By Jeanette Gardzelewski
Special to the Daily News

To call Tilda Swinton versatile is an understatement. To call her work exploratory and daring doesn’t quite cover it. Wednesday evening’s tribute made it clear that last year’s Oscar was doubtless handed to the correct Leading Actress.

As one of current cinema’s boldest and most powerful performers, Tilda Swinton has what can only be called classic star quality.

The evening started out with AFI FEST’s Artistic Director Rose Kuo giving a brief introduction to Swinton’s work, highlighting that few actresses could cross over from the avant-garde to the mainstream—certainly no one has done so with such remarkable ease or in quite the same way.

David Poland of Movie City News, who would later do the Q&A, then took the stage to introduce the tribute reel saying how the first time he saw Tilda Swinton it was also at an AFI-hosted event, a screening of Derek Jarman’s 1989 movie WAR REQUIEM.

When the lights lowered and Swinton’s work was allowed to speak for itself, it was apparent where her great her talents lie. Often playing the most pared-down of characters with no obvious make-up or costuming, she uses her own stark and arresting presence as a sculptor does clay.

Her rawness of image is rivaled only by her acting technique. With electric eyes and alabaster skin, Swinton is already a haunting enough vision. She becomes even more transfixing because of her unique and powerful way of delivering a line.

And then how to describe what happens when the hair, make-up and wardrobe people get a hold of her? Swinton’s entire being transforms in ways that only the often wrongly used word ‘chameleon’ can quite convey. From role to role, (or minute to minute), she seldom seems the same actress.

Indeed, Tilda Swinton is no mere actress. In fact, as we learned from the Q&A with David Poland, she doesn’t consider herself to be an actress at all.

Swinton says she stumbled into acting through her collaboration with Director Derek Jarman as an artist and writer on all of her earliest movies. These movies are her entire body of work before the multi-faceted starring role in ORLANDO brought her international fame in 1992.

Said Swinton, “I’ve never considered myself an actress … I was a political science student, pretending to not be a writer who had stopped writing, who should have gone to art school.”

Confused? Don’t be. If that is how Swinton saw herself when her career began, Poland took no time at all to come up with how she would like to be seen today, pointing out that in THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA she was more like a piece of production design.

“THAT’S what I am,” Swinton exclaimed. “I’m not an actor. I’m a piece of PRODUCTION DESIGN!”

Swinton spoke eloquently and fluidly, moving from topic to topic: Jarman’s devastating death in 1994; the film festival she is starting in her home town; her online project, 8 1/2, with which she hopes to bring classic films to children; her film in this year’s festival, JULIA, but always coming back to writing and art.

The Q&A ended with a surprise screening of her latest film JULIA, in which Swinton would have a hard time convincing anyone she was a piece of production design.

AFI FEST presents JULIA in collaboration with the American Cinematheque and the Egyptian Theater:
7:30 p.m., Friday, November 7 @ Egyptian Theatre
Tilda Swinton will appear in-person to introduce her new film.