Sally Potter has a whiff of Marmite about her. Not literally, let’s be clear; but her films don’t exactly inspire fence sitting. Ever since her feature debut, The Gold Diggers in 1983, she’s run the critical gamut, from borderline hagiography to outright disdain. In 1984, the then National Film Theatre even invited her to programme a season of films that inspired The Gold Diggers (no pressure, then). She didn’t release her next film, Orlando, until 1992, making your average case of second album syndrome look like a minor sniffle by comparison.
Her latest, Rage, has already raised critical hackles since its unveiling in Berlin last February. It’s been chewed up and spat out as a murder mystery-cum-fashion industry satire but, discussing it with Potter herself, it quickly becomes clear that that wasn’t actually the film she was trying to make.
LWLies: Why did you choose the fashion world to focus on for Rage, and why New York in particular?
Potter: Well, funnily enough, I’ve never felt that the fashion world itself is the focus of the film. It’s the setting but it’s a setting you never see. So it’s really the paradox of having as a setting for a story that’s really about the unravelling of people in the face of corporate power and of global crisis. Having that setting remaining invisible, because the fashion world is something that is so, in a way, over-imprinted in people’s consciousness that if you say ‘catwalk’, everybody knows what that looks like: you know, models – okay, wearing different clothes, depending on the designer – walking down, posing and turning round and going back; lots of flashing going on. So you don’t need to see it to know it, apparently: the surface of it. So it what’s behind that, the individuals behind that – including those hidden workers who rarely get a voice – that becomes the setting for a world that could equally apply to other industries but, in this case, is so much about the world of the seen and the unseen. So, there’s those kind of paradoxes that made it attractive as a setting, especially a setting you didn’t see.
LWLies: With the issues that come up in the film, having it set in New York rather than Milan or Paris gives it an added resonance.
Potter: Because everyone thinks they know New York. And what it looks like.
LWLies: And just the fact that by the issues that come up in the film, the fashion world seems to function as a prism through which you can view other industries in the world, and the global economy.
Potter: Exactly, any part of the media… Exactly as you’re saying.
LWLies: You’re known for really formally inventive filmmaking and theatre. When you have an idea is the form what comes first, or are you thinking of the idea, and then the form comes about?
Potter: No… with this one I really struggled with it for years. It was a film I’d written as a more ‘conventional’ script, where you saw everything that was happening, and I knew there was something very wrong with it and I didn’t know what, so I put it aside, made two other films [Yes and The Tango Lesson], then came back to it and thought, ‘Hmm, there’s still something that’s really interesting in here…’
And then, I’d subsequently had a lot of experiences myself with the internet, and with other things, and eventually found, if you like, the form, of the idea – of interviews given by an unseen and unheard person, and that the idea of what everything is offering, the story is offering, and it’s the inner world of the characters unravelling, on frame, through the kind of confessional, that we’re know familiar with from so many other things – from Big Brother and stuff – but which tend to be phoney confessionals. So: a kind of unveiling, an unveiling through the power of the attention of this ‘other’. So that formal solution came about gradually, and with difficulty, through many, many rewrites and then it was kind of a bit of a Eureka moment. I kind of finally thought, ‘Okay, this is it’, then once I was onto that – the minimalism of that – I went, ‘Okay, this could start to get exciting. How much can I strip this form away? How little can we show and still understand what’s happening, what’s going on?’
LWLies: As you say, the film is very contemporary – as is its distribution, which we’ll come onto – in its style and how the story unravels online, and the kind of effect that creates. But there’s something very classically theatrical about the set-up and almost novelistic about the conceit of having a framed narrative of ‘found footage’ in this case. Did you find yourself looking back, in terms of formal influences?
Potter: Well I found myself thinking about the history of the portrait, you know, all the way back, through painting, and what it was to just gaze at a human face. You know, how much information is there in that geography? Do we need to travel to be global, or can you just sit and look at your best friend? But really look? Or a stranger? Like your face, like I’m looking at you now. Do we need, do I need to go to New York? Not necessarily, no. I’m starting to talk ecology now, but there is an ecology of personal relationships as well, and a kind of addiction to travel and the big and the multiple that this film, in a way, is a protest against – you know, the way of going into what’s immediate and what counts and how close you can get, and what does it mean, one human to another. And then, in a way, all those other delusions and illusions fall away. Umm, I’ve forgotten the question…
LWLies: Did you need to go to New York to film it then?
Potter: [laughs] Well, this is when the process and the product start to mirror each other. I knew that I wanted to find out how much I could with how little. That that meant, you know, going for my absolute first choice, greatest-all-time actors within completely minimal structures. So, we came up with this format of, okay, each actor is being asked for a two day commitment only, and I will go to them. So, usually we have this nightmare of schedules, you know: ‘Jude’s available then…’, but most people can fit two days into their schedule, especially if they don’t have to travel. So I said okay, if we get our crew down to the absolute minimum, if I shoot it, it’s like there’s a green screen in my back pocket, just like the kid [Michelangelo], set it up – even in someone’s hotel room – set it up, film, go away. The fact is it didn’t turn out quite like that but we needed two bases because half the actors were based over there [the States] and half were over here, basically. So we just used a photographer’s studio in each case with a green screen.
LWLies: Talking about how stripped down the film is and how you mention getting close to the human face, the visual image is prime, but the sound design becomes a million times more important…
Potter: Yes, hugely important.
LWLies: Could you talk a bit about the sound design?
Potter: The sound design was fascinating because at first I though we’d use documentary sound – I mean ‘real’ sound, say, recorded in a real fashion show, for example – but as soon as you listen to that, a microphone, as you know, is indiscriminate and picks up everything in equal range, just like this one [gestures at my dodgily positioned dictaphone]: far too much information. So, again, to tell a story in that way, it was like less information gives you more, so we constructed it layer by layer. It’s very simple actually, the track, but very layered and very precise and very subtle. I’ve never done so much work on things that were almost imperceptible, you know, incredible attention to detail, really. And that was an ear-opener for all of us; we’d never worked on a track with that kind of, almost ‘not-there’, intensity.
LWLies: But it’s very ambient. Watching it the other day, I was thinking, ‘Can I hear that outside, or is it on the soundtrack?’ It’s the attention to detail, like you said, but there’s something going on all the time with the sound.
Potter: Yeah, there is. It’s wanting to awaken the senses, so that the big-budget, massive, ‘whoooooooaa’ sort of sound, whizzing around and massive special effects and everything, induces a kind of comatose-like, sloth of consumption. So, trying to do the opposite – to give a lot, not to not give – to give but to give spaciousness, that allows the ears to wake up, and the eyes to wake up, and therefore for people to feel their senses sharpened, rather than dulled, by the end of the film.
LWLies: In popular filmmaking what we see so often seems to automatically take precedence over what we hear. Was this something you had in mind?
Potter: You know, the ears are that way [gestures around head], the eyes are that way [points straight ahead], so we’ve got ‘surround’ ears, but we have to move our eyes and our head to see. So, it’s very much routed in the body, in that way, the body experience. And the creative experience of how the senses then construct something, and turn it into what it is.
You know, I’ve always felt, I work on a film for years, often – I mean, always years, but sometimes more years than others – refining, refining, refining. The first time you see it with an audience you know every single person in the audience is making their own film up, out of what they see, and you know that once you start listening to feedback. People see different things, depending on where they’re coming from, how they are that day, you know, what the projectionist did, whatever.
So, viewing is a creative act in that sense, so we decided to kind of go with that more, and create this spacious, aural environment in which people could construct, visually, from sound clues, the offscreen world, whilst concentrating on what’s given them in front of them, which is the geography of the human face, and the contradictions between what people are saying and what’s actually going on. And that’s the layers we worked on with the actors. That gap: investigate that gap. And in that gap comes this kind of truth-telling thing, and what’s true? What we see? What we hear? Or what we don’t see and what we don’t hear?
LWLies: So did you ever think, since you’ve worked in the theatre before, this might have worked as a theatre piece? Rage made me think of Katie Mitchell in particular. In Some Trace of Her she used video screens on stage to provide super close-ups of the actors’ faces.
Potter: Well, it’s quite funny, I mean, Katie Mitchell – who I know and whose work I like very much – she told me that Orlando had been a big influence on her, and she came to see Yes, for example, and wrote about it in one of the Sunday papers or something… So, you know, there are these interfaces; what I see in some of her more recent work is somebody who loves films but whose medium is theatre, and so she’s kind of exploring that – how you can bring one world into another. But I never saw this as theatrical this film. I saw it as very much to do with the photographic image, above all and the world of sound, and that’s cinematic but in a world in which the internet is displacing what we thought of as cinematic, so we kind of have to rethink what the boundaries are, what the frame edges are, what distribution is and all that…
LWLies: You’ve managed to gather an incredible cast. On the one hand, the film sounds like an actor’s and director’s dream – just you as camera operator, the sound recordist and the actor, with no one else getting in the way – but it’s also very exposing.
Potter: To the actors.
LWLies: So, did you find yourself having to convince people or were they jumping onboard?
Potter: A bit of both… No, though, I never try and convince people, actually. I learnt that a long time ago. It’s pointless. If people are interested and want to do it, you go with that energy… The really good actors knew that it was a terrifying prospect and a thrilling prospect because of the exposure, including even the most well-known ones, you know – terrified, really. But they knew that it was creating a space perhaps where they could go somewhere they hadn’t gone before, and in which there would be the luxury of undivided attention and the ability to really work deep, in a smaller zone.
Because shooting big film is so fragmented: so much waiting around, so much attention on technical detail, set-up, lighting, whatever. And in that madness, keeping the focus… In this case, we were very dedicated to the actors’ performance. Each two days it was like going back to the beginning of the film, starting all over again, and going through a whole process. And by the end of each two days, we all felt as if we’d made a whole film, and we’d deeply bonded – tears, goodbyes, hugs! It was very emotionally intense. I think the actors all found it a pretty good experience, from what they’ve said to me. And I loved it, I love working with actors, and I’m often frustrated that I don’t get enough time to go as deep as I’d like to – really, creating a space in which, you know, the first layers go, the second layers go, the third layers go, the fourth layers go… and somebody becomes kind of naked.
LWLies: So, how about the script? In the two days’ filming you had with each actor, was there room for development?
Potter: No, it was all written. But I always, as a rule of thumb, when I’m first meeting with an actor, once they’ve agreed to do it, we’ll go through it and I will listen to it and talk about, and I’ll listen to comments very carefully. And if things aren’t quite working or aren’t quite fitting, or just, they’re alright, they’re good but they just don’t fit this particular person, I’ll rewrite to suit. So, by the time somebody arrives on set, I hope what they feel is writing they understand everything – why it’s there, why they’re saying it. There’s no kind of obstacles.
People generally want to improvise and to stuff when the script isn’t working for them, so they want to find some space by improvising. But if you’re giving them space within the text, that need is not there. Having said that, if something came up on the set that wasn’t quite right, we’d stop and talk about it, and I’d change it, if necessary. I’ve learnt the hard way though, that if you make last-minute changes on set, you forget those years of preparation in here [taps her head], where every word relates to some other word and if you change things because, for that character it doesn’t feel right, you get in the cutting room and you go ‘Oh my God… They’re saying the same thing as that person there, now I’m going to have to cut that…’ You can’t do thoughtless, random stuff. I quite often do improvising in a workshop setting, to loosen stuff up; maybe even generate a bit more material, but then I’ll try and hone it.
LWLies: Lots of the characters seem to spout certain clichés and conform to certain types. You have, for example, the Hispanic seamstress…
Potter: Anita de Los Angeles.
LWLies: It’s almost a parodic name, really.
Potter: It turned out it was her real name.
LWLies: Really?!
Potter: I did not know. Adriana turned around and said, ‘Did you know my name is ‘de Los Angeles’?’ I said, ‘No!’ [laughs]. So it’s not too parodic!
LWLies: Obviously not…
Potter: In fact, if anything, I tended towards the understatement.
LWLies: But, while they’re revealing themselves to ‘Michelangelo’, who’s behind the camera, the characters are not in dialogue, sparring with other actors onscreen. Did you worry about trying to get behind the stereotypes, the layers, as you put it?
Potter: They were talking to me, and that’s how we built it. A real relationship – first of all in rehearsal, then behind the camera. So I tried to embody Michelangelo and get as involved as this child would. But I think that the whole question of clichés and stereotypes, for me it’s more about listening to how people really talk, and the kind of received words and phrases people use, to try and communicate what they’re really thinking and feeling. And, as I say, the gap between that, and some inexpressible level of thought and feeling, that was behind the eyes. So, I think only a few of them really speak things that we feel… If you look at the text, a lot of the things are really not things we really feel people we’ve heard people say.
LWLies: It’s more the character types I was getting at. You’ve got the heartless marketing guy and the egomaniacal fashion designer… how did you research the characters?
Potter: Listening, and all the things I’ve always done. And then understating! But the marketing guy, the Bob B character, I mean, his journey through the film – at the beginning of the film he’s spouting his line, but pretty quickly, he’s a broken individual, who’s been made redundant. And I don’t think that’s… So what we concentrated on, actually, was the vulnerability behind the role, in his case. And the egomaniacal fashion designer – well, I found myself observing my own behaviour, as well, when being interviewed…[nervous laughter all round] And here I am, you’re inviting me to talk, and I’m having grandiose thoughts about my work [adopts highfalutin tones]. You know, you hear yourself spouting this stuff and try and be accurate, but being invited to talk about your work does invite a degree of ponderousness if you’re not careful about it. So, it could be any maker or creator but I read a lot of fashion designer interviews and blimey! You know, this is really understated stuff, compared to some of those! So, I researched through observation, in that world, and reading a lot, going to some shows but also, I’m afraid, people in the film industry aren’t so different, honestly… And other industries.
LWLies: Someone like Lily Cole defies the stereotype of the vulnerable, exploited model. But in Rage, she’s actually playing the inverse of her real self: one of many terrified 14 year old girls in that industry being manipulated. We’re all familiar with that. Why did you put her in that role when that’s so clearly not true of her?
Potter: Well I met tons and tons of female actors for that part, and models, actually, and then finally met Lily. And I realised that to show a model onscreen, you’ve really got to show the real thing. It just doesn’t work, showing somebody who wasn’t what that could be. That’s point one. Point two, she’s a really, really interesting performer. She’s incredibly at ease with the lens but when I met her, she was right at the beginning of her acting work. She hadn’t got the Terry Gilliam part or anything like that yet, that happened after. So, she was incredibly bright, but what we drew on was her experience when she was 14. She’s now 21 but when she first started, she was like that. And when her mum saw it, she said ‘Oh, that’s just how Lily was when she was 16!’
And I also wanted people in there so I could say, ‘Tell me if anything doesn’t ring true, not only in your part but in anybody else’s part in the whole film, as I wanted this to be really authentic to anyone from that world.’ So, within the informality of it, it got ticked off by her, and some other people, for its own particular kind of authenticity. And I think what she does in her part as Lettuce is she starts out by looking like one thing but becomes the other thing, in the end. She’s the one, after all, who gets the last word, and gets the camera in her hand at the end. So, this kind of thin, vulnerable 14 year old, whatever, is going to be the one who’s the author of the future.
LWLies: What were you trying to do with ‘Michelangelo’? Is he simply a proxy for the viewer or were you trying to add another layer?
Potter: Well, I hoped what you’d get through the experience, was a portrait of somebody you never see, through the way that these adults all relate to him, that you’d bit by bit, piece him together, you know – your own little mystery story, your own little painting, your own creation. And of course, people on the internet use all these pseudonyms so, we had an intern in New York whose name was ‘Scorsese-Kubrick’ I think! So, Michelangelo was not an unreal kind of name for someone to use, but I also wanted to keep the ethnic identity of the character ambiguous – so it could be a Latin American name, an Afro-American name… and sort of take it from there. I think there’s an evocation of the great, grand masters of the past, I think Michelangelo would be one painter, sculptor. The child with an internet is sort of carving out of that granite, ether-granite, their own David. That’s what he’s doing; he’s a junior artist.
LWLies: On that point, can you talk about the distribution, which relates to the form…
Potter: Well, just that we wanted the process and the product to be two parts of a whole experience, that the distribution would mirror the story itself, and how it was filmed. The fact that Michelangelo is supposed to be filming the film on his cell phone and putting it out on the internet, over a period of seven days, to then actually put the film out in episodes, over a period of seven weeks in this case, on cell phones and the internet, and a virtual kind of screening where people can suddenly be in simultaneously digital reality with the live event… The multi-platform intangibility of it, that is the virtual world, it seemed to make complete sense and be very exciting, actually.
LWLies: Obviously the Michelangelo character is a dramatic conceit but how does it work dramatically? Why do all the characters come back and confess to him? Is it a vanity thing? And why do they keep doing it, especially when they know it’s being leaked onto the internet?
Potter: Anyone will talk to somebody who will really listen. Most of us don’t really get listened to. Even when someone’s pretending to listen they’re really only thinking their own thoughts; the ‘me too’ syndrome. ‘Yeah yeah, it’s bit like me…’, you know. So to get truly focussed attention, which is what a psychoanalyst tries to give, or a priest, is what allows people to unburden, and the need to be listened to, and to speak their truth, and in the process find out what they really are, is enormous. So it could be a child and obviously in this case, something about the attention of this child, in the midst of this world that is full of white noise, would draw people. At the same time, a child just armed with a cell phone, would be not a threat. They would feel at the beginning – you know, there are all these mentoring programmes – that they were doing this kid a favour, doing the world a favour, therefore feeling good about themselves… and that sort of, seamlessly – to use a good word, perhaps in this world – morphs into a need to talk to the child. A few people have said, you know, it would never happen. I know it happens. Because, first of all, when I was a child, that was what people did to me. Adults unburdened themselves to me and there must have been something in my gaze, as a child, that invited it. But I’ve seen it, and it does happen.
LWLies: You’ve talked about how hyper-intimate you wanted to make the film, but through the sound world you’ve got an awareness of the wider world outside. At the end, it provides a kind of aural deus ex machina which hints at wider, global issues – terrorism, for example. What kind of thoughts were you trying to inspire…? Or were you just trying to inspire thought?
Potter: Well, that’s a good thought! To inspire thought is good. To awaken the senses, as we were talking about, is one very simple one. But I think what you’ve just touched on is the relationship between the intimate and the global. You know, there’s no such thing as a global ‘out there’ and an intimate ‘in here’; we’re all linked with each other and with the planet we’re on. And that sounds like too big a theme but that’s why I wanted to narrow it down and make it be, apparently, so simple, and so intimate, to allow people themselves to make the connection with wider things, by association, by feeling and by association. There isn’t a didactic moment in it. But people can make their own links if they choose to.
