Sally Potter is one of the world’s most interesting filmmakers. She’s made films with shoestring budgets, and some bigger movies as well — no matter their size, they are always intriguing. She took on a Virginia Woolf classic with “Orlando,” told a story primarily via iambic pentameter in “Yes,” drew parallels between teenage girlhood and the threat of nuclear destruction in “Ginger & Rosa,” and brought contemporary political tensions to a head in “The Party.”
Potter’s latest, “The Roads Not Taken,” is about memory. Leo (Javier Bardem) is suffering from dementia and has become incapable of taking care of himself. His daughter, Molly (Elle Fanning), comes to take him to two different doctors appointments. No longer living in the present, Leo keeps revisiting his past and the decisions he’s made. The pic, which premiered at the Berlinale, is an exploration of love, loss, and how we come to terms with our choices.
We interviewed Potter live about “The Roads Not Taken,” and much more, at the inaugural Girls Club event last month. A community for women creatives, culture-changers, and storytellers, the Girls Club will be hosting more live events and opportunities such as this in the future. We are offering the first month free for those who are interested and identify as a woman. Please email girlsclubnetwork@gmail.com to receive an invitation and let us know a bit about who you are and what you do.
Bleecker Street will host virtual screenings of “The Roads Not Taken” beginning today, April 10.
This interview has been edited. It was transcribed by Sophie Willard.
W&H: Thank you for being here, the inaugural event for the Girls Club. We couldn’t have a better person joining us: Sally Potter. Talk to us about your new film, “The Roads Not Taken.” It’s a beautiful look at memory, family, and choices. Could you give us the the logline for people who are not familiar yet?
SP: Well, Susan Sontag said [in her text “Illness as Metaphor”] when she became ill, “There’s the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the [sick],” and then the line that divides these two states. This film explores the relationship between a daughter, Molly (Elle Fanning), and Leo (Javier Bardem), her father of Mexican origin. He is, in quotes, “losing his mind.” He has some kind of dementia-like state. She’s looking after him for 24 hours — during that 24 hours, we go into his mind, and into her receptive state in which she witnesses him becoming more ill, and we find that not all is as it seems.
This film came out of a very personal experience I had with my own brother. He suffered from a form of young onset dementia, but I could see that he was all there, and I just got increasingly intrigued by where he might be going when he seemed to be in some other place in his mind.
This could apply to somebody with autism, somebody with mental illness. The whole film is an exploration of what the mind is, and how we care for and love those around us who are, in quotes, “sick” but are still there. So that is what it’s a meditation around.
What happens is that while Leo is in these otherworldly states of mind, he’s actually visiting the lives he could have lived had he made other choices earlier on — the roads not taken, that universal thing. We’ve all had crossroads moments where we’ve made choices that have taken us one place or another, and wonder what would have happened if we had gone the other way.
W&H: And is it true that the film was initially called “Molly?”
SP: It was — the daughter is called Molly, and Leo doesn’t remember her name until the very end. I was advised by American distributors that “molly” was the word for a drug, and it might be a little misleading!
In fact, I think “The Roads Not Taken” is a good title because it gives people a clue already about what status, what reality to give these parallel lives that we see happening during the story. It’s Molly who is, in a way, holding the emotional space and playing the role of carer, which women so often do — lovingly and willingly, but nevertheless they are the unsung heroines in this situation.
W&H: And I think that a lot of it does fall to women, but this is something that keeps coming up so much in our culture now — caring for children as well as caring for adults, for parents, and how we’re all struggling.
SP: Exactly. And of course now that we’re in what’s just been announced as being a pandemic situation [COVID-19/coronavirus], this phrase of Susan Sontag’s about the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the ill, how we deal with illness, and what our relationship with illness is, is going to be on everybody’s minds right now.
W&H: I think the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the ill seem to be the same now in the world we’re living in.
SP: We’re all in the kingdom of the ill. Yeah, we all potentially can be. That also is true — disability activists have been saying that for a long time. We are all temporarily able-bodied until something hits us. So thinking about care, and love, and the work of loving others is something that we all get to think about and know about deeply at some point in our lives.
W&H: My understanding is that you wrote this script, and it was ready back in 2015 when you were doing “The Party.” How did you make the decision of which film goes first, if you have both of them done? Was it financing? What were the issues?
SP: Well, I always work on at least two, usually three things at once, in parallel. This is partly because I like to do that. I find that if I’m working on one thing, I can get maybe a little too down it and a little bit stuck, so I go over to the other project, and while I’m working on that, the back of my brain somewhere is sorting out the problems of the first one. So it suits me to do that, but also pragmatically, you never know which project is going to appeal — which is going to go ahead of the pack. So I’m open to that, and things come together for different reasons: casting, availability, or whatever.
While I was writing “The Roads Not Taken” — which is a tough subject, in many ways — I was writing “The Party” as a political comedy on the side, partly to entertain myself, I have to say. Then it just so happened that that one was easily cast, and took off quicker. So then I returned to this one afterwards.
W&H: You talk about how you make some bigger movies and smaller movies, and that is just the way that it works out for you. Is it creatively that works best for you, happenstance related to timing, or a mixture of both?
SP: For me, all movies are big movies. Lower budget, higher budget — that’s secondary. In a way, they take the same amount of passion, amount of care, and attention to detail, and work whether you get paid, not paid, whatever. So I don’t really make the distinction, honestly, but I think flexibility and adaptability in what is an imperfect situation — and it is always a struggle to finance a film, any film. You have to be on your toes.
I think Orson Welles said that you have to be like cotton pickers, and go where the harvest is. A lot of filmmakers have now gone into TV series or other places where things are easier to finance. I still love the fiction feature form — I think it’s a classic form that’s going to endure. I have nothing against TV series, but film is the medium that I’ve given most of my time to.
So I think adaptability within that, about what’s possible at any given moment, or what seems to be attracting people to a particular idea that I have — I’ll go with that. I love them all, but at different times they are easier or harder to finance.
W&H: You’re particularly a writer-director, you’re not a director for hire. Talk about the challenges of that and why it’s important to you.
SP: Well, the major challenge is it takes longer, so in the end you have a smaller quantity of films made because you can’t turn them around really, really, really fast because writing is a slow, contemplative process that mostly consists of rewriting — and then an edit is long. But for me the joy is this total arc from nothing: nothing to something. You know, I can’t believe that I sit down on day one with a blank sheet of paper, but I know that eventually it’s going to be up there on the screen, and it’s all going to exist — this world that somehow materializes from nothing. So that’s really about the joy of writing.
I didn’t necessarily set out that way, but it became that to make the films I wanted to make, I had to write them. Nobody was going to give them to me, and I couldn’t wait for that moment to arrive at some point in history. So, in a way, I had to write — then I discovered that I love to write.
W&H: Do you think that’s still a lesson for people, particularly women, today: you just have to make your own work?
SP: I think the lesson is: don’t wait. Women have waited too long for every damn thing. Don’t waste a moment of your life waiting. Adapt, be flexible, do whatever it takes, or fight for what you want to become — in the case of the director, if you want to direct a film written by somebody else, then find ways of making that happen too.
I think “get on with it” is the basic best bit of advice. Whenever I talk to students who feel this condition isn’t right, that condition isn’t, or they’re not being given this opportunity, they’re being prevented from that opportunity, I say, “Well, do you have a phone? Yes? Does your phone record images? Yes? Do you have a friend who might be prepared to perform? Then you can make a movie starting tomorrow morning.”
Work with what you have, work with the materials that you have, get the practice, get the flying hours, and find out the way you want it. It’s a useful piece of advice, and it puts one into a mentality of power and action rather than passivity and waiting.
W&H: Absolutely. Now, Elle Fanning is so good in everything she does. I want to talk about her arc since she was in your 2012 film “Ginger & Rosa.” I believe I met both of you in Toronto when you were premiering that, and she’s incredibly mature for such a young woman. Seven years later, she’s done a lot of things since you last worked with her. What was it like reuniting with her?
SP: I adore Elle Fanning, and I have great respect for her. I think she’s an absolutely extraordinary actor. She’s very professional in the best sense of that word. She’s somebody who turns up on time, she knows all her lines, and is totally receptive and eager, and freshly jolly about the whole life, in love with the medium and the process in a way that is infectious.
She’s also very, very serious about what she does, extremely skillful, and has the gift of entering into the experiences and the lives of others that she hasn’t directly experienced but can empathize with, and imagine her way into. So I think that the sky’s the limit for Elle, honestly. I think she is truly extraordinary and I loved working with her when she was 13, and I’ve loved working with her when she’s 21.
W&H: Leo, the central character in this film, has frontotemporal dementia.
SP: Yes, it’s the type of dementia that affects the frontal lobes of the brain. It’s different to Alzheimer’s.
W&H: I think what I found so very interesting is when we see movies about dementia, it’s always about a person who’s older — 80-plus. We never really see people who have been afflicted with something at such a young age, so vibrant. His body is still very vibrant, but throughout the movie, as the viewer you’re always struggling with him. I know this was very personal for you given what you said about your brother. Talk about bringing the personal into your films — I don’t know how often you’ve done that in such a profound way — and why you wanted to tell this story.
SP: I think every writer is always writing from a personal place. It’s not necessarily an autobiographical place. It’s not literal. You have to start with material that is somewhere close to you, or at least close to you in your imagination. You have to be linked with it, viscerally and emotionally, partly to sustain you through the very, very long process of writing and directing a film.
This is not a fly-by-night situation; it’s years of your life, and then you live with the consequences forever. I’m still talking about films I made 25-30 years ago, so it’s a long-term thing. It’s a big, big commitment. I think what every writer then does — unless you’re deliberately doing a biopic or portraiture — is you take that deep research into life. You’ve loved the experience, and you transform it, transpose it, work with it and turn it around, and set it somewhere else, and it becomes a story based in something true, but is no longer a portrait of you or your experience.
And then in the process of making the film your concentration as a director is on the craft of it. How am I going to shoot this? Where am I going to shoot this? With whom? Who shall I cast? What’s the color palette? What’s the sound design here? You’re concentrating with professional detachment, albeit passionate, on the thing you’re making, so it becomes in a funny, strange way less personal — even if it had its roots in something that very, very deeply affected you.
W&H: I saw that you also did the music for this. Have you done that a lot?
SP: Yes, right from the beginning. I co-wrote the score a long time ago for “Orlando,” and I’ve always either curated — I’m not sure about that word — chosen the music for the films that I’ve done, or worked with composers, or worked with musicians who improvise according to a structure that I set up for them, or whatever it may be. This film, however, I didn’t set out to do it necessarily in the beginning, but I ended up really writing the music, like a score.
W&H: So you’re a musician also. That’s impressive.
SP: It’s one of the places I started out, in my 20s, yes. I was an improvising singer, and I worked with a lot of improvising musicians. That’s where my history, my relationship with rhyme came from. I did a film that rhymed [2004’s “Yes,” which is told almost entirely in iambic pentameter]. I’ve always felt that music and cinema are so deeply linked, even when you don’t have any music in the film, you’re thinking musically, you’re thinking about rhythm and layers of meaning — like harmony, in a way, visual harmony, even. It happens through time. There are a lot of similarities, for me, anyway, about my experience of music, and my experience of cinema.
W&H: One of the issues that has been discussed over the last 13 years is the systemic discrimination that women directors and women in this industry have experienced, and how people don’t necessarily get to have long careers or make enough movies to have longevity. You have had longevity, you have made your own rules, if I could say so — you’ve done it on your own terms. There are a lot of people here [at this event] who are starting out in the industry, and want to have a voice, and want to have longevity, and want to have a career. Why have you been successful, working over the last 30 years?
SP: First of all, I don’t think of it as longevity. I always liked the idea of beginner mind. Each new thing is like the first thing I ever did! It’s got its own rules, its own laws, things to learn, things to discover. So I’ve never had this feeling of “I know it,” or “I’ve arrived,” or anything like that. We know success is an impostor, right? Success and failure are the twin impostors, you can’t take either seriously.
The only guide is asking: “Am I doing something that is necessary for me to do, that I really want to do, that’s going to add something to the sum of human endeavor. Is it fun at the very least?” Let me put it this way: I’ve never made, consciously, a career move, and I’ve never thought about what I’ve been doing as a career.
I’ve just felt, “If I didn’t make this film, I will die. I want to make it so much.” I’ve always been in contact with my own longing to work.
W&H: Is that for every film you’ve had that feeling?
SP: Every film, without exception. If I find when I’m preparing a film that I don’t have that longing, that sends up a great big red flag, a warning bell: don’t go there. That’s why I work on several things in parallel, to see which ones sustain over a period of time that level of interest and longing, and with those that drift away — it was maybe something I needed to work on for a while to find something out, but actually I don’t really want to pursue. There’s been a few of those.
I was astonished to find out the other day — somebody told me, and I don’t know if it’s true because I haven’t verified it and done research — I’ve written and directed nine feature films, and that may be the highest number for a female director working in the English language. I know there have been French and German women directors who have made more quantitatively, and there may be some in the English language who have as well — I just haven’t been told about them. That’s an insane situation.
W&H: We’re going to look that up. Nicole Holofcener has made a lot. [Holofcener has written and directed six films.] She’s doing a lot of TV now.
SP: I don’t want to wear that as a badge, particularly, but it’s very telling. What it tells me is that a lot of female directors at a certain point just say, “I can’t stand this anymore, I can’t stand how difficult it is,” and stop. So there’s been something in my trajectory that has allowed me to have the stamina to push through the discouragement, the obstacles, the things one inevitably faces along the way. I comfort myself also by saying quantity is not everything.
W&H: Of course not. We have a couple of questions here [from Girls Club members]. This was also one I wanted to ask, about your secret as a director to bringing in the amazing actors you had, in “The Party,” and also dealing with Laura Linney and Salma Hayek in “The Roads Not Taken.” How are you able to get people to come and be a part of your work?
SP: When I’m writing, I’m always imagining, how would I feel if I read this as an actor? What would I be able to make of it? What would I find in it? I spend a lot of time unraveling a script when I’ve written it, and I look at each individual part, its trajectory through the whole thing. What’s the arc, what’s the shape of it? I think of it from the actor’s point of view, and I’m very actor-conscious in that sense, not to inflate any one particular thing, but to make sure that it makes sense.
The first step: as with all actors, they maybe already know some work of mine, and they’ve seen the kind of performances that have happened in the films that I’ve directed, so they have some sense of how I might function as a director. Then we meet — how are we, one on one? What kind of relationship do we build, starting with that first meeting, then it goes from there. It’s not really a big secret. It starts with the writing, and then it’s the meeting, and then it’s the work.
I think what actors notice very quickly is that, firstly, I’m very attentive and I look, and they begin to feel my gaze on them — they often say this to me — and then they know that I’m going to be giving time to them in preparation. I always do, and I do that one on one. So when we come to shoot, the trust is already there. The relationship is there, and they know I’m going to be really, really holding them in my eyeline. I’m creating a protective space in which they can take risks.
W&H: Do you believe that the female gaze is real?
SP: I don’t think gaze has a gender. I don’t think our eyes have a gender. But I think sometimes as women we are trained to learn how to listen well. This is very useful. We’re never going to take for granted an image or a representation — we’re decoding things all the time. So we know that there’s no such thing as an objective lens. There’s a point of view behind that lens. So there are many ways of looking, many ways of listening.
Theories about the female gaze that have been developed at length by various people who write about feminist cinema — that’s a more psychoanalytical approach, a way of summing up the fact that a woman might be looking at the world as well as the particular women or men she’s looking at — will be bringing that point of view, and now what we have come think of as a neutral point of view, the gaze of men, is not neutral at all.
It’s a useful code word to start to think about how we look, as directors, what we see, and what we want to put out there. And that’s not necessarily just a positive role model, or the way we think things should be. Sometimes it will be looking very bravely at the way things are, or at the things that are hidden. We can’t take things for granted, what we want to look at, and what effect the images that we’re creating are going to have on the imaginary viewer, or on the culture as a whole.
W&H: Another member says as she channels her own longing into her scripts, her hardest sell is to her male colleagues. How, as an unknown person, can you get gatekeepers to buy into your vision but also simultaneously make the art on your own terms?
SP: Very good question. It takes work to bring people into your vision, and it takes work to build alliances with the gatekeepers, with your producers, with all the people you work with. At one point, I was having trouble speaking to financiers, and I had some resentment and anger about the number of times that my projects invariably get turned down by those financiers. Male directors as well, but let’s say female directors and filmmakers of color are more familiar with that territory. This friend of mine said, “With whom in the industry do you have really fluent, good relationships with, where you feel things go really well?”
I said, “I love the actor. I’m already there in a state of great respect. I look at them with love. I talk to them with respect, I’m excited by what we can do together.”
So he said, “How about if you walk into a room with the financier and imagine yourself full of love, full of respect, excited about what you can do together, treat them like you would an actor?”
I thought, “That’s a novel idea.” I tried it. [whispers conspiratorially] It worked!
Financiers and gatekeepers: they’re not the enemy — they’re doing the best they possibly can. They want to make creative, good decisions. They want to be part of the so-called talent pool, they want to think of what they’re doing as important — they’re under great pressure from other people. It was very illuminating to me. We are responsible for the relationships we build with others, and we need to create allies who are not the same as us, who are different, who are in different roles, and different positions.
W&H: At Women and Hollywood, one of the films that women filmmakers say has influenced them the most is “Orlando.” Why do you think it’s had such an impact on women filmmakers?
SP: It’s based on a classic book by Virginia Woolf, and was the consequence of many of her explorations and questions, very notably about gender, about maleness and femaleness — that she saw as a kind of performance, a kind of construction that she wanted to deconstruct — but also about history, about how history is told, about mortality, about ownership, about class. She put a lot of ideas into that book, which by the way, when it came out was entirely trivialized. People called it a silly book. Ha! Good to bear in mind: Things that get called silly when they first come out, become enduring classics. It was a very curious and very interesting piece of work that was written with a light touch. So that’s the starting point.
Secondly, I spent seven years adapting it to the screen. During those seven years, it was rejected untold times. I have great big, fat folders full of rejection letters. I’ve kept them. After a few years of working on it, I approached Tilda Swinton and she became a kind of companion on my shoulder. She was doing other films at the time but she was committed to [“Orlando”], and I held her in mind while I continued to write and adapt. In a way the density of work behind the scenes, the number of places we went to — I went with my producer to locations in Russia, Uzbekistan, meetings here, things that fell through there, deals that came, a coup happened — it was a series of disasters behind the scenes, but many of those events in fact ended up as part of the film, became food for the film, became incorporated in the life of the film.
I had a great crew, and so it was a coming together, all these things, and it was all made, so to speak, under the radar. Nobody was interested, particularly, that I was making it, nobody was expecting anything. At the time, nobody in the cast was famous. People tried to persuade me to get somebody other than Tilda in the lead role, would you believe. It kind of just suddenly came out. People were surprised by it. And it has endured. Tilda and I were recently introducing it at a screening in London. This is 27 years later, and people are still discovering this film, and treating it as if it was made yesterday according to a recipe of what’s current — all the gender issues now make it seem current in another way.
I always try to tell younger filmmakers this: All the hidden work you ever do on a film is never wasted — even if it doesn’t end up in the film. Work itself is the thing. Engagement, passion, doing it, doing it every day, redoing it, refining it, thinking about it, whatever — none of it is wasted. It’s how you get better at what you do.
W&H: It’s such a delight to talk to you because you just love what you do. We can always feel the passion from you. And I think that’s why people love you.
SP: I’ve noticed that you do, as a filmmaker, have to have a tolerance for discomfort and bad times. It’s not an easy ride. I think Kubrick said, it’s like you have to do your best work in a military zone, that’s in the middle of a funfair, with a gun to your head. It’s tough. It’s very testing, it’s not going to be a lovely time. People who sometimes have met me for the first time ask, “What do you do?,” and when I say, “I’m a filmmaker,” they exclaim, “Oh, that must be fun!”
W&H: Last question: where do you get your creative inspiration from? Books, TV, films, art? Where do you go when you need inspiration?
SP: There’s too much inspiration everywhere. It’s like the world is full of ideas and subject matters. I don’t find inspiration a problem. What’s tricky is then how do you give that a shape that is going to endure, that people are going to want to look at 27 years later? So really it’s about the self-discipline. That’s what I learned from my early years, training in dancing. Dancers know you have to do it every single day, whether you feel like it or whether you don’t feel like it. And then you hopefully get better at it.
