Booze, guns, kidnapping, more booze. The singular Tilda Swinton gives another tour-de-force performance as the titular character in Erick Zonca’s Julia, a moving portrait of a down-on-her-luck drunk on the lam, in theaters this weekend. BlackBook’s Editor-in-Chief Ray Rogers raises a glass to the avant garde goddess who throws down here on resilience, aliens in America, booze and cock.

So I heard you were in Nepal recently? I was indeed. I was there for a couple of weeks recently. It’s very much more beautiful than I could have imagined, and very much tougher than I could have imagined. Kind of colder than I could have imagined. I recommend that you go and trek there. I would have liked to just go one walking and walking.

As an artist, how important is it to get out of one’s environment? You mean, coming to Manhattan? I suppose you can say I was able to come to Manhattan because I was in Nepal for a month. It makes it all possible. And I’m going home tomorrow. Just got enough energy to be in Manhattan for a week, and I really love it, but really have to go home tomorrow.

How long will you be home for? A couple of weeks. I am going to Cannes to support the World’s Cinema Foundation . Let’s talk Julia. You mentioned to me that you were inspired by your friend Justin Bond’s Kiki and Herb character when thinking of Julia’s mannerisms and speech. How much of Justin is in Julia? Justin less than many of my friends. Many—they are all very proud. I think I always wanted to make a film about exactly this woman. So when [director] Erick Zonca came to me with this, she is exactly the woman I wanted to make a film about. I always wanted to make a portrait of a drunk woman who is always as resourceful and fantastic and energetic andas fun to be around as all of the glorious drunks I know. And here she was.

Why did you want to make this film? Because Erick Zonca is the right person to look at that kind of portrait, look at that kind of woman, look at that kind of subject, he has a very well-developed relationship with himself and he really knows that being at rock bottom means going deeper than what most cinema portraits show. He is really going there, and so he was exactly the right person to do it with. I love his early films, I don’t know if you’ve seen Dream Life of Angels, and another film called The Little Thief, which was never released in the cinemas but was released on television and was about a young boy who becomes a thief, he comes into that under world. It’s very much a project that looks into what I describe as a zoological way of narrative filming—to look at an animal, follow them with amoral compassion, and just stay with that through the end.

That’s a testament to your performance, with Julia, that one does feel compassion for her, that she’s not just a caricature, there’s heart and soul there. She’s a loose canon, but there’s also that sense of survival and getting on and there’s a sort of redemptive quality in it as well. Was that important to you, that there be a redemptive quality in the end? Well, I can’t always assume a redemptive quality in every movement of that life. It’s not even an issue of plotting. I think that if the film had stopped at any point the film would have had a redemptive quality. The thing about her is that, like any addict, she’s a liar first and foremost. She deals in lies and denials and she is also—which was also very interesting to me as a performer— she is a proper actress. She is more of an actress than I have been or ever would be. She tells the truth twice, as far as I can count. The rest of the time she is just filling up the air with lies and wisecracks and deflection and distraction. It’s all a big front, a big ol’ mask. I find that kind of redemptive.

Julia is indiscriminate in what and how much she drinks. What about you: what is your go-to drink when you’re out? This is where I have to come out of the closet and declare that I do not drink. If I’m around champagne drinkers, my drink is ginger ale. Because it means that I can look like I’m jolly and pretend to be getting drunk as well. I become infected by other peoples’ drunkenness. And when I came to play the drunkenness in Julia, I realized that it was actually very easy for me because I’d been pretending to be drunk around my friends for years. Just getting high off their highness. But then the great thing is then I’m sober so when the police are called I just let them in tell turn the music down and send everybody home.

Was there a turning point when you became sober? No, I’ve never been drunk. I literally cannot do it. If I drink I fall asleep. I tire very quickly. I try and drink and have social champagne but it never works. I just go to sleep.

So no lamp shades on the head… No, lamp shades on the head. Just drunk off Shirley Temples. No need for alcohol.

Was it more difficult to get into this character’s head then? No it’s all just dressing up and playing. As I say I really felt like I knew her very well. I know so many people that she reminds me of. I felt a very good company the whole time.

Where do you like to go out? There’s a club in London called Cock, which is fantastic. But I haven’t been there for a while. There was a club here called Cock for a while. Is it still here? I’ve had times out there with Justin Bond. Basically, any club called Cock.

You also have an appearance in Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control which is due out soon. In it, your character remarks: “the best films are like dreams you’re never sure you really had.” In what ways does that resonate for you personally, or does it? It does, in fact. That particular section of the film was something I wrote myself, which Jim wanted in the film. I describe something in the film that happened to me which is absolute truth, which is that I once saw a film in which a dream that I had since I was a young child was played out. It completely blew my mind. It’s a scene in which a bird flies towards the camera in sand-filled room and it informed my whole attitude to cinema, that it was possible for that to be a shared conscious. Maybe it’s telling us what our dreams are.

That film is sort an artful meditation, non-linear and suggestive on many levels. Credit-crunch travel for the summer, I call it. Forget that expensive and un-eco-friendly flight to Spain, you can go for the price of a movie ticket. Similarly, by watching Julia, you can go to Mexico and not catch swine flu.

In what ways did working on that film remind you of your early days in the avant-garde cinema scene in London with the likes of Derek Jarman? Jim feels so much a part of my cinema childhood that its possible true to say that Strangers In Paradise was the first contemporary independent film that I saw that really made me realize that there were aliens in America. I met him a couple years ago at a concert. We got to know each other and then after that we made Broken Flowers. I love him very much as a person and working with him is less chaotic and less brimful than, for example, working with Derrick Jarman. He has his act together in many ways more than Derrick. The thing that was refreshing about this particular film was that he set out to not know what it meant to actually be in the state of travel, so that resonated. He feels like old family.

How about Patrick Wolf? He also feels like part of my family.

New family? Yeah, new family, old family, twins divided at birth probably.

How was that working with him on his new album? He came to a screening of Julia, which is where we met. He came up afterwards and asked me if I would contribute to his CD and I was happy to.

What was that process like? I went into a recording studio with him, and we improvised putting my voice over a few tracks and yeah that was it.

You are referred to as “the voice of hope” on the album. It’s some kind of exterior voice. Who knows what it will add up to, because I don’t know, I haven’t heard the whole album. I imagine each track informs each other.

He’s giving us his guide to London, where he likes to eat, drink, dance, shop. See, I don’t go out shopping. My twin can do it for me.