After graduating in 1983, Swinton joined the Royal Shakespeare Company but left it after one season. She compared it to what she imagined working for the industrial giant ICI would be like. It should be perfect training for her forthcoming role as the Velvet Underground collaborator and heroin addict Nico, for which Swinton - who turns 45 soon - will age from 22 to 50. "I'm like an escapologist - I can go in for a bit, and then leave," she re-assures. "I am genuinely interested in the tradition of the blockbuster, believe it or not It interests me.
I'm not a very industrial animal, in the way I work, but I am interested." While she may have played Leonardo DiCaprio's colleague in The Beach, one only has to look at Swinton's vanity-free past performances to know that she is the very antithesis to the blonde, bland starlets that decorate studio fare. How many would have dared play her gender-bending role in Sally Potter's Orlando, or followed it with the repugnant Colony Club bartender Muriel Belcher in the Francis Bacon tale Love is the Devil and the hairy-legged barge-owner in Young Adam? In this month's Jim Jarmusch movie Broken Flowers, she is almost unrecognisable as a raven-haired biker chick - a former flame to Bill Murray's middle-aged man-in-crisis, and looking like the love-child of Joan Jett and Ozzy Osbourne. It's a worrying thought that this former member of the Communist Party of Great Britain might be swallowed by Hollywood. Her statuesque limbs, ghostly white skin, green eyes and shock of red hair lend her an ethereal presence that has already seen her play the archangel Gabriel in this year's Constantine.
"We contacted the pirates and got them to distribute the DVD," he confirms "So they protected us during the theatrical release We don't know the rules," he laughs. "We are Russian, playing our own game."'Night Watch' is out now. Tilda Swinton was Sleeping Beauty in 1995, when she climbed inside a glass case at the Serpentine Gallery and dozed, eight hours a day, for Cornelia Parker's exhibit The Maybe. But as the White Witch in a live-action adaptation of CS Lewis' classic The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, she is undoubtedly perfect casting. Dark represents freedom but light represents responsibility".