In an interview with the SF Chronicle about playing the mother of a school massacrer in Lynne Ramsay's adaptation of Lionel Shriver's novel, We Need To Talk About Kevin, Tilda Swinton makes some sober observations about pregnancy and parenting:
Q: It's like an act of atonement and it seems as if she's been atoning for something ever since Kevin was born.News you can use, from the new Daddy Types!A: And I think before it. I think one of the things is her ambivalence about pregnancy. She never speaks of it and you feel that she never even really acknowledges it herself, but you see her in that locker room with all those other pregnant women who are all kind of in their bodies and feeling the experience and you can see how disgusted she is. That's a real syndrome for so many women, even for women who eventually actually fall in love with their babies quite soon. It's a chunk of change, that pregnancy thing. There's a lot not to love about it, but she has this terrible shame about it, largely because she's living this life that is so isolated and so self-determined within which you get the sense that there is no place for chaos. This is a recipe for disaster. If you're going to encounter becoming a parent, if you're not up for a bit of chaos, let alone a lot of chaos - and I speak as the mother of twins - then you are riding a kind of really dangerous horse.
UNCOMFORTABLE REVELATIONS UPDATE Given the film and the book, I suppose it makes sense, but the marketing strategy for this project turns out to be having Tilda Swinton make highly disturbing comments about parenting to increasingly prominent film critics.
Tilda Swinton on 'We Need to Talk About Kevin' [sfgate.com]
We need to talk about Tilda [rogerebert.com via dt hero dt]
