Sally Potter was never going to play it safe. The 59-year-old writer-director
and Brit-film iconoclast had already given us an historical epic called Orlando
in which the protagonist spontaneously changes gender, plus a modern love
story called Yes performed entirely in iambic pentameter. So when it
came to addressing the perils that cinema faces in the digital age, through
piracy and online competition, Potter’s solution has been typically
perverse. She has made a star-studded murder mystery called Rage,
featuring heavy-hitting names such as Judi Dench, Eddie Izzard and Jude Law.
But she has decreed that it be released online, chopped up into
mobile-phone-friendly “webisodes”, and then sent out into cyberspace — and
this is the best bit — it’s free! “It’s like, ‘Take my film! Go on! Have
it!’ ” she says, with a dismissive shrug. “Why do we have to be so afraid of
what’s happening? Piracy? The internet? Why not embrace it?”
Fighting talk indeed, from a spacious split-level studio in Tower Hamlets,
East London. But then again Potter, immaculately attired in crisp white
blouse and a black hakama-style skirt (there’s something of the samurai
warrior about her) knows no other way. As a lone trailblazer for
contemporary female directors such as Andrea Arnold, Lynne Ramsay and
Antonia Bird, her career has been built around taking the unexpected, the
uncompromised, and the contrarian position. Here, fresh-faced, with full
cheekbones, a mischievous smile and sad downturned eyes, she wonders how
she’ll ever make the film’s £150,000 budget back — “It was paid for by a
second mortgage on this place!” she says, gesturing to the room around her.
And yet she had to do it, she says. “It was a poetic and political
necessity.”
The film itself is almost as revolutionary as its distribution strategy (it
will be released online and in cinemas on the same day). Fourteen
performers, including Law, Dench, Diane Wiest and the model-turned-actress
Lily Cole, star as New York fashion industry workers who separately recount,
straight to camera, their experiences during one tumultuous murder-filled
week. No props, no sets, no action. Just faces to camera, beautifully framed
in front of block colours (think iPod posters meet Warhol prints).
In this, Law, adorned with the wig, make-up and slow guttural accent of a
Russian transgender model called Minx, gives the most remarkable and
immersive performance of his career. “I know people who have watched the
whole movie and haven’t been able to figure out which role Jude played,”
says Potter, excitedly. Steve Buscemi too, gives another classic turn as a
jaded photographer bemused by the encroaching chaos. While Dench, in soft
soft close-up and dazzling lipstick, is quite the blonde bombshell. “I think
that Judi Dench is beautiful, so I was giving you my subjective response to
that face,” she explains. “Not meat on a plate!”
It must also be noted that Rage, like so many Potter films, is a movie
of the mind rather than the heart. It is a film that bristles with ideas.
Globalisation, celebrity, immigration and the fall of capital are all in
there. And, indeed, there is no other film-maker working in the UK today who
can claim to be as intellectually and politically conscientious as Potter.
But often, and as a result of this awareness, her movies — from Orlando
and The Tango Lesson to The Man Who Cried and Yes — can
be ideological instead of emotional. Their defenders use words such as
“discourse”, “deconstruction” and “hegemony”, and tease out political ideas
and thematic resonances. Their detractors call them cold.
I wonder about this, and whether Potter has ever worried about being too
political, and not personal enough. “But for me there is no separation
between the two,” she says. “I’m trying to make something that is true to
everything that I have learnt thus far as a human being, and at the same
time I’m concerned and driven by what’s happening in the world.”
There is, nonetheless, a deeper story in Potter. Her politics, for instance,
began with her father, who was a furniture maker and self-declared
anarchist. Her North London childhood, she says, “was not an easy ride”.
There was no money, and her parents soon separated. “But what there was,”
she adds, almost by way of compensation, “was very strong political ideals.”
After toying with her uncle’s 8mm camera she announced, at 14, that she
wanted to become a film-maker. “I was greeted only with guffaws,” she says,
biting down bitterly. She left home as soon as she could, at 16, and began
living hand to mouth, renting a room in Kentish Town, and peeling carrots in
the kitchen of a West End restaurant. At the same time she joined a
film-makers’ cooperative, and began making and watching avant-garde films.
When film financing proved too difficult she became a dancer, but always
with the intent of returning to movies, which she eventually did, with early
experimental works such as Thriller, London Story and The
Gold Diggers.
It is thus difficult, on first glance, to disentangle Potter from her family
history. Hard not to see her as a woman, politicised from the cradle, but
determined to prove the doubting guffaws wrong. She says, naturally, that
it’s more complex than that. “Politics is in my blood. And, OK, that may be
because of my childhood,” she says. “But I’m also a child of my time.” She
lists her political credentials from the 1970s — marching with CND, getting
arrested in a squat in Tottenham Court Road — but then admits that
film-making has been a struggle for her, and that the guffaws, in some ways,
have often lingered.
When she made her 1992 Virginia Woolf adaptation Orlando, for instance,
the critic Barry Norman greeted it with a sneering paraphrase of Samuel
Johnson, remarking, “Potter directing is like a dog walking on his hind
legs. It’s not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all!”
Similarly, at the release of her follow-up movie, The Tango Lesson, a
clever postmodern depiction of a film director called Sally (played by
Potter herself) struggling to make a movie but falling for the tango
instead, critics were appalled at her decision to cast herself. Again, there
was a strange sexist subtext to the reactions. Variety, for instance,
criticised not Potter’s line delivery, but her “pinched features”. (Imagine
the magazine criticising Philip Seymour Hoffman for his “big ugly fat
face”.) Potter says that these reviews hit her hardest of all, and that she
took to her bed and “cried for a month”.
She followed The Tango Lesson with the $20 million Second World War
drama The Man Who Cried (“the film I am least happy with, because it
didn’t do what I intended it to do”), and then Yes. Of
the latter movie’s poetic dialogue she muses: “I was making a film about two
people really trying to listen to each other, so iambic pentameter seemed
like the only structure within which I could do that.”
Along the way there have been personal sacrifices, too. “I haven’t had
children,” she says, explaining that although she recently married her
long-time producer Christopher Sheppard, the question of children was always
troubling for her. “I was really quite tortured about it for a very long
time. I felt that if I had children I wouldn’t be able to continue with my
work as a director, because it’s so time-consuming. I’m fine with the
decision now, but for the longest time it was a really painful secret — that
I felt I had to give up everything, even children, for my work.”
Listening to her talk so openly about her pain, about her childhood, her
father and her sacrifices, I can’t help feeling that there’s a phenomenally
personal movie in there, waiting to emerge — the Sally Potter story,
complete with Spielbergian uplift and a five-hankie finale. But she’s not
going there. A political beast to the end, she wants to do more than just
tug heartstrings. She will admit, however, that in moments of weakness she
wonders what would have happened if she had made the trip to Hollywood after Orlando
(at the time she was invited to meetings, and tempted with offers). “But I
quite consciously and deliberately said ‘No’ to America,” she says. “I
didn’t want to be swallowed up by that machine.”
She says that, anyway, she is mostly happy now, contemplating future projects
(nothing decided as yet), and doing what she does, in her own inimitable
way. Being a contrarian? I offer, tongue only half in cheek. “I don’t feel
contrarian,” she answers, calmly, and thoughtful as ever. “I just feel that
there’s no point in doing the safe thing. I don’t care about the critical
backlash. I’m as vulnerable as the next person, perhaps even more so. But
that’s not going to stop me!”
Rage premieres on mobile phones on Monday (www.babelgum.com/rage)
and in cinemas on Sept 24 (www.ragethemovie.com)
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