The Contemporary Auteur: An Interview with Sally Potter

by Kristy Widdicombe

This interview took place at Adventure Pictures on 20 August 2003. It is an accessible primary resource, tailored to help students who are looking at 'auteur theory' and, more specifically, at the work of director Sally Potter. It is also particularly useful for teachers and students of the WJEC Film Studies - Unit FS4 Auteur Study, or the OCR Media Studies - Unit 2734 Critical Research Study on Women and Film. This interview accompanies Kristy Widdicombe's contribution to the 16+ Media Studies Source Guide on Auteur Theory/Auteurs.

Kristy Widdicombe: Thank you for agreeing to do this today. I think it is very important for students to see the full history of cinema, with both male and female directors. I also think there are many problems with auteur theory as it stands, particularly with studies that focus on the canonised male directors. What is your opinion of categorising directors as auteurs? Do you find this limiting; is it a term that has a resonance within the industry you work in?

Sally Potter: After I read your piece [introduction to Sally Potter in the 16+ Auteur Guide], I began to think again about auteur theory... because, of course, when you are working you tend not to think of yourself in any category... whether auteur or not. But, I believe that fundamentally, cinema has to be thought of as a collaborative medium because you really can't do it alone, with the exception of 8mm or video pieces; or perhaps a 16mm film like Thriller which was shot with one of my hands on the sound button and the other one on the camera, and then I edited it. Under those circumstances perhaps auteur is the right word to use. But hang on, there were four performers in Thriller, so what was their status? Of course, they gave their input too, and their input became part of the image. And what about the people who printed the film at the lab? In other words, film can never be a solo medium in the way that the novel is. But then, what about the editor of the novel? What about the publishers of the book? What about the teachers of the writer who wrote the book? So, ultimately, we do not work alone without help and influence from others. Having said that, a film is not a committee medium. It has to be steered by one person. And this is the paradox. It is a collaborative medium, but with a director. Of course some films have been made collectively. I had some degree of experience with that on The Gold Diggers, although I was still directing the shoot.

KW: And you were writing?

SP: I was co-writing in that instance (with Lindsay Cooper and Rose English and as they were the composer and designer respectively we really co-authored the film). But usually what happens as a director is that it is down to you to make the final decisions about every aspect of what you see on the screen. That doesn't mean that you do everything that you see: as a rule you don't sew the costumes, you don't design or build the sets, you don't do the performances (with some exceptions). In fact the better director you are, the more you draw out other people's ability, their genius. You support what they're doing and, hopefully, make the people you are working with feel like it is their film too. So, I think being an auteur doesn't mean that you work alone, or that it's only yours, but that you take ultimate responsibility for it; and that you steer the vision of it.

KW: So, you have your own vision and it is these other people involved (choreographers, set and costume designers, etc.) who come in and contribute, bringing different aspects to the film?

SP: Yes, and work with your vision. And they bring their own vision and experience as well. But, the difference is that they're not ultimately responsible for the film as a whole. Only the director holds the entire film in his or her head. This intimate knowledge, of the intended film, long before it manifests, and the responsibility that goes with that knowledge, apply particularly if you have also written the material (which I have for most of my films). It is slightly different for a director who comes in to an already finished script. But every director puts their own stamp on the material and in some case radically changes it with directorial decisions. Because with a script you can go in a thousand million different directions. You can put the camera here, or there. You can radically change meanings with your choice of lenses, of locations, of sounds and music. You can shape a performance; guide an actor in many different directions. All these decisions are a complex and sometimes invisible form of authorship.

KW: Moving on to Orlando. How did you find authoring an adaptation of a novel by Virginia Woolf?

SP: She wrote the extraordinary book, which was of course the basis for everything in the film. Then to bring it to the screen, I worked on the adaptation for nearly seven years. In the process of filming I then changed the adaptation, and everybody involved also had their part to play. It was an incredible team, with a production led by Christopher Sheppard and a cast headed by Tilda Swinton. Incidentally, I've noticed that auteur is much more readily used as a term for male directors than female directors because people don't concern themselves with the profound collaborations that men have. But as soon as a woman has a collaborator it's thought of as "oh it's not really hers then". You know, Scorsese worked with the same producer for many many years; and always the same editor. Orson Welles, who's thought of as the ultimate auteur, had his whole theatre company around him, and some very experienced film technicians for Citizen Kane that he relied on heavily and a great screenwriter (Herman J. Mankiewicz). That doesn't make him less of an auteur, but it certainly doesn't mean that he did everything entirely by himself. Godard, Fellini, Bergman... all the great auteurs that you can think of also have their collaborators.

KW: In your films you also take on more than one role. Does this give you more control, what with owning Adventure Pictures and having your own production company?

SP: Adventure Pictures is run more by Christopher Sheppard than by myself although we are co-directors of the company. I'm not a producer (other than with Thriller and my early works). To be a feature film producer as he is, really is a huge organisational, administrative, creative and financial job. A good producer creates the conditions in which it is possible for a director - and for everyone else - to work effectively. And sometimes, if the material is perceived as difficult, it is down to the producer to make it happen at all by convincing financiers or inventing elaborate co-production strategies. So, that, too, is part of the ultimate authorship of the film - a hidden part. For a director, control is an interesting question because although you can direct a film, you can't finally control everything. It's how you steer and direct the uncontrollable, within the constraints of time and money, that finally creates the shape of the film - along with how you incorporate other people's skills, chance events and accidents. In effect, it is all about the decisions you make and the choices you make under pressure, often in a state of fatigue. Of course you try to set up things contractually to keep the maximum amount of artistic control so that you're not interfered with on a gross level and made to do something other than what seems right.

KW: I wonder if you could talk a bit about what you think about students studying your work from the perspective of auteur theory. Is it necessary for them to investigate these many levels and look at your collaborations with other artists?

SP: I've talked to a lot of students over the years who've written their theses or PhDs on things that I've done and it's always really interesting what they see, what they're thinking about, and what concerns them. I think that the auteur theory is as good a way as any into the work and to beginning to think about it. But the collaborations are important too. I have worked with some wonderful people: Alexei Rodionov, Carlos Conti, Sacha Vierny, Herve Schneid, Ben Van Os and Jan Roelfs, Sandy Powell, Osvaldo Golijov, Fred Frith and others behind the camera, and Tilda Swinton, Pablo Veron, Cate Blanchett, Johnny Depp, Joan Allen, Simon Abkarian and others in front of the camera. These have all been strong collaborations. I think that there are a lot of misunderstandings about what the relationship is between the director and the crew and actors. I don't see collaboration as undermining the notion of auteur. Everybody that we think of traditionally as an auteur also collaborated, perhaps even more than I do. So, I don't see them as contradictory ideas.

KW: It is all part and parcel of working within the industry.

SP: Also, maybe female directors are more willing to give credit to the people that they work with because women know that there is an enormous amount of invisible labour involved in cinema, and women historically have usually done the invisible work in the home and the workplace. You don't want to do that to other people. You want to make sure that the things people do are recognised and given credit.

KW: You mentioned in a previous interview [see Florence's conversation with Sally Potter published in Screen 34:3 Autumn 1993] that you do not consider yourself to be a feminist. In terms of the differences between male and female directors, do you consider yourself a "feminist director"?

SP: This issue about not naming myself a feminist is a complicated one... it's because the definition of the term is difficult. Under some circumstances, and within certain groups of people, I happily call myself a feminist because it's a useful shorthand. But, in other circumstances, the word feminist is used dismissively as a way of categorising and putting me into a little box; usually by people who don't know what the word means anyway. It's more useful, I find, not to use a label at all. What's the value of the label? Who cares? What's important is what the film's actually doing and communicating. I found that in interviews and reviews the term "feminist" could become like a curse after a while. Some people use the prefix "female director" or "feminist director" as opposed to just "director"... as a way of pigeonholing the work as if that is the only defining aspect of the films. Of course, the investigations of female-ness and politics in the films are a vital part; but so is the image, the framing, the music, the mise-en-scene, and all the aspects of the language of cinema...

KW: ... and you don't want these aspects to go unnoticed.

SP: Exactly

KW: As if the only way to approach the work of Sally Potter is from one direction...

SP: ... which would be quite wrong.

KW: In terms of your specific collaborations, do you like to build up a team of personnel and carry this team forward with you? Do you find this is this the best way to work?

SP: When a relationship works well it's lovely to be able to pick it up and go on together to the next film. In practice, I've sometimes only worked once with somebody. That doesn't mean it wasn't a good experience, but that maybe it wasn't appropriate for the next project, or something changed in our lives. But I've worked with the editor Hervé Schneid, the sound recordist Jean-Paul Mugel and the designer Carlos Conti on three films, and with script-supervisor Penny Eyles and Christopher Sheppard on the last four. It's nice to have some continuity like that but it tends to be a shifting group, which builds over the years. A lot of directors find it useful to have a pool of people that they trust and build up a common language with and can work with again and again. Woody Allen does it. He always works with the same people. Bergman did it. Auteurs do it.

KW: And that, in a way, is part of your directorial vision.

SP: Choosing your team is a huge part of the directorial responsibility.

KW: How do you prefer to work? For instance, when starting a new project, when you're scripting or playing about with new ideas, do you have a particular vision of the film from the outset, which you stick to, or does this alter throughout the development of a project?

SP: I usually start with one or two little clues - perhaps an image or a piece of music - which I then develop over a period of months. The majority of my time is spent alone, in here [Sally Potter's Studio] writing. I mean completely alone. Writing is a solitudinous activity.

KW: As you played out in The Tango Lesson in that wonderful scene where your character begins the scripting process... an image that sticks with me.

SP: That was actually a set of this room built by Carlos Conti in a studio in Buenos Aires!

KW: ... with the floorboards being pulled up!

SP: Yes. [Laughter]

KW: The way that you manage to incorporate the processes of film-making into your films, I think, points you out as an auteur in that you are using film as a means of investigating the methods of film-making.

SP: Yes. It's part of a general questioning process. But it's also about how the way you tell a story cinematically shapes your perception.

KW: How do you react to critics who hold you up as an auteur (as Anne Ciecko does in her entrance on you in "Fifty Contemporary film-makers")? And, is it harder to maintain a sense of authorship with a bigger budget, such as you had with The Man Who Cried?

SP: I think Anne Ciecko elegantly described some of the complexities of 'auteur'ship. The Man Who Cried was the biggest budget by far that I'd ever worked with; twenty million dollars, which is a lot and apparently, at that point, the biggest budget that any European female director had worked with... whether that is supposed to be a compliment I don't know... I suppose it's a measure of some kind of responsibility. But, following that experience, I became very interested in working in low budget again because a big budget brings it's own problems with it.

KW: Do you feel you have more control with a smaller budget?

SP: Yes, you have more control, except there is less time and less money so there are certain things that you can't do. But you can create a smaller, cohesive group and a more manageable machine that is being watched less from the outside, because there is less anxiety from the investors. The budget of the film I've just been shooting, Yes, was a quarter of what Orlando was ten years ago and Orlando was already a very low budget, so it really is going back to my roots in a way.

KW: Is this also a film that you have written? Could you talk a little bit about what it's about?

SP: The new film? It's always hard to talk about a film before it's finished. Yes is essentially like a long poem that charts the development of a relationship between an American woman and a Middle-Eastern man as their love affair becomes a war zone. In effect it's a metaphor for the global situation, the conflict between Eastern and Western belief systems. Within this structure there is a network of other relationships and a story that unfolds, but that's the essence of it.

KW: I find your films fascinating because they do deal with human relationships and you do get this idea of a theme running throughout your work. How do your stories develop? What processes are involved?

SP: You asked previously about how an idea for a film develops and whether there is a vision from the outset. I think things tend to start small, such as with an image, or a line from a poem, or a piece of music, or perhaps a desire to explore a genre or a feeling, and then, in the process of writing, it's as if one finds the idea and builds it up. I am answering this specifically for students because when people start out making films they often expect that the whole idea is going to be there in its entirety from the beginning and if it isn't they panic! What are they going to do? The reality is: it's very rarely there. It comes in the process of working on it. You discover it as you make it. At the beginning you will often come up with ideas that are no good and you will definitely make mistakes and have problems... but you refine the idea, you change it, you improve it, you keep working on it until it becomes what you are interested in doing or it somehow resembles what you're searching for.

KW: So, is there a point where you just have to let it go and stand back after working on a project for many years?

SP: To some degree. You let it go progressively at different phases; the script, the shoot, the edit, the preview, the first public screening...I think that standing back is a vital part of the process, yes. At first you have to be in it, possessed by it, working and working on it; and then you have to take that hat off and put on an editorial hat. It also helps to have an editorial eye, from the outside, from somebody else. I have a script editor (Walter Donohue), and later on a film editor, who each have a different point of view on what I've done. But I think the ability to be both passionately involved with something and passionately detached about it is something you have to cultivate in order to be discriminating. You have to try to see which of your ideas you've got to junk, and which of the ideas you can keep going with. And sometimes you're not sure... but you certainly have to make choices and sometimes be quite ruthless.

KW: That's an enormous strength to be able to do that, because you know people are going to see the end result. How aware are you of audiences when you are making your films?

SP: I think one of the great advantages of doing a lot of live performance (as I did in my earlier life), is that you get a very visceral feeling for audience, for timing, for what people want... or maybe what they need rather than what they want. As a performer you know instinctively whether something is working or not working. It's as if there is an energetic charge in the room if something is getting across. Then, I think after a while, you internalise that feeling of how to communicate. I've also done a lot of Q & A's after my films around the world and listened very carefully to people's questions, and read letters people have written to me about what they have got from the films. That's very interesting. It becomes a kind of teaching from the audience. But ultimately you have to become your own audience. You can't work on the basis of trying to please in advance, that's doomed to failure. Neither can you work on the basis of trying to avoid criticism. That's definitely doomed to failure. So it's more like being your own first audience... and being true to yourself. That's not necessarily popular at the time. Or it may be. It's unpredictable. It's very strange. One never quite knows... I've had my fair share of attacks, without doubt, in the press, but one of the things you realise after a while is that criticism is one of the things you have to learn to deal with when your work goes out past a certain number of people. It's a fair game situation. Secondly, if what you're doing is taking risks either formally or politically then it's going to antagonise some people. It's inevitable.

KW: That must be very daunting for you. Your new film is in post-production, when will it be ready for release?

SP: We're trying to get it ready for Cannes or one of the festivals next year.

KW: Well, thank you very much it's been very interesting. I'm sure students will continue to see your work, and hopefully go back from your recent releases to see your early work. Is there a plan to get The Gold Diggers re-released?

SP: Yes

KW: I do hope so as the new Artificial Eye DVD release of Orlando is very interesting because of the documentaries, a valuable resource for those writing on your work.