by Vera von Kreutzbruck
– Germany –
When I told British director and choreographer Sally Potter, 59, that I am from Argentina, she broke into song – “Don’t cry for me Argentina.” She has many fond memories from the time she spent in Buenos Aires in 1997 shooting her film The Tango Lesson with tango dancer Pablo Verón and herself as the protagonists. And her passion for tango has grown fervently ever since. “Next week I’m flying to London to dance with Verón,” she tells me before starting our interview at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival.
Sally Potter is best known for Orlando, for which she won the European Film Award for Best Young Film in 1993. Based on the novel by Virginia Woolf, the film is a feast of sharp dialogues on philosophy, tackling such universal topics as love, death, politics, sex and poetry. The title character, played by Tilda Swinton, has the ability to change sex and the peculiarity of being immortal. Through Orlando’s eyes we experience the vertiginous changes spanning centuries, from the Elizabethan époque until the present time.
Her new movie Rage, competed in the official competition section at this year’s Berlinale. A parody of the fashion industry, the film is one of Potter’s most intimate and experimental endeavors. It is a decidedly stripped-down film, made on a minimal budget of a million dollars, but cast with A-list actors such as Judi Dench, Steve Buscemi and Jude Law.
Unfortunately, as it sometime happens with risky flicks, Rage was not well received. At times, it does demand too much patience of its audience, since the entire movie consists of endless monologues. But if you let yourself indulge in this unusual experiment and sit through the film, it is a funny, worthwhile trip.
Your new movie Rage has a minimalist and experimental approach. Why did you choose this style for the film?
I wanted to make a film for lean times, a recession film. It is a personal manifesto about no waste cinema. Just cutting through the crap. Even cutting through the whole celebrity thing – big budgets, big everything – down to something really elemental, really simple about human communication through the face.
Why is the film set in the fashion industry in New York?
The setting is in the fashion industry but you can’t see it. Actually it’s an invisible setting. Both New York and the fashion industry have over-dominated the world, their visual presence has come to the point where they have become an iconic signature. We don’t need to see them to know what they mean to us. New York is the ultimate western city, idealized and demonized in different ways; and the fashion industry, is the ultimate expression of dedication or addiction to appearance and all the profiteering that [comes] from that.
The film is very confessional in nature. The characters confess themselves to young Michelangelo in “Big Brother” style. Why did you choose this intimate tone?
Michelangelo is not the “Big Brother,” he’s more like a psychoanalyst. I think that what a good psychoanalyst does is listen, like a good friend. If you listen to somebody with non-judgmental gaze and some love, eventually every single human being has the same affect, the desire to tell, to share your suffering and to show who you really are. But in reality TV there is such a cult of the confession that the confession is very rarely truthful. It’s confession for effect, to draw attention. Its confession to gain celebrity, to gain fame, that kind of addiction. I wanted to use that form to expose the gap between the image [a person] wants to project and who they really are and the battle for supremacy of one or the other.
Why did you cast Jude Law as the film’s drag queen?
Well, women are human beings in drag. We all know that. When we wake up in the morning we are human beings and then we put make-up on. That is what drag is – a disguise. Originally the part was written for a female actor and then one day I woke up and said: Yes! It needs to be played by a man! It gave it another layer and made it much more tragic actually, because we know that this creature is a persona, a creation, and that there is another individual trapped inside.
The movie has many strong theatrical elements. For instance, you can only see the faces of the actors. What was your biggest challenge as a director when you were shooting Rage?
One of the roots of cinema is theatre, but cinema has many different roots in many different arts, it’s such a synthesizing medium. With Rage, this particular approach helped me understand how to work with actors. If you go back to the roots, back to early Greek theatre, the performer is in an amphitheatre and acts as a vessel in a circle of communication with the audience. In Rage the chorus is off-screen. However, acting for the camera is very different than acting for the theatre. What the actor has to do for the camera is to work in a very interior way so that the camera can read tiny nuances of thought and feeling. Whereas in the theatre you are directing your energy out to people far away, with cinema you’re directing energy very intimately to another person. And that’s a very important difference.
The characters in Rage make their confessions in front of the camera but they all lie. Can we find the truth behind the characters’ masks?
The guiding principle for the film and with working with the actors was exactly that, we were always looking for truth. The principle with the camera work was to find a true point of view, not a pretense of objectivity or neutrality, but a subject in relationship with the truth the actor is dealing with. Masks are one way of telling the truth because I think that mostly, without realizing it, we often are wearing a mask.
Modern society is obsessed with beauty. Truth and beauty are major topics in this film.
I think that’s where there is enormous confusion in our culture – that we have come to think that if somebody is photogenic he is a good person – as it happened with the cult of princess Diana as a saint, just because she looked good. The cult of beauty and the myth of beauty are very dangerous. There are other kinds of harmony and beauty one can find even in so-called ugliness.
Would you consider yourself a feminist filmmaker?
I’ve noticed that any female film director is called a feminist film director just because she’s female, which is just stupid. It’s lazy. I don’t use the word because I try and be more specific. The word feminist has become so general, it’s like a shorthand that almost is without meaning except in groups of people who themselves agree what that meaning is. So if I was with a group of women and we all understand what we mean by the word feminist, it’s a word that’s useful maybe to use.
How would you describe the type of cinema you make? You always choose strong, unusual women for your films. For example, Orlando has an original perspective on gender boundaries.
It was written by Virginia Woolf originally and I made the adaptation. And the novel was written in the days [before] the word feminist was used. She was thinking about gender and thinking very creatively, very ironically and very wittily about what did it mean to be male and female? Remember her famous phrase in this book: “The mind of the artist is androgynous.”
Are you referring to the “Myth of Hermaphrodite”?
Yes, when you’re working on a piece of work you don’t think, I’m a woman writing this piece. You think, What does this piece need? and you become a universal sort of human. My experience is female – I’m a female and I bring that in. But look at Rage, there are fourteen characters in it and ten of them are men. But because I’m a female director the attention is centered on the female characters. I spent a lot of time writing and identifying male experiences for those characters.
I’m a political animal, I’m interested in going behind the stereotypes, the divisions of all kinds, between male and female, between white and black, between different cultures, different ages, young and old. All of those divisions and stereotypes are related to each other and anyone that is interested in liberation politics in the broader sense has to have absolute respect for every living creature.
You mentioned a manifesto earlier. Do you have your own manifesto for filmmaking?
I do actually write manifestos sometimes when I’m working on a film but I tend to keep them private because I think manifestos can become very rigid. It can substitute one set of rules for another. Nevertheless, the manifesto is very useful as a way of telling you what you believe in, or even finding out what you believe in. You need that as an independent filmmaker.
Every time you make a film it’s like going to war, you need to know why you’re doing it, or what you believe in, what your principles are, what your ethics are. Rage is a film that had a very strong ethic, all the actors were paid the same – famous, just out of drama school – no difference, equity minimum. I tried to get rid of the hierarchies between the director, the producer, the actors and the runners. And everybody enjoyed that particular aspect of this film. It was freeing for people because they felt proud of themselves. Now in the film industry, that’s revolution.
Be sure to read Vera’s series of interviews from this year’s Berlinale – with actresses Tilda Swinton and Parker Posey. – Ed.
About the Author
Vera von Kreutzbruck was born in Argentina. She started her career in journalism at the English language newspaper, Buenos Aires Herald. After a fellowship in Germany three years ago, she decided to settle in Berlin. She currently works as a freelance journalist contributing to media in Europe and Latin America. Her articles focus on international news and culture in Germany and the European Union.
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