That might be the only real laugh line in Scottish director Lynne Ramsay’s masterfully crafted but unrelentingly bleak film, which was adapted from the much-discussed novel by Lionel Shriver. But as Swinton often insists in talking about her role, there are scattered elements of comedy in “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” and it is first and foremost a love story, albeit one any parent may find it painful and difficult to sit through. But Eva’s not cracking a joke with those missionaries. She might as well have told those guys she’s already in hell — none of the torments imagined by Dante could exceed what she’s already lived through.

“We Need to Talk About Kevin” is a lot of things: A visual essay on the color red, a triumph of sound design and musical-visual counterpoint, a chronologically disordered, collage-style portrait of a family’s disintegration; a character study of a woman who surrendered her urbanity and her independence for her family life, and who reaps the whirlwind from those seeds of bitterness. It’s also a European director’s movie about the soullessness of American suburbia, which bothers me a little because it’s such a hackneyed target, but would bother me a lot more if it weren’t so convincingly rendered. But when you break it down to essentials, “We Need to Talk About Kevin” is a horror movie aimed at parents, and especially at mothers. All discussion of its craft and subtlety (which are considerable) or about how great or how evil it may be are constrained by that fact.

The monster isn’t Eva, although she may have some doubts about that. The monster is her lithe and handsome teenage son Kevin (played by Ezra Miller in the present tense, and even more unnervingly by Jasper Newell as a younger child), who has, we gather, committed an unspeakable, headline-grabbing crime. We know that from the beginning of the movie, by the way; Ramsay hopscotches compulsively backward and forward through time, frequently alighting on the night when Eva must push her way through a crowd of stricken onlookers and emergency vehicles surrounding her son’s high school. It’s the scale of Kevin’s monstrous act, and its tangled prehistory, that are gradually revealed. (The screenplay is by Ramsay and her partner Rory Stewart Kinnear.)

But Ramsay isn’t particularly interested in a realistic story about a Columbine-type event, and both she and Swinton have sought to distance this film from that genre. “We Need to Talk About Kevin” is far more psychological and symbolic in nature than that setting suggests, unleashing a potent flow of dreamlike images that seek to drill through your brain and down into the unconscious. It’s barely at all about the what or how of Kevin’s crime, and all about the enormous, insoluble mystery of why, found in the enigmatic relationship between mother and son. As she showed in her earlier films “Morvern Callar” and “Ratcatcher,” Ramsay has an extraordinary cinematic gift, and for the first half-hour or so “Kevin” is more like a brilliant, avant-garde sound-and-vision construction than a conventional film, a series of postcards delivered from Eva’s disordered psyche.

Indeed, there are so many great things happening on almost every level of this movie, from Swinton’s haunting, magnetic and tremendously vulnerable performance, which is absolutely free of condescension to the suburban American wife-ness of her character, to the many unsettling individual moments. There’s the way Kevin puts way too much jam on his white-bread sandwich, and the way Eva drifts hollow-eyed through the empty aisles of a supermarket. There’s the world’s most depressing holiday party, complete with random lechery and the upbeat bogosity of Wham! singing “Last Christmas”; there’s the oddly powerful disjunction of hearing Buddy Holly’s “Every Day” while Eva drives through a menacing crowd of Halloween revelers. (If you like to count such things, Ramsay may be offering a nightmarish tribute to the famous Halloween sequence in Vincente Minnelli’s “Meet Me in St. Louis.”) There’s John C. Reilly, nearly stealing the whole show in his low-key, terrifying performance as a well-intentioned dad who just wants to reassure both Kevin and Eva that everybody loves everybody and it will all be fine.

On first viewing the film last spring at Cannes, I frankly found it a little hard to take. Let’s make that a lot hard to take; I recommend this movie to other parents only with a major asterisk attached. It could definitely prove a powerful therapeutic or cathartic exercise, but give yourself time to decompress afterward and have an adult beverage (or three) with someone you trust. But odds are your relationship with your kids will look awesome next to the post-Oedipal horror show between Eva and Kevin. In my initial review, I wrote that Ramsay seemed devoted to scaring the crap out of us with the highly original observation that sometimes bad things happen for no reason, and suggested that this was the movie Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier would make together, if they started out with a whole bunch of Quaaludes and cough syrup.

I’m walking that judgment partway back now, partly because Haneke and Von Trier are guys and this film definitely reflects a woman’s point of view on Eva’s life choices and indifferent mothering. Even beyond that, the subject of “We Need to Talk About Kevin” may precisely be our fatal need to seek causality and comprehension in a chaotic universe. Was Kevin just a demon seed from day one, a baby so colicky his mommy took him out into Manhattan traffic, next to a road-construction site, just to drown out the noise? (Sound designer Paul Davies has filled this picture with all sorts of disconcerting audio effects, but that screaming baby — Jesus!) As a child, he’s a malicious, canny, power-hungry creature, deliberately crapping in his pants at age eight, vandalizing his mother’s room, refusing to answer simple questions politely. “Before you were born, Mommy used to be happy!” Eva tells him in one memorable scene. “Now Mommy wakes up every day and wishes she were in France!”

After all that, of course, Eva can’t shake the sense that her own ambivalence about motherhood poisoned the well. That predates Kevin and his bad attitude; we see her in pregnancy yoga class, where she was the only expecting mom not to flaunt her enormous belly. Now, if half-assed parenting produced psychopathic killers, we’d have a whole lot more of them, but anybody who’s had kids can grasp the underlying terror. Maybe the scariest thing in “We Need to Talk About Kevin” is that Eva understands that she and Kevin have a connection, and that his coldness and viciousness toward her are his special way of showing affection. Only she can see him as he really is, while his father (Reilly) and little sister (Ashley Gerasimovich) are confused onlookers, whom he can easily mislead. Whatever made him into what he is, it’s also in her, and his violent acts are a return gift in kind.

“We Need to Talk About Kevin” opens Dec. 9 for a one-week Oscar-qualifying run at the Angelika Film Center in New York and the Cinefamily in Los Angeles, with wider release to follow beginning Jan. 27.

That might be the only real laugh line in Scottish director Lynne Ramsay’s masterfully crafted but unrelentingly bleak film, the first of the Palme d’Or competition entries to screen at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. The thing is, Eva’s not cracking a joke. She might as well have told those guys she’s already in hell — none of the torments imagined by Dante could exceed what she’s already lived through. “We Need to Talk About Kevin” is a lot of things: A visual essay on the color red, a triumph of sound design and musical-visual counterpoint, a chronologically disordered, collage-style portrait of a family’s disintegration; a character study of a woman who surrendered her urbanity and her independence for her family and reaps the whirlwind from those seeds of bitterness. It’s also a non-American director’s movie about the soullessness of American suburbia, which bothers me some because it’s so hackneyed but might bother me more if it weren’t so convincingly rendered. But when you break it down to essentials, it’s a monster movie — and I think all discussion of its craft and subtlety (which are considerable) or about how great or how evil it is are constrained by that fact.

The monster isn’t Eva, although she may have some doubts about that. The monster is her lithe and handsome teenage son Kevin (played by Ezra Miller in the present tense, and even more unnervingly by Jasper Newell as an almost affectless younger child), who has, we gather, committed an unspeakable, headline-grabbing crime. We know that from the beginning of the movie, by the way; Ramsay hopscotches compulsively backward and forward through time, frequently alighting on the night when Eva must push her way through a crowd of stricken onlookers and emergency vehicles surrounding her son’s high school. It’s the scale of Kevin’s monstrous act, and its tangled prehistory, that are gradually revealed. (The screenplay, adapted from Lionel Shriver’s acclaimed novel, is by Ramsay and Rory Stewart Kinnear.)

This has already been a big year at Cannes for formally inventive cinema that breaks loose from realism. If Woody Allen’s time-traveling “Midnight in Paris” did that in goofy, lightweight fashion, both “We Need to Talk About Kevin” and Australian writer-director Julia Leigh’s dark, erotic fantasy “Sleeping Beauty” (more on that film later) unleash a potent flow of dreamlike images that seek to drill through your brain and down into the unconscious. As she showed in her earlier films “Morvern Callar” and “Ratcatcher,” Ramsay has an extraordinary gift, and for the first half-hour or so “Kevin” is more like a brilliant, avant-garde sound-and-vision construction than a conventional film, a series of postcards delivered from Eva’s disordered psyche.

Indeed, there are so many great things happening on almost every level of this movie, from Swinton’s haunting, magnetic and tremendously vulnerable performance, which is absolutely free of condescension to the suburban American wife-ness of her character, to the many unsettling individual moments. There’s the way Kevin puts way too much jam on his white-bread sandwich, the way Eva drifts hollow-eyed through the empty aisles of a supermarket; there’s the world’s most depressing holiday party, complete with random lechery and the upbeat bogosity of Wham!’s “Last Christmas”; there’s the oddly powerful disjunction of Buddy Holly singing “Every Day” while Eva drives through a menacing crowd of Halloween revelers. So I’m disappointed to revert to my earlier point and say that fundamentally this is a parenting-gone-wrong horror movie with no real purpose besides scaring the crap out of us with the highly original observation that sometimes bad things happen for no reason. This is the movie Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier would make together, if they started out with a whole bunch of Quaaludes and cough syrup.

Even there I want to argue with myself a little, because arguably the subject of “We Need to Talk About Kevin” is precisely our fatal need to seek causality and comprehension in a chaotic universe. Was Kevin just a demon seed from day one, a baby so colicky his mommy took him out into Manhattan traffic, next to a road-construction site, just to drown out the noise? (Sound designer Paul Davies has filled this picture with all sorts of disconcerting audio effects, but that baby — Jesus! Every time they play that scene on the TV monitor in the press room, you can see all the parents’ heads swiveling, faces creased with unhappy recollection.) As a child, he’s a malicious, canny, power-hungry creature, deliberately crapping in his pants at age 8, vandalizing his mother’s room, refusing to answer simple questions politely. “Before you were born, Mommy used to be happy!” Eva tells him in one memorable scene. “Now Mommy wakes up every day and wishes she were in France!”

After all that, of course, Eva can’t shake the sense that her own ambivalence about motherhood poisoned the well. That predates Kevin and his bad attitude; we see her in pregnancy yoga class, where she was the only expecting mom not to flaunt her enormous belly. Now, if half-assed parenting produced psychopathic killers, we’d have a whole lot more of them, but anybody who’s had kids can grasp the underlying terror. Maybe the scariest thing in “We Need to Talk About Kevin” is that Eva understands that she and Kevin have a connection, and that his coldness and viciousness toward her are his special way of showing affection. Only she can see him as he really is, while his father (John C. Reilly) and little sister (Ashley Gerasimovich) are confused onlookers, whom he dupes easily. Whatever made him into what he is, it’s also in her, and his acts are a return gift in kind.

As is customary, this year’s Cannes lineup features the world premieres of enormous Hollywood productions aimed at an audience in the hundreds of millions, intimate personal films that may almost literally never be seen again, and nearly everything in between. Early on Saturday morning, the horde of journalists will pack into the Grand Théâtre Lumière, the legendary main auditorium here, to see “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides,” with Johnny Depp and Penélope Cruz, a movie we could have seen at home with less glitz but a great deal more comfort. A couple of days later we’ll do it again for Terrence Malick’s long-awaited “The Tree of Life,” with Brad Pitt and Sean Penn (which was initially expected at Cannes last year).

Those two films may well be the biggest news events of the next week — but in all honesty it isn’t those movies that make Cannes so great. It’s the fact that I can see those movies and also see, say, the newest film from little-known Japanese director Naomi Kawase (a personal fave) or “Martha Marcy May Marlene,” the debut of young Canadian director Sean Durkin. There seems almost no end to the potential riches on the Riviera beachfront this spring; picking just 10 films to spotlight in advance has been tough. (There, I’ve gone and jinxed it.) I’ve selected five movies with reasonably high star quotients, name directors and obvious audience appeal, and five more that are just as exciting (to me, anyway) but are flying a bit more under the radar, at least from the perspective of ordinary American moviegoers.

Of course this is all guesswork. Here’s what we actually know, so far: 1) It might sound lame to open Cannes with a 21st-century Woody Allen movie. OK, it actually is lame, but one of the most inexplicable things about Europe is how much people here love them some Woody. I guess it’s part of the love-hate relationship with America that plays such an enormous role in this continent’s cultural life, but even in those terms it doesn’t make much sense. Anyway, good, bad or indifferent, the Woodman’s cinematic postcard to the French capital will be a huge deal here. 2) Some things proclaimed here as masterpieces will be ignored by the world, while other things mocked by the Cannes critics will make zillions. 3) When you hear about a movie here that provokes booing and widespread walkouts? Seek it out and see it, when you get the chance; it’s probably good. 4) I will spend almost two weeks in a beach resort adjacent to one of the world’s great food and wine regions, and will dine largely on sandwiches and pizza and come home without a tan. The suffering! It’s hard to bear sometimes.

BIG NAMES

The Tree of Life A personal, family-based film that stars Brad Pitt and Sean Penn and is also, somehow, about the evolutionary history of life on earth. A beautiful if utterly inscrutable trailer. A legendary director (Malick, still best known for “Badlands” and “Days of Heaven”) viewed by some as a visionary master and by others as a pretentious ass, whose filmmaking career appears half-paralyzed by indecision and procrastination. These are the mysterious ingredients of “Tree of Life,” which is almost guaranteed to be a major debate topic here.

Melancholia Any Lars von Trier film is guaranteed to be a media circus at Cannes, and whether you like the guy or hate him, give him credit: He gets people to pay attention to small-audience art-house movies, and that’s not easy. “Melancholia” appears to be an odd, Trier-ian blend of the country-house wedding movie with a “Donnie Darko”-style story about the end of the world, and presumably won’t horrify and galvanize audiences quite the way “Antichrist” did two years ago. No genital mutilation! A box-office plus but a P.R. minus! An intriguing transatlantic ensemble includes Kirsten Dunst, Kiefer Sutherland, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Charlotte Rampling.

Drive Take cult director Nicolas Winding Refn, whose last two movies (“Bronson” and “Valhalla Rising”) established him as a prodigious, visionary, almost uncontrolled talent while barely making a nickel. Add rising star Ryan Gosling of “Half Nelson” and “Blue Valentine.” Mix with an implausibly large budget and some fast cars and you have an action-adventure movie that’s almost certainly the most unlikely competition entry at Cannes this year, and an object of worldwide yearning by film geeks. There doesn’t seem to be an embeddable online trailer yet, but here are the first two minutes. Sold!

The Skin I Live In Longtime art-house fave Pedro Almodóvar returns to Cannes without recent muse Penélope Cruz — but with Antonio Banderas, star of several of his groundbreaking ’80s flicks. Banderas plays a plastic surgeon with a bizarre Frankensteinian obsession in what’s described as a 1940s-flavored horror melodrama. Despite numerous premieres here, Almodóvar has still never won the Palme d’Or, and yes, that’s a hint and a hunch.

Restless Gus Van Sant’s latest is an intriguing-looking outsider love story, starring Mia Wasikowska as a cancer patient and Henry Hopper (son of Dennis) as an alienated young man whose best friend is a WWII Japanese ghost. But is it a commercial Van Sant movie in the “Good Will Hunting”/”Finding Forrester” vein, or a Euro-friendly art-house oddity in the “Elephant”/”Paranoid Park” vein? Either way, it’s the opener in Un Certain Regard, Cannes’ slightly artier second-string competition, which is often where the most exciting films are found. And Van Sant is a contender for the Jerry Lewis-Woody Allen awards, which convey the undying loyalty of European culture-vultures upon American filmmakers who are all but forgotten at home. (Other recent nominees: Jim Jarmusch, James Gray, Abel Ferrara, Lodge Kerrigan.)

MIDSIZE AND BELOW

We Need to Talk About Kevin It’s taken a long time for Scottish director Lynne Ramsay (“Morvern Callar”) to bring Lionel Shriver’s acclaimed novel about a troubled teen and the aftermath of a school shooting to the screen, but Ramsay has a rep as Britain’s undiscovered secret and expectations are huge. Indie heroes Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly — an unlikely but irresistible pairing — star as the estranged parents of the titular Kevin (Ezra Miller).

Hara-Kiri: The Death of a Samurai Coming hard on the heels of ultra-prolific Japanese genre maniac Takashi Miike’s samurai opus “13 Assassins” comes his next samurai movie — and it’s the first 3-D film ever included in the Cannes competition! (To be clear: Other 3-D films have been shown at Cannes in non-competition slots, including the latest “Pirates of the Caribbean” entry this year.)

This Must Be the Place Hardly anyone in America saw Italian director Paolo Sorrentino’s dazzling “Il Divo,” an Oliver Stone-meets-Scorsese political phantasmagoria that was one of the genuine cinematic breakthroughs of recent years. Now Sorrentino turns to English-language film with this eagerly anticipated fable about an aging rock star (Sean Penn) who’s hunting for a Nazi war criminal. We definitely haven’t seen that movie before. Frances McDormand, Judd Hirsch and Harry Dean Stanton co-star.

Oslo, August 31st Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s “Reprise” is one of the terrific undiscovered movies of the last decade, an exhilarating comic fable about art and life that splits the difference between Godard and, say, “High Fidelity” with tremendous cinematic craft, an irrepressible sense of humor and genuine heart. (Fun fact: Trier is indeed a cousin of Lars von Trier.) Trier’s new film “Oslo, August 31st” — that’s when and where the main character intends to kill himself — screens in the lower-wattage Certain Regard competition, and I will happily skip other things to catch it.

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia He has a subzero commercial profile in the United States, but Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan (“Climates,” “Three Monkeys”) has developed a modest but intense international following for his brooding, Bergmanesque urban dramas. (Which are never officially even a little bit about such “Turkish” questions as the role of Islam or the ambiguous, intercontinental status of his country, by the way, but may indirectly wind up being about those things after all.) If this story about a doctor living on the rural steppes (I’m guessing it’s meant to recall Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya”) is the masterpiece Ceylan hasn’t quite made yet — well, OK, no, it won’t change much of anything. But people in Cannes and in Turkey will sure be excited, and you’ll be able to watch the movie on VOD in like six months.

As she does in “Leaving,” playing a privileged French wife who falls hard and disastrously for a Spanish laborer (Sergi López), Scott Thomas can seem like a woman hoarding a prodigious buried treasure of sensuality. On the other hand, in the forthcoming “Nowhere Boy,” she is equally irresistible in a totally different direction as John Lennon’s Aunt Mimi, a standard-bearer of lower-middle-class English propriety who has no discernible sexual identity. She is beautiful, but without possessing many of the attributes of beauty: Her nose is large, her lips thin; her startling gray-blue eyes are customarily half-hooded; her high forehead and un-curvaceous figure suggest neurotic intellectual, not sex bomb.

At an age when many actresses struggle to find roles at all, Scott Thomas comfortably plays both upward and downward in age by a decade or so. At 50, she is several years older than both López, who plays her lover in “Leaving,” and Yvan Attal, who plays her vengeful surgeon husband. She’s comfortable not just with the language but also the mannerisms of both French and English characters (although her French characters often have an Anglo background, to cover a slight accent). It’s well known that actresses over 40 get much better roles and last far longer in European film, but Scott Thomas seems devoted to playing every kind of role in every kind of movie. In recent years she’s played a lesbian best friend in “Tell No One,” a released convict rebuilding her life in “I’ve Loved You So Long,” Lady Elizabeth Boleyn in “The Other Boleyn Girl,” and whoever the hell she played in “Confessions of a Shopaholic.”

Now, “Leaving” isn’t going to win her that Oscar either, but this compact, intense little adultery drama from French writer-director Catherine Corsini is well worth adventurous moviegoers’ attention. Its literary antecedents are obvious — it’s like a 21st-century combination of a little “Lady Chatterley” and a whole bunch of “Madame Bovary,” which may already be giving too much away. You’ll probably be able to tell where the story’s going from the opening act of violence, but this is still one of Scott Thomas’ best performances, playing a normally bored, normally attractive bourgeois wife who goes from tasteful twills and pastels — she’s like the Gallic equivalent of the J. Crew catalog — to erotic madness and despair.

“Leaving” is now playing in New York, with other major cities to follow. Beginning Oct. 27, it will also be available on-demand from many cable and satellite providers.

Swinton has made a practice of taking filmmakers under her not insubstantial wings, including Luca Guadagnino, with whom she spent 11 years nurturing the spark that became “I Am Love,” which opens in limited release on June 18. Swinton plays Emma Recchi, the transplanted Russian matriarch of an Italian industrial family whose long-held traditions are beginning to crumble. In some ways the film is a deliberate throwback, evoking the superheated melodramas of Luchino Visconti and Douglas Sirk, but Guadagnino’s style bears more resemblance to the mixed-media sagas of Arnaud Desplechin. With swelling, sometimes overwhelming music courtesy of John Adams and luxurious sequences devoted to cooking and al fresco sex, the film pushes sensuality into the red, almost forcing the viewer into ecstasy.

Like her character, Swinton is an outsider among the otherwise all-Italian cast, but there’s little question that she is the reason “I Am Love,” for which she received her first producing credit, exists at all. More than an actress, a description she resists, she sees herself as someone whose duty it is to bring films into the world through whatever means are at her disposal. It’s a role she’s been playing for decades, and a responsibility that carries on after the film is done. Next month, after years of prodding, Sony Classics will rerelease “Orlando,” the 1992 Virginia Woolf adaptation that gave Swinton her first leading role, and her first major film after Jarman’s death.

You’ve said that you and Luca Guadagnino have been working on “I Am Love” for 11 years. What does that mean in practical terms?

In my experience, most films take 11 years to make. It’s not actually that exotic for a film like this to take a long time. Of course, we’re not talking about an industrial amount of time. We’re talking having an idea originally, kicking it around over a bottle of wine for about four years, and gradually getting up the courage to think it might be something you can do. We’re not talking about something developed in an office by a team of people who are on a payroll. This kind of slow farming, as I think of it, with the seed in the ground for a very long time, is pretty much par for the course for me. The kinds of experiences I had when I started making films were those. The very first film I made, which was “Caravaggio” with Derek Jarman, I think he’d been developing it for 11 years when he finally got to shoot it. So my clock seems to be set at that sort of distance. Luca and I fantasize about the whole Kubrick experience of developing something for 20 years, but with some money coming into the bank at the same time. That we would like very much. We didn’t have that this time.

What was the initial idea?

What we’ve been talking about for 11 years is a kind of cinema: I call it sense-ational, something that’s cinematic in that you are taken out of your own experience, and not only with a 3-D pair of specs. I love the way in which 3-D can put you into a place, and this is sort of lo-fi 3-D — that’s the idea we’ve been talking about for 11 years.

The germ of the story started following a film that we made, “The Protagonists.” After that, we started talking about making this rather grand adventure, which ended up being this film. Seven years ago, we made a short film called “The Love Factory,” which is a close-up on my half of a conversation that Luca and I had, and the final theme of that conversation was love. At the end of that project, we looked at each other and said, “Let’s make this film we’ve been talking about. Let’s make it about the revolution of love.” So we just started piecing together this idea and the life of a woman I would play. Maybe we knew that we were going to take a while to make the film, because I was only in a way the right age to play it now. We knew in order for that love to be really revolutionary, we needed to place her in a milieu that was breakable in some way.

There are moments in the film where it’s difficult to articulate why the camera does what it does — why, for example, it breaks away from the guests arriving at a banquet to zoom in on the woman putting away their coats. It makes intuitive sense, but there’s no explanation for it.

That’s a really good sign. Inspiring inarticulacy is a very good thing, and very much up our street. I think that expresses very nicely what we were trying to do, actually. We were trying to place the audience in the camera, in the way in which our great masters do, in the way that you’re somehow in the lens, and in the scene, so that you turn and you look at the coats being put away, and so the audience does. That feeling, as Hitchcock says, of the camera telling the story and the dialogue just providing atmosphere — what we were into, really, was setting up an atmosphere, setting up a kind of attention to behavior. A sense of the personal in the camera is very important.

There’s a sense in the movie of the characters wrestling with their past, of trying and often failing to escape it. You’re dealing with a family who gave their factories over to the Fascists, and who are now trying to take the family brand global. Your character, a Russian woman who’s become the matriarch of this Italian industrial family, claims not even to remember her own name.

It’s a family and it’s a milieu that’s run on the benzene of iconography. It’s completely codified, not only visually but structurally codified. Your range of gestures, your range of appreciations, is relatively limited. Witness the moment when the artist daughter brings to her grandfather her latest adventure, which is photography, and he basically puts the kibosh on it and says, “No, that does not compute. I want a painting or a drawing from you. That’s what we think of art as being.” That’s a very clear indication of the kind of prescription that goes on in that kind of milieu.

Going at least as far back as “Orlando,” there’s a protean quality to many of your characters, a sense that their identity is in flux. What attracts you to those kinds of characters?

I only know this because people in your situation have asked me these questions before, and so I’ve had to work out some sort of defense strategy [laughs] — or not defense strategy, but some kind of concept of method. I suppose the reality of transformation really interests me. The idea that transformation is in any way optional I find completely bemusing. So to look at conservatism — the effort within conservatism to withstand, or to deny, change — I do find really kind of touching. It seems so much barking up the wrong tree. It feels so painful. It’s such a painful thing to put oneself through, the fantasy that change is avoidable — or is something to be avoided. For some reason it’s always been very clear to me that change is pretty much all we’ve got, and the sooner you make friends with it, the better.

That seems to hold for you personally as well. Since “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” a lot of people ask you, “What’s it like to be a movie star?” and your answer tends to be uniformly positive. There seems very little anxiety at the change on your part.

It’s very interesting. A question like that, I very often feel very inadequate in front of, because I realize that the person asking the question has a concept that no one’s ever let me in on. Obviously, I’m very badly educated in certain areas. Why certain things would be problematic has not been explained to me. But it’s about other people’s experience. I suppose one just has to get used to people assuming that one has the same experience.

You resist being described as an actor. You think of yourself as a filmmaker. What part do you play in a movie like “I Am Love”?

In this film, we are all filmmakers. This is a very pre-industrial product. This is something that was put together with paper and string by a group of people who made it happen in a very self-determining way. I suppose my main contribution to this film is as co-generator and producer. The fact that I’m in it feels like it’s taken up much less of my time, and to a certain extent less of my attention. It describes much more my activity in relation to this film that I co-produced it.

What about on the set, as you’re shooting? Are you thinking about your character in that moment, or are you thinking about where the scene falls in the film, how it works in relation to other scenes, and so on?

That’s one of those questions that makes me feel inadequate. Because it’s only very, very rarely when I’m wearing the clothes and disguised as a certain person other than myself in a film, that I think as that person. I don’t work that way. It’s much, much more smoke and mirrors than that for me. It’s much more a question of what is the frame and how can I contribute to the frame. It’s questions like that that make me want to declare once again that I am not a proper actor, because I don’t think as the person. But then at the same time, the thinking as the person on a project like this, which I developed for so long, happened so long ago in the actual development of the scenario. That it makes it a very graceful thing, dressing up and playing, because all the thinking’s done.

What was it like working with the Coen brothers on “Burn After Reading”? Javier Bardem, who gave an amazing performance in “No Country for Old Men,” said he felt like he had no idea what he was going. He just had to go along with what they told him to do and trust they knew what they were asking for.

My experience of working with the Coens, which was so enjoyable from start to finish, was in many ways very different to a project like “I Am Love” or “Orlando” or “Julia” or this film I’m making with Lynne Ramsay ["We Need to Talk About Kevin"], which is completely generated from scratch. They came to me with a script that they had already written, a film that was going, and if I wasn’t going to be in it, someone else was going to be playing the part. That’s a very different rhythm for me. But at the same time, it was absolutely business as usual. It was as easy as if I had known them for 20 years. They communicated everything they needed to in that extraordinary script. It was just so easy to roll up and say the lines and go home. That’s kind of the way I like it, and the way I tend to know it. But, as I say, the difference was that I was simply a performer and to a certain extent an interpreter in their world, and very, very happy to be so. It was a sort of holiday for me. I’d happily sit around with them for 11 years, and I’d like to, but I didn’t have to.

I once saw Joe Orton’s biographer, John Lahr, do a talk-back after a performance of “What the Butler Saw,” and one of the actors told him that he found the experience of being in one of Orton’s farces totally unsatisfying, because he wasn’t experiencing any kind of emotional fulfillment onstage. Lahr told him, “You’re thinking about it the wrong way. A farce is a gigantic machine, and you’re just a part of it. You have to find satisfaction in making the machine function properly.”

That’s a really interesting thing to talk about, actually. I hadn’t thought about it that way. But I think that explains something very clearly to me. I think that’s what happens a lot of the time for actors. I’m trying to understand what an actor’s life is, because I don’t live it, but I do occasionally meet actors, and understanding their lives and the way in which they work and operate their lives I find very striking. It’s very often a very tough deal. You have to locate your attachment to your work in yourself, because very often there’s nothing else to attach yourself to. You are the moving part. You go from play to play, team to team, project to project, and you can’t feel yourself to be in company with other people. You’re very much a sort of solo artiste. That explains clearly the difference with my life. I’ve never worked that way. I worked once with Derek Jarman; we did this fantastic opera in Florence. I was running around the stage shouting in Italian, and we were working with these wonderful opera singers. I remember them explaining to me what an opera singer’s life is like. You get on a plane, maybe, and you fly to New York and you’ll be taken by car to the back door of the Met or wherever you are. You go in the door and you’re playing Figaro, and you’ll go onto the stage, and you’ll literally shake hands with your co-singers and then you’ll sing. There’s that feeling of carrying your work with you and going with your work to different locations, which I think a lot of actors have to have, because they move around so much an they can’t build up those strings of attachment. I’m only about strings of attachment.

Opera’s a fascinating case, because a lot of times you’re looking at a production where the sets were constructed and even the blocking was laid out 30 years ago.

Very often, a lot of theater feels the same way. I’m not a natural theater audience, I’m afraid. I find it difficult to be in a theater audience. But when I used to live in London, I used to go every year for my birthday to see “The Mousetrap,” and that’s the theater that I love. I think the “Mousetrap” productions change every five years or so, but certain things don’t change, and haven’t changed since the ’40s. There are props that are on the stage that have been there ever since. There are certain pieces of clothing that look like they’ve been there for a while as well. And of course they’re talking about rationing and things. I sometimes think it would be fantastic to be in a production of “The Mousetrap,” or rather that production, the production in St. Martin’s Lane. Because it is like a sort of kabuki performance. You’re going for that kind of kabuki. I love the theater where television actors come through the door and everybody claps, and they come to the front of the stage and they bow and then they go back into the scene. That’s the kind of theater that I love.

I have a great deal of respect for what I call real actors. I find it unimaginable for me, doing what they do, and to locate that creative engine only in yourself as they very often have to do. For me it’s all about the conversation. It’s all about the working-with. One of the things I love most about making films is the company. I don’t tend to have that sense of being self-determining. If it weren’t for those strings of attachment I wouldn’t be doing any of this.

Was that something you learned from Derek Jarman? That seems very much in the spirit of his approach to making films.

It’s, to me, unimaginable that I would be in films, certainly on the screen, without having met him and worked with him. He gave me the possibility of developing this completely ramshackle approach at a time when the only other approaches seemed to be impossible. The industrial model that we’ve described, talking of strings of attachment, that sort of frayless independence, I was never interested in. I’m just really not interested in being an actor at all — never was and still am not. So he gave me the possibility — and all of us, not just me: Sandy Powell, his costume designer; Simon Fisher Turner, his composer. He never said this, but the graphic novel version would have the Derek Jarman figure saying to all of us young kids: “You wanna find out if you want to perform in films, you wanna find out if you want to compose for films, you wanna find out if you want to design for films? OK. Find out with me the way you want to do it. Just find out. Just push it.” It was like a kindergarten. I may have made seven films with him, but I think I only talk in three of them. Most of them are silent, autobiographical pieces of performance. No wonder I never describe myself as an actor. ‘Cause it ain’t acting.

What about an enormous Hollywood production like “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”? Does that even feel like the same job?

That just felt like an enormous Derek Jarman film to me. The form of it is everything. The form is the interesting bit. The idea of being in an enormous Disney film on the top of a mountain in New Zealand, it was as important as anything for me. It’s going to lunch with 1,500 people every day. That is what the film is. It’s as much to do with that as the story or what they call characters. 

Indulging in nostalgia for Jarman’s movies would be precisely the wrong approach, but when you look back at a movie like “Edward II,” which inserts the queer activist group Outrage into Christopher Marlowe’s play, it’s easy to wonder what’s happened to that kind of politically engaged, formally adventurous cinema.

It’s very interesting that Sony Classics is finally rereleasing “Orlando,” and I’m going to be very curious to see how it does. They’re doing it because I have spent 15 years walking down streets of cities with at least five people telling me that it’s their favorite film, and me going back to Sony Classics and saying [whispers], “If you rerelease this, you’re going to make some cash, because lots of people want to see it in a cinema.” When you see it again, you will be so struck at how fresh it is. The reason I mention it in relation to Derek Jarman is it is like a message in a bottle from that time. And there are so many films from that time that if you look at them now, I would say almost every one is fresher than most of the things made now.

I think it’s a really valuable exercise to look back, not for the stake of nostalgia, but for the sake of trying to figure out what happened. There’s this what I call Saran Wrap that has come over the aesthetic. One of the things that one sees in “Orlando” or in all of Derek’s work, in the early work of Terence Davies or Bill Douglas or early Peter Greenaway, there’s this feeling of effort, this feeling of handmade-ness. There’s a relationship to art, there’s a relationship to an art world. You would have to go to Mathew Barney now, to look for that kind of thing, although Matthew Barney, there’s something so much smoother in his aesthetic than there ever was with us. Someone like Ulrike Ottinger, there’s a relationship with playfulness. It’s as if things have become more refracted now.

One of the things that I’m constantly saying to students: The most important thing to remember about Derek Jarman is not only all his work, and him, but the fact that his work at that time was what they call crossover. If you made a film like “The Last of England,” number one, you would never get it made to a 35mm print. You probably wouldn’t get anyone to distribute it. But if they did, they’d distribute it very late at night at Film Forum. “The Last of England” had a big mainstream release at the Prince Charles Cinema on Leicester Square in London. It had all the main reviews that weekend, and Derek Jarman was a mainstream cultural figure. He was in a fantastic slanging match with Mary Whitehouse, who was a sort of arbiter of all taste issues in the U.K., which was fantastic, because it meant that he was a tabloid person. He was out there. The culture of that time meant that it was possible for that sensibility to be really visible. This is a much longer conversation, but I think something that’s important to notice is the ways in which that sensibility has become remarginalized. If one does look at that time, and one looks at that work and sees how fresh it was, one also has to notice it was not only fresh, but it was also really visible. And so to ask oneself, “How is it possible to make that fresh work again, and how is it possible to be seen, really, as centrally as that work was?” That’s not nostalgia. That’s trying to learn how to regroup.

There was a very dark moment, a sort of quietness for about 10 years after that point, for very serious reasons. The plague of AIDS at that time really exhausted the people who were left. Sadly, we lost a lot of people to it, but even the people who were left were very, very tired and needed to lick wounds and the rest of it. But also politically, we went through a huge change at that point. In the U.K. we voted in — we voted in — we kind of flourished under Margaret Thatcher, and then the point came where we all voted for Tony Blair, and look what happened. We didn’t have the great excuse you all had with Bush, which was that it was nothing to do with you. It was everything to do with us. But that feeling of quietness, I feel like we’re all beginning to come out of that now, and I think it is time to just pick up the threads. It’s not nostalgic. I think it’s really useful So I hope that “Orlando’s” rerelease, if it goes well, will encourage distributors to rerelease films from that time. How great would it be for someone to put out a kind of ’90s season? I saw “Poison” again not so long ago. It’s so fresh. Fresher, as I say, than so much that’s made now.