One of the most independent-minded writers and directors working in and around British cinema, Sally Potter is famous for saying yes. Yes is the title of her most recent film. Her characters say yes to life’s challenges. They abandon inhibitions; they learn to tango; they even, in her famous Virginia Woolf adaptation Orlando, change sex.

But with opera, Potter has usually said no. No, she wouldn’t direct Tosca. Or the other mainstream operas dangled by companies anxious to see if someone who’d made audiences queue for the Woolf could freshen the family heirlooms. Hiring film directors for opera has become the fashion. Two years ago Anthony Minghella made a splash with his English National Opera Madama Butterfly. Next year in Los Angeles, one of Puccini’s three one-act operas will be directed by Woody Allen and the other two, as improbably, by William Friedkin.

Some two-and-a-half years ago, John Berry, the artistic director of English National Opera, bent toward Potter’s ear and said the word Carmen. She didn’t say no immediately. “I thought, oh my God – chocolate box, mock flamenco, cliché femme fatale, victim of violence. But I also thought I can’t keep saying no for ever.”

It took her about a year to decide. “When I started to listen, really deeply, with a fresh ear to Bizet’s score I found much more than I was expecting. And I started to go on an archaeological dig into the opera, casting off preconceived ideas.” Before the dig she met Alice Coote, the soprano already set to star; it would be her role debut. “I knew from the first meeting we could work together. She’s got a hunger for exploration and is prepared to take risks. And she’s not the stereotypical Carmen, which makes her about three thousand times more interesting, in my view.

“Again and again in rehearsal I’ve felt the cells of my body opening out listening to her voice; it has such power, such beauty and integrity. It’s without a single affectation.”

At the time we were speaking, two weeks before opening night, that voice had been temporarily silenced by a virus. Coote was at home, chafing, e-mailing Potter. No follower of her films will be surprised at the feminist reading Potter has evolved. Carmen the coquette has been ditched. Expect someone “fighting for freedom against restraint, against hypocrisy, against being possessed, caged and owned”.

She’ll be fighting, too, in a theatrical space far from picture-postcard Seville, or any place in the 19th century. Potter describes the setting as “the abstract of a present-day urban universe” – an abstract pounding with a fusion of tango and hip-hop steps choreographed by Kate Flatt and Pablo Veron, Potter’s tango mentor from her film The Tango Lesson. Why tango? “Because it uses the vocabulary of relationship, it’s inherently a dialogue and a power play. Who’s leading, who’s following?” And hip-hop? “It’s the dance language of people who are outsiders, who live on the streets, and they’re the people who populate this story.”

Not for a second did Potter consider setting the opera in its own time and place. Nor did she want realism. “If you want real, get a camera and take it out on location. There’s no point in taking on the theatre unless you do what’s unique to the theatre. Point a camera at an empty black room, all you see is an empty black room. But the stage gives you a symbolic, almost a metaphysical, space. You’re tapping into a lineage stretching back to the arena of the Ancient Greeks.”

With her set designer, Es Devlin, she’s filling this space with circles, verticals, horizontals – a design geometry she insists she’s drawn from the heart of Prosper Mérimée’s story about social transgression and the divided heart, and the conflicting rhythms of Bizet’s score.

Devlin isn’t conjuring up anything pretty, certainly nothing to suggest Seville. Act I will give us a curved wall, stirring resonances in Potter’s mind from the Israel-Palestine wall, the Berlin Wall and similar urban dividers between us and them. (Does this replace one set of opera production clichés with another?)

There will also be surveillance equipment and surveillance footage; Bizet’s soldiers now work for a private security firm. Potter doesn’t reveal what Carmen and the other cigarette girls have become, but they won’t be maids in a vicarage.

“Today,” she says, “I was in the Coliseum theatre, looking at this incredible ornate auditorium, wondering if there was going to be a low hiss when the audience saw our set. I doubt it, but – oh, you never know. That’s the thrill of live theatre.” It’s a thrill she knows well enough. In the 1970s live performance dominated much of her early career as a performance artist and creator of “expanded” cinema. Even so, after five feature films she doesn’t hide the difficulties involved in leaving the movie camera behind.

One problem has been a production schedule that demands designs be submitted one year in advance (“in film-making terms that’s a total insanity”). Then there’s the absence of scissors. Scissors, she says, are the film-maker’s best tool: by cutting scenes they control the pace. But an opera masterwork cannot be cut, and the musical tempo’s in the hands of the conductor (Edward Gardner; “fantastically open – it’s been an absolute joy”).

Unlike a day of shooting, a day’s rehearsals leave Potter with nothing in the can. She almost sounds bewildered: “There’s just this kind of ephemera working through other peoples’ bodies and memories. So I need to communicate as clearly as I can and give notes with a burning clarity to help imprint what the opera needs.”

On the brighter side, her film production company, Adventure Pictures, has kicked in with a deluge of video material for the ENO website’s extravagant coverage of the production. Coote was even going to be filmed visiting her doctor, before she saw sense.

But it’s the bridges between film and opera on stage that matter – that fixed, gaping opera stage which Potter found could be fairly easily controlled through movement, lighting and composition. The biggest, most pleasant surprise, she says, has been using the working processes she’s evolved with actors – “working deeply from the text to find an impulse that’s based on the necessity to speak or to sing. So nothing’s empty; everything comes from the character’s inner world.”

This couldn’t have been easy for a cast containing troupers such as the Australian tenor Julian Gavin; he’s having his eighth whirl as Don José, Carmen’s tortured lover. Did the singers fight her approach? “No, no.” A brief pause. “Well, a little bit of resistance at first. But most of them found it of value for themselves pretty quickly.”

She’s also undertaken clearing up body language, “decluttering redundant gestures that aren’t really coming from anywhere.” Really, she should work on politicians. And TV reporters. But maybe they’re already in Potter’s reimagined, hip-hopping Carmen.

— Carmen (www.eno.org/carmen) opens at the Coliseum on September 29. Box office: 0870 1450200

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