When Sally Potter appears in the reception area of her London production offices and greets me with a handshake, I am struck by how small her hand is. Having just seen her new film, Orlando, a free adaptation of Virginia Woolf's 1928 epic fantasy that fairly bursts the screen with visual bravado, I half expect a female Schwarzenegger to emerge from her office rather than this slight redheaded figure. But appearances-- as Orlando, crowned by Tilda Swinton's ethereal, provocative performance, reveals-- are extremely deceptive.
Today Potter pads through the converted East End shoe factory where she both works and lives. Although the offices of Adventure Pictures overlook blighted warehouses and grim tower blocks, there is a warm air of optimism within, and the antique piano in Potter's office hints at a rather dreamy temperament that takes the long view of things. Indeed, making Orlando fulfilled a lifelong quest for Potter, who was transfixed by the novel as an adolescent. "When I read it, I immediately saw it as a film being projected in my head," she says. "It seemed intensely cinematic. The images never left me. So it was just a process of letting that emerge and manifest."
That process took decades. Although Potter, happily unmarried at 44, had made shorts, documentaries, and a cult black-and-white feature-- The Gold Diggers (1981)-- the self-taught director was an outsider in the commercial film world, and her Orlando script was repeatedly rejected on both sides of the Atlantic. Anyone who has read Woolf's idiosyncratic novel can understand why: Much of its interior life seems unfilmable. Written as a tribute to Woolf's friend, Vita Sackville-West-- the English writer and aristocrat now renowned chiefly for her gardening and flexible sexual preferences-- Orlando is the story of a youth who lives for 400 years without aging and changes sex halfway through. Orlando begins life as a landed Elizabethan nobleman and winds up as a woman in the twentieth century, stripped of property and privilege but spiritually enriched, having experienced the vicissitudes of love and human nature both as a man and as a woman. "Everone said it was uncommercial," says Potter, "but the idea wouldn't leave me alone. So I sat down and made the inner decision, I will make this film, come what may! I felt it was what I was put on earth to do."
Shot on a tiny budget in three countries in just ten weeks-- and nearly not made at all-- Potter's Orlando is a witty, stirring achievement, gliding from ice to desert, from sixteenth to twentieth century, flaunting a stunning array of costumes and wigs. But it's more than just eye-catching: Attempting to extol the forces of art, history, politics, and gender that have shaped Western civilization, the film is nothing less than the story of a soul's journey through time. That Potter has been able to even suggest the depth of the original is laudable; that she has been able to turn it into popular entertainment verges on the miraculous.
Potter's accomplished hand is present in every aspect of the film: the script written for and shaped by Swinton; the casting with a camp twist (Quentin Crisp in drag as Queen Elizabeth I); a New Age sound track, which Potter herself co-composed and sang; and an inspired coupling of naturalistic cinematography (by Russian Alexei Rodionov) with high-artifice production design (by Peter Greenaway's team Ben van Os and Jan Roelfs, and Derek Jarman's costumer Sandy Powell).
When the film showed at this year's Sundance Film Festival, its painterly richness, splendor, and breathtaking scale had studio executives guessing its budget to be $20 million; in fact, it had cost $4 million. This spring in London, despite having only four prints in circulation, it was the city's top-grossing film, above blockbusters Malcolm X and Scent of a Woman. And Hollywood, which had previously triple-bolted its doors against Potter, is now deluging her with scripts.
Potter, a former dancer, sits at her worktable erect but relaxed, elegant in a black-and-white outfit. Pale and small-boned, with soft, upswept auburn hair, she is somehow both gritty and serene, soft-spoken but forcefully intelligent, and her enjoyment of ideas is palpable.
"Orlando is a story of an unpeeling of layers," she says in a reedy voice. "The trappings of inheritance are revealed to be illusions, and in losing everything, Orlando finds him/herself. I'm trying to restore to people that sense of themselves which has nothing to do with gender, time, or circumstance.
"It's also a film about modern consciousness, how to discard history-- particularly England, which is so enmeshed in its past that it has no real vision of the present. Orlando is a kind of metaphor for England itself," she says, looking out the window at the mixture of decay and rebuilding in the streets below.
Orlando may sound ponderous, but it plays meringue light. Potter was as much influenced by Hollywood musicals and the Marx Brothers as by Eisenstein. "I always felt I belonged in the mainstream," says the director, whose mentor was the late Michael Powell. More pop video than operatic tragedy, Orlando still conveys a political subtext, though one could well miss it amid the sheer beauty of the images. "Whatever a camera looks at, it glamorizes," says Potter, sighing.
The daughter of a singer and a designer, Potter had a bohemian childhood in a run-down part of North London: "I was fairly wild, a rough street kid with a head full of poetry and Beethoven. We were a culture of outsiders; everyone was a critic of the status quo. ...It was a childhood full of intensity and principles, but no stability."
Potter's parents separated when she was quite young, and she became highly independent early on, quitting school at fifteen to be a filmmaker. "When I looked through the lens, it was as if everything came together." As there was no undergraduate film school in Britain, Potter went to art school and worked in restaurants until she joined the London Filmmakers' Cooperative in the late seventies.
While the careers of her contemporaries Peter Greenaway and Derek Jarman were picking up speed, Potter could not find funding. She made the odd documentary whenever possible but acquired most of her directing skills by choreographing and performing avant-garde dance and music projects across Europe. "It really gave me the flying hours, the experience of how to construct and stage a piece of work," she explains, "and music has always been hugely spiritually important to me." (To write Orlando's score, she scribbled an A-minor triad, entered the recording studio, and sang what she wanted.)
Potter developed the reputation of being something of a firebrand. Her experimental feature The Gold Diggers, a discourse on the circulation of money and women, was dismissed by one critic as "a feminist torture session," and Potter herself describes it as "relentlessly antinarrative." She used an all-female crew to make the film, which many in the industry interpreted as a flag waving rather than as the intended positive gesture. But, says the film's star (and Potter's close friend), Julie Christie, "Sally has refused to letherself be marginalized or to let her fear get the better of her. She has an overwhelming need to do her own work. That absolute commitment produces great strength."
Orlando is proof of that; it took eight years from conception to completion, including four merely to acquire the rights from an American businessman so obstructive Potter and her producer, Christopher Sheppard, cannot even bring themselves to name him. Sheppard, a former journalist and documentary director, arranged the complicated funding (Russian, British, Dutch, French, and Italian).
"By the time I actually shot the film, I was bursting!" says Potter witha laugh. "I really did my homework: reread and reread the book, then everything ever written about it...all Virginia Woolf's diaries, Elizabethan history, shelves of stuff, and then through it all away and treated the script as something entirely in its own right; writing, rewriting, and writing again, cutting characters and stripping right to the bone."
She customized her script for Swinton, who joined the project four years before filming began. "She was a kind of inspiration and a sounding board," says Potter. "She was involved in the whole development, helping to embody and manifest this possible androgyny."
Potter had seen Swinton in the film Friendship's Death and Manfred Karge's play Man to Man, in which Swinton played a woman who impersonates her dead husband, and was attracted to "the light way in which she dealt with maleness and femaleness. And her screen presence has a quality of stillness, rather than a busy naturalism, that seemed right for the other-worldliness of Orlando."
Star and even actress are terms that grate on Tilda Swinton; the 32-year-old Cambridge-educated avant-gardist prefers the more deadpan performer. Her work rigorously eschews conventional leading-lady glamour and gloss. A muse to Derek Jarman, who has used her in seven films, Swinon has already reached such a cult status in England that a retrospective of her films was recently mounted at London's bastion of high artiness, the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts).
Although Swinton has been compared with a young Vanessa Redgrave, her beauty has an endearing tomboy gaucheness that reminds one equally of Pippi Longstocking. She is renowned for her preference for obscure but weighty roles that match her intelligence and also for entertaining interviewers with unexpected roadblocks and detours.
We meet at a Notting Hill wine bar; Swinton arrives late in a fluster of apologies. Cloud pale, wearing an old navy blue sweater and baggy trousers, her luxuriant red hair in a chignon, she looks smashing. With catlike grace, she peels a prawn.
"Sally and I shared a vision," Swinton declares. "I'd always dreamed of Orlando as a film, and to meet someone else who has dreamed not only that but in the same way, was really important. Orlando is about the similarities between men and women, not the differences. ...It presents a portrait of a spirit rather than a character, which is something I've been interested in for a while now. My attention was on trying to model something consistent, so that Orlando is never purely a man or a woman.
"The scale of the human imagination, the workings of the mind on film-- the immense close-up, the fullness of epressionlessness-- are something I'd been thinking about, so when Sally said, 'Have you ever thought of making a film of Orlando?' it was like finding something under the sofa that you'd lost; it was already there, it just needed to be refound," says Swinton, fixing me with her clear nettle green eyes.
Although some actresses might make heavy weather of the challenge of playing a 400-year-old man/woman, Swinton merely smiles and says, "It was very easy. It fired my imagination, and I never had to concentrate on reseeking it." Having long campaigned with Potter and Sheppard to make Orlando, Swinton is tremendously relieved to have finally done it. "It was a wonderful, intimate, very bonding experience; it's hard now to divide the spoils!"
She found Potter's precision a good foil for her own more airy approach to working. "I'm more interested in asking questions, and she likes solving problems. Sally truly loves cinema-- she enjoys the very meticulous work of planning a film, which is rare. She knows what she wants and is very determined, but I very much hope that Sally's undauntedness won't be called on again: I'm indignant that any of us should have to be that relentless!"
During the stressful shoot, the production department's budget was axed in half. Sheppard suffered the indignity of having his personal credit cards seized, and both Potter and Sheppard had to remortgate their homes along the way. "I won't pretend it was easy-peasy," says Potter. "It was incredibly tough, and all the people close to me were extremely worried."
Veteran actor John Wood, Orlando's suitor Archduke Harry, was struck by Potter's grit on location in Uzbekistan. "It was cold beyond belief at 5:00 A.M. with 300 extras and 100 crew standing around, and we'd already been filming for twelve hours. Sally was directing Tilda in an important close-up, getting infinitesimal shades of subtlety from her, allowing 45 minutes for this one shot. She was able to focus completely despite enormous pressure from every quarter, with serenity and equanimity. We were amazed-- anyone else would have found a solution in the editing room, but she was able to achieve what she wanted with minimum emothion and create a very intimate space for actors."
Potter says modestly that performance skills helped: "I was terrified throughout! But if you show 'confidence,' that's all that's needed: You keep your terror in a private place and act decisively even if you're feeling like jelly. But I knew what I wanted. That I didn't have to act."
She also drew on her documentary background to give the film its deceptively lavish appearance. An ardent Russophile, Potter had filmed a documentary on women in Soviet cinema for Moscow (1988) and used the expertise of cinematographer Rodionov (Elem Klimov's cameraman) to enable her to film Orlando's exceptional Thames ice sequences on the frozen seas of St. Petersburg. "The Russians know how to achieve a grand scale and use wonderful model techniques-- now abandoned by Hollywood-- to give the illusion of space."
With its exotic locations, multicultural cast, Russian cinematographer, and European art directors, Orlando has a remarkably open, fresh, one-world consciousness that feels distinctly un-British. "Well, I never felt English," Potter explains simply. "I was an internationalist from the age of eleven. There's a whole stratum of English society that grows up feeling not-English, because Englishness is so much about the whole class-system establishment."
And yet Orlando is deeply embedded in the storybook England of titles and country houses. "Exactly. It's that peculiar paradox of being inside a culture and outside it at the same time. If you grow up with that sort of mythology, then it's embedded in you-- or you are embedded in it. You have to make some sense of it."
Despite the film's costume-drama glamour, Potter insists it is a critique of romanticized Englishness. "I wanted a principle of contradiction, of irony in every shot or scene so that it would never become yet another picture of England-- rolling green lawns, the great country house, yawn, yawn. ...I think there is a tendency in English culture to cling to these things as if they are the substance of life!" She laughs. "There is an overidentification with property that comes with the colonial mentality. Far transcending that in importance is the human spirit, and the true meaning of why we're here."
Although Orlando reaches for a wide audience, Potter brings her humanist/feminist sensibility with her, lightly updating the film's ending, taking Orlando into the 1990s as a single mother with a female rather than male child, thereby preventing Orlando's inheriting the house and title, as she does in the novel.
"Isn't it a realistic portrayal of where we are?" asks Potter. "There are no easy answers at the end; it's not a prescription for where to go-- I'm not happy if you thought that-- but I don't think the single woman's is a voice that's been heard or a face that's been seen. All the stories that have been told are about women finding salvation in a mate, hanging their identity on a man or on something other than who they are. That feeling of coming out of the shadows of history and taking center screen-- even if we don't know where we're going or who we are-- what an exciting moment! What an ecstasy of uncertainty about it! That's where we are now! I want people to feel a kind of release at the end, hope about being alive, and the possibility of change. Empowerment through entertainment."
As for herself, the only uncertainty is what to do next. "My whole life is about making films," she declares. "The only other thing I have time for is my weekly ballroom-dancing lessons." She wants to continue developing her own unique scripts-- the present one is about an epidemic of immaculate conceptions-- but she is considering all possibilities, she says laughingly, "apart from the ones for costume dramas where someone ages 400 years."