There are horrible bosses, and then there’s Elizabeth, the role Oscar winner Tilda Swinton plays in A24’s Problemista. A New York art critic with a temper as fiery as her sharply banged hair, Elizabeth hires Alejandro (Julio Torres, who also wrote and directed the film), an aspiring toy designer from El Salvador who hopes that she will sponsor his work visa. Over the course of the film, produced by two-time Oscar winner Emma Stone, Torres explores the perils of working for an uncompromising, sometimes completely nonsensical boss and navigating an even more nonsensical visa application process.

Torres was able to draw on his own experience when crafting the film, likening the visa process to being trapped in a locked room. “I think that dealing with all bureaucracy is a little bit like that,” he says. “Talking to an insurance company or talking to an airline or banks, it all feels broken and that what you want is just out of reach.”

Casting Swinton as his boss was also a deeply personal decision. On Torres’s old Tumblr page, there’s a now defunct link to another website simply called “Jokes About Tilda Swinton.” In his 2019 HBO comedy special, My Favorite Shapes, Torres mused about what Swinton’s apartment might look like, envisioning a giant hourglass that instructs guests when it’s time to leave.

The feeling, of course, was incredibly mutual. “He’s like a god in our house. My children and I adore Los Espookys particularly,” Swinton says over Zoom, name-dropping Torres’s delightfully strange HBO series. “And of course, he’s very accurate. His fiction of where I live is spot-on.”

Despite their mutual adoration, Swinton initially had misgivings about playing Alejandro’s FileMaker Pro–obsessed boss. “I loved Elizabeth, but I thought, I’m going to tell him he can do better than me,” she says. “He needs an American, a proper American person.” But Torres quickly dissuaded her of the notion that an entitled, Karen-esque character had to be American by necessity. “Then the whole thing just bloomed in my mind,” Swinton continues. “And I went, ‘Okay, that means she’s an immigrant too. That means everything.’”

Vanity Fair: It’s been almost a year since Problemista premiered at South by Southwest. What is it like to watch it a year later?

Tilda Swinton: I haven't seen it since South by Southwest. How many screenings have you had, though, Julio? Not many?

Julio Torres: I have been at one other screening in Provincetown over the summer, and I saw it there, and after seeing it there, I swore to myself I would never see this movie again.

Swinton: It was too soon.

Torres: Yeah. And I'm glad that many months went by and last night I saw it.

Swinton: I had such a great experience seeing it after one year. Honestly, it's got better. Whether it's because the world is just so much more fucked now than it was even last year—I don't know. It's like when you go to the optician and he puts another lens in your eye and you go, "Ooh, I can really see." It's got a sharpness to it that I don't think it had this time last year.

Torres: A couple of people, who had also seen it a year ago, said "It changed a lot in Southwest."

Swinton: I know. Isn't it funny? It didn't. The world changed.

Tilda, what about Problemista attracted you to the project? When did you sign on and how did you get involved?

Swinton: Him. It's all about him, and it always is with me. It's always the people. I am not a proper professional person who's got a skill that I'm protecting. I'm not an actor who is interested in acting, and so I'm looking for roles in which to “act well.” It's always been from the very beginning people—making work with people. That's just the way I roll. It's my drug of choice and I'm so incredibly grateful to be able to keep meeting people that I adore, like Julio.

I have to say, Elizabeth was very triggering to me.

Swinton: You're not alone. We thought we were doing something really unique. Can you tell us about your Elizabeth?

There were so many. I was a tutor on the Upper East Side.

Torres: Oh, no.

Swinton: You are a masochist. How could you do that to yourself?

I don’t know. If you said something that wasn’t what they wanted to hear, then you were “yelling” at them. That recurring bit with Elizabeth was so accurate.

Swinton: You're existing, and that's just not really acceptable. I imagine they feel so criticized by you for not tutoring their own children—they are a bad parent for even needing you. So you are kicking a bruise with your every breath. The fact that you even have a body, you're a shape, you are in their eyeline. You are such an irritation to them.

Torres: I worked at this museum for a bit, the Neue Gallery, and many Elizabeths loved coming to the Neue Gallery. And this one expected me to know who she was and to understand that she could walk into the museum for free. I personally don't care if the museum makes money or if it doesn't make money. But I was employed to charge admission.

And so I said, "That'll be $25 for one adult." And she was so upset. She moved past me, and as she was going up the stairs, she just yelled, "Ronald Lauder will hear about this." [laughs]. I'm assuming he has an assistant, and I'm assuming the assistant heard about this, and I would hope that that assistant just ignored it.

Tilda, did you draw from any real-life people or experiences when crafting Elizabeth?

Swinton: There's somebody in my life, and I have to tread very carefully here because they're not an employer. They've never been an employer, but I've been, let's say, at their mercy, consistently for a very long time. And I, funny enough, didn't really think about this person while we were shooting. And then last year, I was forced into a quite extended revisitation of this person. And during the course of the time we were together, I went, "Oh, oh my Lord, you are Elizabeth."

Torres: There she is.

Swinton: That's when I understood her. I didn't realize that this person was actually lurking like a dormant disease in my consciousness.

Elizabeth and Alejandro’s relationship isn’t all bad. They're able to connect as two uncompromising people who keep being told to change and who refuse to.

Swinton: When I first read it, that was really what got me. I think it's so sophisticated that the person who is your biggest challenge actually ends up being your savior. When Julio first presented it to me as an idea, I had this hesitation. If he had said, "Yes, she has to come from America,” I would find it difficult to take on one of your Upper East Side ladies because I don't really know them. I feel like such an alien in America. I'm more and more alien, and I don't really understand it. I understand us [she gestures to Torres], and that's why our world is everything to me, because it'll see me through any part of this planet and others. But that properly kind of entitled America, I really don't understand it. I know it's very different to entitled Scotland or entitled England or entitled Europe. It's really strange to me. I don't get it.

Torres: You're not exposed to it either.

Swinton: I'm not really exposed to it, but I'm very scared of it. I'm really genuinely frightened of it. The entitlement thing is paralyzing for me because it's so inhumane for anybody to think that they're entitled to more than anybody else. That’s something that just doesn't compute for me. The thing about Elizabeth that I really, truly love is that all her monstrous behavior is a reflex. It's her fighting for her life as she's had to do pretty much always. Having realized that she could be an alien too, I found [Elizabeth’s] voice, the ramifications of that mad voice, which may mean nothing to your ears. To my ears, it's roughly speaking West Country. What that means is, it’s apart from Bristol, it means rural. She is more of a town person or even a village person. She's always going to be an incomer. She hasn't got that, "yeah, I know how New York works. I'm a New Yorker." She's not even a Londoner. She's not streetwise. It's all performative. It's all put on.

Torres: Which is also interesting because I feel like at the time during the pandemic, you watched a little bit of The Real Housewives.

Swinton: It hooked me in a little bit. [Laughs.] I basically got a PhD.

Torres: What is interesting about those women is that they are also constantly trying to assert themselves as sophisticates.

Swinton: The original RHONY was a little bit of an inspiration for me. I have to say [redacted Housewife] definitely is part of the seed-bed of Elizabeth. Don't print that Chris, please.

Which Housewives cities have you watched?

Swinton: I've done Beverly Hills. I have to say the Australian ones are incredible. Have you seen?

Torres: There's Australian ones?

Swinton: They're really out of control. Wild. Everybody tells me to do Salt Lake City. Everybody tells me to do Atlanta. Julio, what have you been watching housewives-wise?

Torres: I am scared of reality TV because I do have an obsessive mind. I'll never come out.

Swinton: You don't have to because it goes on forever.

Julio, in all your projects, you really support and feature the Brooklyn alternative comedy community.

Torres: Those are our friends, so yeah.

Swinton: They're superstars.

Torres: I like writing for people I know and people that inspire me, and those are the people I know. Those are the people that make me want to write. The first attempts at scripts that I ever wrote were for Spike [Einbeinder]. In college, Spike played Marina Abramovic in a little thing that I wrote. That just became the thing that I loved doing the most. What was scary about writing this movie is that in the treasure chest of my community, I didn't have someone who could be an Elizabeth. And now I have found one.

Swinton: How lucky am I? I want to say something—it's going to sound corny—but it's really for real. I might cry. When you talk about your community being represented in this film, this is where I started with [artistic collaborator] Derek [Jarman]. It was all about our community for nine years, seven movies. That's all we were. Occasionally we'd have a couple of people who could properly act, but not many. We were there and that was it.

I'm so old and I've been doing it for so long, but here I am in this evolved version. It's the same community. It is just 2024. It's such an amazing feeling for me. I'm sorry—I'm being sincere, really sincere right now. It's like a miracle because it's like the same. And I wish Derek was here. He would just love it so much, and would love everybody. And it's like a real torch. On it goes.