In a way, using Orlando as a starting point for Potter isn't such a bad idea. A musician and choreographer whose first films were integrated into the performances of her Limited Dance Company, Potter gained some small notice in 1979 for her featurette, Thriller. A witty deconstruction of Puccini's La Boheme, it became an item of interest in academic film and theory circles, but can't be said to have impacted the so-called mainstream in any way.
Her next film, The Gold Diggers, starring Julie Christie, should have put Potter on the map. But this elaborate, plotless exploration of capitalism and the romantic iconography of women, produced for the BFI, was savagely attacked when it debuted in 1983, and never found an audience. Critics who'd been charmed by the BFI production that preceded it-- Peter Greenaway's The Draughtsman's Contract-- didn't respond to Potter's experimental designs, and (much like the critics of America's N.E.A.) began to question why state funding should be involved in such an enterprise.
With Orlando, things couldn't be more different. Instead of brickbats, bouquets have been tossed Potter's way. Her adaptation of Woolf's fanciful tale of an Elizabethan-era youth who lives for over 400 years-- turning into a woman in the process-- has been given the sort of notice "art" films haven't received since...well, since The Draughtsman's Contract. Though Potter utilized that film's set decorators and cast actress Tilda Swinton-- director Derek Jarman's muse-- in the title role, Orlando remains a work at one with everything that its maker has produced before. Consequently, the fact that with Orlando Potter has achieved success doesn1t mean she1s changed, but that critics and audiences have finally caught up to where she was to begin with. Turning a verbally dense work of literature into a highly visual film, Potter has managed to make of Orlando a work that touches on such hot-button issues as feminism, imperialism, and gender and gay/lesbian politics, all the while seducing audiences that would be loathe to deal with such topics head-on.
With Swinton's figure as anchor-- a calm center in a storm of images-- Potter transforms the screen into a living pop-up book of British history. Mirroring the way in which humans and events and the passage of time nearly overwhelm the hero/heroine, Orlando is a work of constantly shifting visual/dramatic perspective. Like The Magnificent Ambersons, it charts the passing of an era. Like Tales of Hoffman, it drowns us in the pure, luxuriant sensation of the visible. Like Hellzapoppin, it constantly pulls the rug out from under its own story, and the viewer as well in the process. Like no other film of the moment, it demonstrates that art and pleasure are not mutually exclusive categories of experience.
DAVID EHRENSTEIN: I imagine you were extremely discouraged after The Gold Diggers. Did you think you might not make another film?
SALLY POTTER: After The Gold Diggers I was cinematically in the wilderness for a decade. I knew that would happen the moment the film came out. I even said to a friend, "It's going to take me ten years to get back to where I want to be." That was not said with a light heart. That was said with the attitude of a budding Sisyphus. I did do other things, of course: a television series, a documentary, a short musical film called The London Story, a big music piece, and a lot of writing. In a way, I gathered myself together, looked myself in the eye, and said, "What do I need to learn so that this doesn't happen again?" With hindsight, I can see that that was a totally invaluable experience.
What's the most important thing you learned from it all?
To fully assume my role a a director without conceding to collective strategies. The Gold Diggers was a collaborative project. I worked very closely with the other women who wrote the script. I was never in the position that I was in later with Orlando, of both collaborating with a wonderfully skilled professional team and being in the thoroughly solitary position of the person who makes all the major decisions. The Gold Diggers came out of a practice in the theater of going with the moment, incorporating ideas, and not being completely text-bound.
There's probably nothing I'd do differently if I were to do it today, but I learned that if you have a rock-solid script, you can move really fast to get to what you need, and then you can improvise and make changes at the spur of the moment.
There were visual and dramatic ideas in The Gold Diggers very much related to lesbian politics.
Those ideas were there, but stated at an angle like everything else in the film. It was very deliberate. I didn't want to put anything "on the nose." It was an alchemical text. Everything in it was in a state of flux.
And people weren't ready for something like that?
I learned from travelling with The Gold Diggers, and really listening to people, and watching them walk out-- or not, as the case may be. There are some fanatical lovers of that film. A number of Ph.D.'s have been written about it, and I still get letters from people who say it changed their lives. Julie Christie always says that it's her favorite film, and we're still really good friends. I have to make an effort not to be overly critical about it myself, although in the privacy of my heart I am, because it failed to do what I hoped it would do. I always hoped for it to simultaneously work on different levels. I wanted people to be able to engage it on the most complex and subtle level if they wished, or at the surface level of sheer intoxication of the senses.
The Gold Diggers simply didn't work as a piece of entertainment for the vast majority of its audience and its critics. So it's very satisfying to me to sit in a cinema with Orlando and see not one person leave for the whole time, and for it to be a full house, and for it to be number one in London, and number three for seven weeks, when things like Scent of a Woman came and went. We're talking about a major commercial success.
How did you come to collaborate with Tilda Swinton?
For me, casting her was the first big decision. Given the nature of the story, the person who plays the part is the one who1s going to unlock it. So the first thing I did-- before the script-- were the photographs of Tilda as Orlando. I took her down to Knoll, the building the house in the novel was originally based on, and said I was doing a research project. They couldn't understand why my companion was in full Victorian dress. And I whipped out my Nikon and got my pictures! But the result of that half-day's shoot is so similar to the feeling of the finished film.
You thank Michael Powell-- who died before the film was shot-- in the end credits. How did he help you?
Michael Powell helped inspirationally in the most enormously sweet way. It was the generosity of spirit-- looking me in the eye and saying "You can do it," talking about it as "our" project that he was so "proud to be associated with," things like that. Here was someone in his early eighties, with years of bitterness behind him. After Peeping Tom, he was in the wilderness. So the credit is a homage not just to his work, but also to what he gave personally. Tilda said her feeling in watching us together was of him psychically handing over the baton to me.
There's one thing I think I unconsciously stole from his film Gone to Earth: the scene where she's running in the garden in her dress. That's the key to using costumes in films-- you have to discover how they move.
Many people would find adapting Orlando a daunting prospect. It seems such a literary work.
Orlando to me is the most cinematic of Virginia Woolf's books. In her diaries she calls it "exteriorizing consciousness." She was trying to find images for the stream of consciousness-- as opposed to words. One or two critics thought of the book as a fluffy piece; lightweight in comparison to her more "serious" literary excurstions. I totally disagree. I think it's as profound as her other works. And sometimes when someone setes out to make an "entertainment" the more serious issues surface in their own right in a less pedantic or polemic way.
I don't think it's possible for a viewer to see Orlando and not connect it to today's debates about feminism, gender, and queer politics.
Orlando is a very gentle, very passionate look at the blurring of sexual identity and the nonsense of femininity and masculinity as constructions, and it1s all done in the sweetest and kindest and most loving way. Maybe it's a reflection of Woolf's own life. I don't know if she would have ever called herself lesbian, or bisexual, or some such word. She made reference to the "Sapphic thread" that ran through her marriage. These were all coexistent facets of sexual identity in a group of people who were moving through and blurring their own sexual identities; not claiming any one of them as a political statement, because that wasn't desirable for them at the time.
Politics to one side, the film shows an enormous interest in formal strategies-- trying to deal with character and drama in new ways. Many of your ideas appear to come from your work in dance theater.
What you're doing in a fim is choreographing the relationship between the camera, the actors, and the space. There are an infinite number of ways to bring each scene alive. You can look at it directly, or through the subtext, or you can look at it obliquely. Take the scene where Orlando learns that she's lost her house and the two guys give her the document and then leave. I spent ages setting up the shot so they would disappear between Orlando and Shelmerdine, and it would look like there was suddenly a hole in the house-- a door opens in the back. Their heads go down, and Orlando and Shelmerdine come forward. It's a very elementary piece of choreography.
How did you come to cast Billy Zane as Shelmerdine-- Lady Orlando's great love affair?
I first saw him in "Twin Peaks." It was a very small part, but I sat up because he had real presence and beauty-- slightly androgynous beauty. Also he had a kind of upright bearing. He's very Errol Flynn-- which is quite rare now.
Whose idea was it to get Quentin Crisp for Queen Elizabeth I?
Mine! That was divine inspiration. I'm profoundly proud of this piece of casting. He took it very calmly. I met him in New York to do a reading. I saw him coming down the street from a distance, and realized he was walking very, very slowly. It was a curious moment, because I didn't know whether to stand there and watch, or whether this might somehow cause him some embarrassment. So I slipped back into the shadows and just peeked around. It was so moving, seeing him pick his way, slowly and with enormous dignity, along the Lower East Side. Anyway, we had a great meeting and he read beautifully. I asked him if he had any questions, and he said, "No, I understand it completely!"
You juxtapose him with Jimmy Sommerville, the gay pop singer, who appears at the end of the film as an angel.
Well, Jimmy Sommerville is an angel. But casting him also had to do with emphasizing the high part of the male voice, which is a running theme in the film. It's a wonderful part of the voice, and I know from music that the whole thing about women having high voices and men having low voices is all rubbish. So I rewrote the ending so that the film would be bracketed by Jimmy. It's an equivalent to something that Virginia Woolf suggests in the end paragraphs of the book; you're not sure whether it's a bird flying over a tree or an airplane. But there's this feeling of sky. So I end the film in this way on a high, on an up-- in ecstasy.
Initially, I just wanted him for the first scene, where he serenades the Queen as she comes in on her barge. The idea is Jimmy Sommerville parading Quentin Crisp-- welcoming him back to England. Putting that on film was too good to be true.
Do you think that Orlando speaks to issues related to today's gay and lesbian politics?
I'm so wary of making any sort of generalization because of what happened to the feminist movement. "Feminist" has become a sort of trigger word that closes down thinking rather than opening it up. I was very interested to see a recent issue of New York magazine with k.d. lang on the cover and the headline "Lesbian Chic"-- as if it were all just fashion. Still, these public moments of shifts in acceptibility have significance. Perhaps it1s a result of the long, slow burn of activism, and the courage of a great number of people, and of course AIDS; the whole kind of sudden waking-up people have had to do around that issue. So I think that those are really significant gains, and gay and lesbian cinema can be seen in relation to them.
As for Orlando and where it fits in, I really think that the film's contribution to that area is not so much about gaining identity as it is blurring identity. It's about the claiming of an essential self, not just in sexual terms. It's about the immortal soul.
You were speaking of feminism as a "trigger word"...
Feminism is a really difficult thing to talk about. I've been asked so many times by the, let's say, populist sort of journalists: "Are you a feminist?" It's like laying the gauntlet down. If I say yes then it's-- Ah, we know who she is and we'll put her back in her box and we don't need to think about her anymore. But more important than that was that they all thought they knew what a feminist was. So if I said, "Yes, I'm a feminist," it would slot in with their definition, which was a cliche of a protesting radical-- everything they fear. But I've learned that to win, you've got to have cover. You've got to be clever. You've got to speak freshly with nice juicy words that intoxicate-- not trigger jargon words that turn people off. If I talk about treating women with respect and dignity, not as second-class citizens, able to make a contribution with freedom and without limitation-- it gets the point across.
The other thing that I think is problematic about the word "feminist" at this point-- at least in England, I imagine it's different in the U.S.-- is that it doesn't necessarily imply linking up with other liberation struggles. People who are fighting for women's liberation have got to realize they're also fighting for gay and lesbian liberation, and all the other liberations. You cannot have this thing called "the liberated women." There is no one woman, and it leads to a cheap, commercialized view of liberation.
It seems that now you're in a situation that's the opposite of where you were after The Gold Diggers.
It's a lot nicer to be wanted than not wanted! I think I'm just about old enough to remain fairly centered and unseduceable by certain things. For example, money. It's not that I'm not interested in it, it's just that I've learned so well to survive on debts. To have money and to end up with work you're not very proud of is totally pointless. Orson Welles said film-makers have to be like cotton pickers-- go where the harvest is. It comes down to the project and the terms, and the only terms I know how to produce are the ones where I'm in complete control.