Sally Potter: "They've thrown the word 'feminist' at me like it's a stone."

BarcelonaSally Potter (London, 1949) is in Barcelona as a guest of the International Women's Film Festival. On Saturday she presented a screening ofOrlando (1992) at the CCCB, and this Monday she participated in a round table with filmmakers Ulrike Ottinger and Paul B. Preciadowho have also directed films inspired by Virginia Woolf's classicPotter's is the best-known film version of the book, but while at the time the ambition of bringing to the screen the impossible story of a character spanning four centuries and undergoing a sex change was valued, today it is considered one of the great investigations into identity and gender in the history of cinema, a key work in historiography. queer.

What led her to adapt OrlandoIt was a well-known novel, but with a reputation for being impossible to adapt into a film.

— I like challenges. But it didn't actually seem that difficult to me, more like alluring. I could visualize it on screen, even though everyone told me I couldn't. So it became an obsession. And it took a very, very long time to convince the financiers that it was possible to make. In the end, the solution came in the form of a co-production with the Soviet Union, where communism had just collapsed and there was a kind of chaotic opening up to projects that in the West seemed like madness.

You had only directed one film [Gold prospectors[from 1983] and it hadn't been a success. It must have been difficult for them to trust you to lead such an ambitious and complex project.

— Almost impossible. It required immense persistence and effort. Seven years of work, five of them spent writing and rewriting the adaptation, casting, and traveling to the Soviet Union to secure funding. It was incredibly difficult, but that very experience shaped the film's texture: the feeling of perpetual change, of a story impossible to bring to the screen. Only in an imaginary world.

At the CCCB, she shared her thoughts with Ulrike Ottinger and Paul B. Preciado. Her adaptations ofOrlando They're very different from yours. Do you know it?

— Yes, I've seen them. In the end, Orlando It's a classic, and like Shakespeare, it lends itself to many different interpretations. The themes are so universal that everyone finds their own way of experiencing the book. The big difference between adapting the book now and when I did it is that back then it was still subject to... copyrightSo we had to pay a lot of money for the rights. Now it's in the public domain, so you can do whatever you want with the book, like Paul did.

Orlando is one of the first iconic roles of Tilda SwintonAt that time, she was only known for her work with Derek Jarman, which wasn't exactly popular. Now it's impossible to imagine the film without her, but did she have to fight hard to get the lead role?

— Absolutely. Most producers told me I couldn't have one person playing both genders. "You have to have a man in the first part, and then a woman in the second." They didn't even want Tilda. As you say, she wasn't very well-known. But for me, it was crystal clear that it was going to be her. When I asked her for the role, I thought we'd shoot in six months, but it took five years. However, this gave us the time to work together on the right tone to make Orlando a believable character that audiences would love.

If I were to manage Orlando If Tilda Swinton were unavailable today, would you consider giving the role to a transgender actress?

— Well, Paul B. Preciado has already done this. He's given the role to many trans people. So, I don't need to do it. Besides, I don't need to do it again. OrlandoIt was a big part of my life. And 33 years later I'm still talking about it.OrlandoI've done my part. And regarding the trans issue, it's a very current debate, but when I made the film, it wasn't the same topic and phenomenon it is now. There were other ways of talking about sex and gender. I tried to explore the issue from Virginia Woolf's perspective. And her thesis, more or less, was that there were no differences between the sexes. What exists is a performance of masculinity and femininity in response to social pressures and conditions related to whether you're perceived as a man or a woman. She approaches a serious subject from a lighthearted perspective, and I followed her lead.

Reading interviews with him from that time, I was surprised by his reluctance to use the term feministWas it very problematic for a female director to describe her film as feminist?

— My reluctance stemmed from being labeled. It's the same reason why people now identify as non-binary. I didn't want a reductive label placed on my films. Throughout my life, I've attended many feminist demonstrations, and as a director, I've addressed feminist themes. This already defines me as a feminist. But if you had been in my shoes and knew how this label was used to belittle me as a filmmaker, you would understand why it wasn't helpful to use any label other than... filmmakerNeither man, nor woman, nor feminist, nor anything else: filmmaker. And if you create a special category like women's cinema or feminist cinema, you're excluding women from the great tradition of film. But yes, it's absurd to have to defend myself against a word I identify with, a word that is progressive, intelligent, revolutionary, and beautiful.

Has her position changed over time? The perception of a filmmaker who identifies as a feminist is not the same today.

— Yes, but I've been doing this for 40 years. I've been told that many times. feminist as if it were a stone. "Shut up, you feminist whore." Or "You're a feminist filmmaker, so we'll put you in a special category or at a festival where there are only women filmmakers, not at the big festivals where all the men are." The word feminist It can be used to harm. "Ah, I understand what you're doing, it's feminist cinema." The term itself has changed over the years, it's evolved since the first wave of feminism. I chose to distance myself a bit because it was too easy a label.

All films are products of their time. How did the political landscape of the UK in the late 1980s and early 1990s influence this film? Orlando?

— Very intensely. We were coming out of the 80s and Margaret Thatcher, the most reactionary and destructive prime minister in many years, who happened to be a woman. It was all very difficult to grasp. And the end of the Cold War also had a huge impact. It was a time of seismic change—politically, culturally, and geographically—with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. And I went about thirty times: to Russia, Georgia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan… This texture of change is very present in the film. But I made a point of not conveying the film's themes through the characters' voices, or telling people how to interpret what's happening; it's better to let them feel the absurdity, the ridiculousness, and the cruelty inherent in the British class system.

I really like how the film translates the ingenuity of the novel to cinema by breaking the fourth wall.

— The solution we found was a sense of complicity with the reader, a way of showing that both the creator and the audience understand that this is a film and that we're playing with reality. At first, we had long monologues to the camera, but we shortened them from the script, and often it was just a glance.

I thought about Orlando upon seeing the series Fleabag.

— Yes, I know her. There are a lot of films and series clearly influenced by her. OrlandoWhat surprises me is that they don't recognize it. Yorgos Lanthimos made The favorite in the same locations, with the same camera crew and the same costume designer [Sandy Powell]... But there's not a single mention of Orlando in the credits or anywhere else. It's very rare. There's a resistance to acknowledging precedents, and it's a problem that female directors face more than male directors. It also often happens in science that women discover things and men make the next version and take all the credit.

Orlando It won the award for best film at the 1993 Sitges Film Festival. She was the first female director to win that award. The curious thing is that this fact isn't even mentioned in contemporary accounts, whereas now it would be one of the most prominent details in any news report.

— I didn't know that I was the first woman to win the festival. It's hard for people to imagine now because everything is so different, but back then, when I went to a festival, I was always the only female director. I was the first woman born after the Second World War to direct a feature film in the UK. And being the first to walk through a door, time and time again, puts you in a very isolated and lonely place. Now, young women know that it's possible to be a film director. There are quite a few female directors who are well-known and respected, so they don't have to climb a mountain to get there; they just have to try and make a good film.

AfterOrlando He made a very different and personal film, The Tango Lesson (1997), which you yourself starred in. What led you to play the lead role?

— I didn't really want to do it. What I wanted was to dance, because that's how I relaxed my mind while I worked on it. OrlandoI used to go to ballroom dances to waltz and things like that. But when I learned tango, I realized it was a very interesting dance, and I went to Buenos Aires to learn from the old masters. At first, I wanted to make a documentary, but it evolved into a fictionalized version of my experience learning to tango. Finally, I decided that maybe I should make the sacrifice and auditioned.

And how do you audition yourself?

— Without mercy. I asked Robbie Muller, a wonderful cinematographer, to film me with Pablo Verón, who would be my co-star in the film. And I gathered a group of very critical and tough friends and asked them what they thought. Was it a disaster? Was it painful? Or was it worth trying? There were mixed opinions, but generally they said the result was interesting and worth taking the risk. So, with some trepidation, I did it. Some even told me that doing this afterOrlandoThat it had been a success was an act of self-sabotage. That I should have accepted the many offers that came my way from Hollywood. But I would read them and think, "I don't want to do it." I was used to the idea of a film possessing me to the point of needing to make it. It was what I had heard with Orlandoand I wanted to feel that sensation again.

One of his last successes was satire The partyIt was performed in Barcelona a couple of years ago. in a version directed by Sergi Belbel.

— I rewrote it for the stage at the request of a theater publisher, and I didn't need to make many changes to the script. It was published as a play and has been performed in Vienna, Budapest, Athens, and, yes, also in Barcelona. It's having a new theatrical life, which I like. And I like that people can take it and do whatever they want with it; it has nothing to do with me anymore.

When the film premiered in 2017, it was read as a work heavily influenced by the impact of Brexit in the United Kingdom, but it has turned out to be much more universal.

— I tried to make it universal by eliminating the more specific aspects of the time. But it's basically a story about a generation that gradually realizes it has tried to live by very strong ideals and has ended up broken by the fact that its ideals don't work. The demonstrations never stopped the nuclear power plants, they didn't stop the invasion of Iraq, and so on. It's about that wound and the conflict between idealism and betrayal. The person who asked me to do it in Athens told me it was the story of Greece. And the same in Budapest, that it was the story of Hungary.

In fact, it also functions somewhat as a history of recent years in Catalonia.

— See? It's fantastic, it works for everyone [Laughs].