Director Sally Potter on Tilda Swinton, the future of cinema and new film The Roads Not Taken

BARRY DIDCOCK

FOR a bona fide legend of British film-making – 1980s avant-garde experimentalist turned studio-friendly darling of the art-house scene – Sally Potter is less hymned in her homeland than she should be. Then again, hers has always been a quiet, steady presence on the cinematic landscape rather than one that powers its own reputation through spectacle or self-publicity. But cast an eye over her back catalogue and you wonder why her status as a trailblazing female director isn’t etched onto a plaque somewhere.

It’s quite a CV. In her 1983 debut

The Gold Diggers, shot with an all-female crew, she worked with

1960s legend Julie Christie. She made a film about tango, shot another film in verse and in 2000 cast Hollywood A-listers Johnny Depp, Cate Blanchett and Harry Dean Stanton in The Man Who Cried. In 2009 she shot Rage with Jude Law and Judi Dench, and in 2012 she made Ginger And Rosa, casting a 13-year-old Elle Fanning as a 16-year-old British girl in a 1960s coming-of-age tale.

In 2017 she turned back the technological clock to shoot The Party in gorgeous black and white. It had Bruno Ganz, Timothy Spall, Cillian Murphy and Kristin Scott Thomas in its strong ensemble cast.

And let’s not forget Orlando, her 1992 adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s famous novel, which starred Tilda

Swinton (who else?) in the title role of the gender-shifting time traveller. Nearly 30 years on, Orlando continues to influence fashion and inform discussions on everything from sexual politics and gender identity to representations of history and queer culture.

“I am proud of that film,” says Potter over a Zoom call. “The whole thing was a work of crazy ambition, but I had a very willing and wonderful collaborator in the form of Tilda Swinton.

It was an amazing adventure and none of us knew – well, I certainly never knew – if anyone was ever going to like it or relate to it. Its deeper themes possessed me, though. The themes of immortality, class and gender are very rich themes to mine.”

Although she always writes her own scripts, the variety of themes and styles on display in Potter’s four decades of film-making is jaw-dropping. But there are constants, too, and one is her clear love of, and respect for, actors.

“It’s not true of all directors,” she admits. “I get very close to actors. I have a great respect for the work. I see it as a sort of sacred profession that goes back a very long way. I’ve had pretty much universally great experiences working with actors and I think they know that I love working with them and collaborating together. They respond to that very strongly.”

Another constant is her love of constraints. Yes, from 2004, was delivered almost entirely in iambic pentameter (“an interesting experiment, but a movie it ain’t,” complained The Washington

Post). Meanwhile Rage, released two years after the launch of the iPhone, was intended to be viewed on smartphones.

“Every film has constraints, but sometimes to voluntarily set constraints is sort of liberating,” she says. “In the case of Rage, which was designed as a miniature to be used on phones, it was about five years ahead of its time because there wasn’t actually the technology available then to allow people to stream to their phones. People told me ‘Oh, it’ll never happen, it’ll never take off, Sally. Nobody’s ever going to watch a film on their phone’. Ha ha.”

Potter’s new film is The Roads Not Taken. It’s chronologically tight, taking place over just 24 hours, and the plot is sparse to the point of non-existent: New Yorker Leo visits the dentist and the optician in the company of his daughter Molly.

But it is unusual in being one of the most explicitly personal she has ever made because Leo suffers from a form of early-onset dementia, the same condition which affected Potter’s younger brother Nic, bassist in 1970s prog rock band Van Der Graaf

WILL BUTLER GENERATIONS

Merge Records

Will Butler likes to keep busy. In the past five years he has recorded and toured with Arcade Fire, released his debut solo album and a live record, and earned his Master’s degree in public policy from Harvard.

There’s also a lot going on in Generations, his new solo album, which at first seems a sprawling and at times exhausting collection of disparate songs.

There’s the electronics of opener Outta Here, the urgent new wave of Bethlehem, the Motown-tinged Close My Eyes, which also includes random whistling, and Hard Times, which has an 1980s pop sheen.

First single Surrender is a call-andresponse with Butler mostly singing in falsetto, and the jaunty last track Fine, about George Washington, sounds like Tom Waits writing something for Hamilton.

Not Gonna Die has the epic sweep of Arcade Fire, moving from quiet to loud as Butler rejects various scenarios of how he’ll meet his end. Meanwhile, Promised sounds like David Byrne, the Talking Heads frontman also being a restless polymath who combines manic fervour and magpie tendencies.

The more you listen to Generations the more sense it makes.