Tilda Swinton returns to the Festival this year in Isaac Julien’s film Derek, a loving and expansive portrait of one of our era’s most vibrant and original filmmakers, Derek Jarman. Here, Swinton talks about the importance of Jarman’s work and his role as an artist, an iconoclast, and role model.

Insider: Derek Jarman’s work was striking when it was made, beginning in the 1970s, but it resonates powerfully now, too. What makes Jarman’s work stand out with such visceral power?

Swinton: Derek lived and worked outside of any industrial model as a filmmaker. That, in itself, is a powerful thing to look at at any time, but now, when filmmakers are constantly being told that we cannot do what we want to, according to some kind of rule book set by the market, it is a vital reminder of a possibility we may have forgotten. An artist first and foremost, the idea of making work within any kind of map laid down by any body, cultural menu, idea of financial viability or profit motive, was anathema to him. He simply didn’t care about any of that. He collected his friends, and anyone who looked right for the images he was interested in playing with, he turned on the camera and we played. Sometimes there were words written down in scenes, more often than not, we were in silent home movies shot from the hip, resulting in hypnotic reveries made up of fire and wind and light, wild at heart and passionately amateur in spirit.

But that was his luxury: as long as there was the kind of funding to accommodate his singular vision – as there was in the United Kingdom in the ’80s and early ’90s – he was able to make films which found distribution. The miracle was, as we see it now, that his work ever crossed over in the ways in which it did – he was essentially an underground filmmaker whose films were distributed widely and with an impact on popular culture. I think our film goes some way to explain why that might have been. But also, we have the blessed opportunity here to show a new audience what was the most important factor in the Jarman effect – Derek himself. Beyond the scope of his various legacies, his films, his writings, his paintings and his garden, his actual self was the magical motor that spun it all into something else.

Insider: Jarman says in an interview that Sebastian is an example of film that is not cinema but the subject taking form. What do you make of this distinction?

Swinton: Formally, Derek was an experimentalist. He approached film as a painter and a poet. Atmosphere and lyricism was a starting point for him. Form was not something he filled with subject or within which he positioned his subject accordingly. Everything became the subject. It was something that defined pretty much all his work: the subject pulled him by the nose. The experiment of blowing up Super 8 to 35mm, for example, first with a segment of Aria, then The Angelic Conversation and Imagining October, led to the two seminal feature films The Last of England and The Garden, which were made without scripts or budgets, but like an anthology of poetry, shot like documentary footage over many months and collated in the edit.

Insider: For Jarman, filmmaking was about making movies, but it was also a process of finding out who he was. How did you experience this aspect of his working process?

Swinton: Like any artist, for Derek, his work was his confessional, his crucible, the material of his responses to being alive in the world and all that that entailed. As a painter, he explored this territory alone, with paint and canvas: with film, he consciously chose the company of others, the collective gesture. He said things with film that he needed to say with a group, he said things with paint that he needed to say alone. He was eternally wrapped up in his own curiosity about his own connections to and alienation from society, both as a gay man and as a thinker troubled by the political fashions of his time. The scripts he wrote, in a more orthodox model, as opposed to the more poetic experimental work shot on Super 8, were principally focused on the lives of men he identified with as sharing this position: St. Sebastian, Caravaggio, Edward II, Wittgenstein.

Insider: How does Jarman offer a model for the role an artist can play in society?

Swinton: He supported the hunch I had long before I met him, and which drew me to him in the first place: that life is too short a thing to spend outside of your own urges and instinct. An artist’s responsibility is to remain self-determining at all odds: uncooptable and free. Derek modeled exactly this measure of a responsibility met head-on. It was his vocation, just as it is any artist’s – and his challenge, just as it is ours. And if not ours, then whose?