Smash hit

The Film Festival programme is fat, but the British contribution is leaner than it should be. Swinton thinks British film is not in such good health as it was in the glory days of the British Film Institute and Channel 4 films. “When you have healthy TV, you have a healthy film culture, but now we have very unhealthy TV. I no longer own a television.” (Her children’s Steiner school sensibly advises that television makes kids “torpid”. Instead, the family screen old movies at home.) “The systematic dismantling of British TV has caused the unviability of our film culture. Funding is linked to the lottery and tourism, and you have to offer 16 reasons for success. New film-makers face this need to make a profit, when the BFI used to take a cultural approach.”

Her voice is raised angrily and puzzled tourists turn to stare. She has a touch of the head girl about her – a position she held at her English boarding school. She is smart, charming, slightly scary. “She was the witch – you know, the queen in Narnia,” whispers an American at the next table.

With her pale, unmade-up face and shoulder-length red hair – variously dyed for the screen – she reminds me of David Bowie in his Aladdin Sane period or in The Man Who Fell to Earth. I say that, and she laughs. “My son fell in love with Bowie’s music before he saw him. He probably likes him because he looks like his mum.”

We have seen less of Swinton while she has been raising her nine-year-old twins, Xavier and Honor, in a big old house near Inverness. “They’ve only been at school for the past two years, so that’s why I’ve been a sporadic presence on the screen. Now they can read, maybe I’ll take them with me.”

She moved north with her partner, the Scottish playwright and painter John Byrne, after the babies were born. They live in a tiny village “where everybody kens yer faither”, says Swinton, dropping into a Highland accent. Swinton met Byrne at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre in 1984. He is 21 years her senior and celebrated for plays such as The Slab Boys and the TV series Tutti Frutti.

I had always assumed from her crisp voice and Cambridge University education that Swinton was English, but it turns out she comes from the landed gentry of the Scottish Borders. “We finally made the wise decision to return to Scotland. I’m ashamed it took so long – I should have done it earlier because I was never happy in London. I lived like a refugee,” she says dramatically. “I was completely alienated – never able to operate that machine, even in the days when it was easier to operate.”

She admits she has been pondering the subjects of Scottishness over the past 12 hours, after seeing David Mackenzie’s Hallam Foe at the festival premiere. It all floods out: “I think it’s all about class. I’m interested that he’s a Borderer brought up in a baronial pile. The Borders are Scotland’s shop window, and posh Scots are brought up to believe that, more than anywhere else, they’re truly Scottish – so much so, ironically, that you are sent to boarding school in England to get an English accent and, when you come back, you boss everybody about and don’t understand what they’re saying. Going to boarding school put me off England for life – and that wasn’t England’s fault. I remember longing for Scotland, longing for the holidays, to come home to nature, to everything I understood.”

You cannot help feeling that Swinton is prone to a certain romantic, dramatic exaggeration about her nationality. “We were on Colonsay and there was a tea towel for sale,” she begins. “It was printed with the story of God giving the land of the eagle, heather and hills to the Scotsman – as a punishment. The Scotsman asks why that’s a punishment. ‘You haven’t seen who your neighbours are!’ says God.” Her children didn’t understand the joke. They guessed Scotland’s neighbours were France or Ireland or Italy or Iceland. “No,” she said. “Try the next one down.” She smiles. “They think the UK is Scotland, Ireland, Wales and Legoland.”

None of this diminishes the suspicion that Swinton, in all her strangeness, comes from another country, if not another planet. How could such a creature be produced by a military family, with brothers who are a regimental soldier, a banker and a digital-technology expert? She answers that her great-grandmother was Mrs George Swinton, the oddly familiar, tall, red-haired beauty painted by Sargent. She was a celebrated drawing-room singer in the days when ladies did not become professionals. “I often wonder what she’d think of the fact that I have been able to prevail as an artist – not in the drawing room, but in the world.”

Michael Clayton is released on September 28

Explore Film

• Film Reviews

• Trailers

• DVD

• London Film Festival

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010