scorsese to recommend her ghost stories; he suggested “They,” by Rudyard Kipling, which Hogg says “unlock[ed] the dynamics” of the film and then various others deeper into production. “He watched so many different cuts of the film, and this was all while he was making [Killers of the Flower Moon] in Oklahoma,” Hogg says. “He was incredibly generous with his time when he had so much going on of his own.”

Hogg and Swinton, meanwhile, went to a very deep place together. They had long talks about their mothers and about themselves. Because Hogg doesn’t script dialogue, Swinton’s contributions brought the movie beyond the autobiographical realm for the director. “It takes it away from being just about me, or it takes it away from being too painfully personal because it’s a conversation,” Hogg says. Swinton adds that “the boldness of it comes from the fact that we didn’t try to protect ourselves, but the opposite. We threw ourselves into it, trying to get as close to the nerve as we could.” (As to the resulting dual turn from Swinton, Hogg says, “It’s an incredible feat of engineering of performance.”)

As you might expect, memory—and its function through film—finds its way into The Eternal Daughter. “As I get older I trust my memory less and less,” Hogg says. “There’s something very mutable about it. I don’t entirely trust it, but then I’m really interested in it, cinematically, playing with that unreliability.” Toying with these ideas while still finishing up The Souvenir, Hogg sees, in retrospect, that the lack of space between movies is what allowed her to take such a leap—to finally make a movie (somewhat) about her mother, to cast Swinton in both roles, to dig up the ghosts that trail her in the dark of the night. “If I’d had time to think, I wouldn’t have been so bold,” she says. “Right now, as I’m sitting here, I do have this space that’s opened up—and it’s much more scary.”


The Eternal Daughter premieres at the Venice Film Festival on September 6, and will be released in theaters soon via A24. This feature is part of Awards Insider’s exclusive fall-festival coverage, featuring first looks and in-depth interviews with some of this coming season’s biggest contenders.