Tilda Swinton in "Julia," Magnolia Pictures, 2009

Oh, that child actor is a pretty developed individual, I have to tell you. [Aidan Gould] was entirely apprised of what the film was about, and he was up for every single thing. He was probably the most professional person on that shoot. [laughs] But my children are nine, he was the same age, so I was well aware that there's nothing a nine-year-old boy likes more than being thrown into the back of a trunk of a car. He would just say, "Again! Again!" Or playing with a gun, being tied up and put in the back of sofa -- he thought it was great. Working with him was really easy. But [Julia]'s kind of a nine-year-old herself. It wasn't a real authority she's using, it's completely random: "Go to sleep!" What kind of thing is that to say? I love their relationship, their weird, freaky equality. He doesn't really know what a woman is, she doesn't really know what a child or a mother is. She meets her match in him.

You said that the film is "incredibly optimistic" and "genuinely amoral." How do you explain that peculiar combo?

When I say it's amoral, I mean that it's not moralistic. It's compassionate in that its attitude is one of unconditional love. It's Zen, in a sense. Zonca sets out to love Julia, and it's tough, but he tries. Somebody told me [something] that the Dalai Lama had said that in many ways, what the Chinese have done in Tibet has made better Buddhists of them all, because it made them practice forgiveness, the only thing you can really do. That's what this film sets out to do, to make you just witness someone and put yourself in their shoes.

That's stylistic as well. We wanted to not only make a film about an alcoholic, but make an alcoholic film. We have blackouts in the film where she doesn't know what happens, and we don't either. It's not like we could say, "We know what happened while you were passed out." The whole moment when we think we're watching one kind of film and then it veers off into another direction, Julia doesn't know any more than us. We are in her shoes. That's really compassionate, and amoral in the sense that we're not moralizing about her. By the end, by hook or by crook, we're somehow with her and want her to prevail. I don't know how that works, but it's kind of magic.

What strengths does Zonca have as a filmmaker that you might only attribute to him?

He has a unique attitude. He's probably the least cerebral filmmaker I've ever worked with. He deals in energy, if that's not too goddamn hippie of me to say. When we started shooting, he hardly spoke English. He was out of France for the first time as a filmmaker, in Mexico where he'd never been before, he had an English-speaking cast and his protagonists never stop talking. It's not like he was making "The Limits of Control" or something. He was making a story about a blabbermouth, and yet what he was constantly looking for was the energy. The very fact that he asked me to do it is extraordinary -- I can't think of many people, even those who know me very well, who would've thought of me being the proper person to play this character. He somehow saw that it might be possible for me to do it.

That's pure animal instinct. His looking is almost like tasting things, his meticulous attention to design. He's definitely affected my way of looking at things, how extraordinary everybody looks. Everybody looks like a freak, let's face it. The only place that people don't look like freaks is when they're in generic Hollywood movies. [laughs] They just look completely regular. But out in the street, out in the countryside, the back of a bus, wherever else you go, people all look completely peculiar, make big gestures, talk loudly, fall over, dress weirdly, and do up their buttons wrong. That's real, and he notices that.

I know! I see the film as extraordinarily valuable, particularly now, and the fact that it's dividing people is interesting because I find a resistance to this film, a really vehement resistance, troubling. Of course, it's personal and absolutely legitimate, but it worries me because it begs the question, "Did you not know that a filmmaker has to be able to ask questions, rather than come up with answers? Are you so used to the formulas by now that that's all you can take? Is your diet so sated with one kind of nutrition that you become intolerant to any other?" That I find interesting, and I hope that not just "The Limits of Control," but this tendency in culture and art, will be supported. If we're not careful, that intolerance is going to absolutely wipe out a whole tendance, as they say in French. Jim always set out to not know what he was doing with this film.

I wouldn't want to put my interpretation forward, other than to say that I think it's significant that Jim made it at a particular moment in his life. It's a reckoning type of work, the kind that somebody makes when they're re-evaluating their work as an artist and what they're really interested in, going pure. For all sorts of reasons, it was very important for him to push the boat out and be gold label Jim Jarmusch for a second. I really love it. I think it hangs together more than I expected it to. My line on it: it's exactly what I want to see at the moment because I want to go to Spain, wear a shiny suit, go traveling, not necessarily know what I'm up to, and be given instructions in matchboxes. That's what I want at the moment, but not everybody does, I suppose.

"Julia" opens in New York and Los Angeles on May 8th.

[Additional photo: "The Limits of Control," Focus Features, 2009]

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