Once the script for THE DEEP END was completed, Siegel and McGehee knew what their most essential task would be: finding Margaret Hall. To fill her shoes, they knew they would need an actress who could exude both domestic tranquility and inner chaos, both an adherence to routine and a complete loss of moral compass — not exactly easy combinations.
Astonishingly, Siegel and McGehee found their consummate American suburban mom in a Scottish actress best known for playing a gender-switching time traveler in the screen adaptation of Virginia Woolf s ORLANDO: Tilda Swinton. Swinton stunned the directors by bringing a quiet ordinariness to Margaret that builds into a powerful portrait of motherhood's unrelenting tenacity.
"Margaret is a tremendous challenge because she's a character who spends a lot of time by herself. She goes through this crisis almost entirely alone, so she has to express the depths of her emotion through her face, body and gestures more than her words," explains Scott McGehee. "Tilda Swinton has a face that can move you in utter silence. Her eyes exude intelligence and passion. And, oddly, when we talked to her she told us that she was very interested in exploring the subtle and powerful ways that the face can be used in close-up. We knew we had the right actress."
Adds David Siegel: "Tilda brings an unusual combination of steeliness and sympathy to Margaret. She succeeds in making you believe in her strength and yet your heart also breaks for her in the end."
For her part, Swinton was immediately taken both with the script and with the source material: Elisabeth Sanxay Holding's The Blank Wall. "The script was something I had been longing to see in the cinema: those great film noirs of the past with women lead characters, the ones that keep us up until 3 am when they're on the TV, yet no one seems to make anymore," Swinton says. "Then, when I went back to read Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, I fell in love with her writing. I was amazed by how modern she is — so astringent and so tough. I've since been seeking out everything she's ever written."
Swinton felt that Scott McGehee and David Siegel were making a bold move by exploring the inner world of a 21st century mother. "I think the woman's film stopped being made because it became politically incorrect. But contrary to our myths, women will always be put in this position of taking care of everyone but themselves," notes Swinton. "By taking a fresh look at this territory, THE DEEP END manages to be at once radical and riveting in its entertainment."
As a mother herself, Swinton was fascinated by Margaret's approach to motherhood. "What I love most about Margaret is that she is very unexotic in a way. The challenge for me was to keep her absolutely ordinary. To her, saving her family from murder and blackmail is just part of her job and she has to do it that same way she has to do the laundry and clean up the house," explains Swinton. "The bottom line in the film for me is this: there's a terrible mess in the family; Margaret's a mother and so naturally she's going to clear it up."
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