Sally Potter: ‘There’s nothing like hearing a whole place vibrate with laughter’

The resolutely independent British film-maker is back with the most broadly entertaining film of her long career – a star-studded black comedy about a disastrous dinner party that reflects the dark state of the nation

Sally Potter isn’t quite sure how to react to seeing her name on a T-shirt. With bemusement, she turns over the garment I’ve given to her, as if concerned I might be playing a prank, but there it is: SALLY POTTER, emblazoned in bold black capitals on white cotton. She holds it up to her slender frame, its glaring whiteness almost garish against her tidy black turtleneck, and squints down at it. “People are wearing these?” she asks sceptically. Hers is one of several similarly stark tees celebrating women in film, run up by Etsy startup Girls on Tops, and now popping up all over the international film world. Isabelle Huppert has one. Ava DuVernay has one. Greta Gerwig, too. Tracy Letts, a star of Gerwig’s directorial debut, Lady Bird, wore it to the film’s Toronto premiere. Why not Sally Potter? She smiles wryly. “Well, that’s lovely. And also rather embarrassing.”

It’s fair to say that Sally Potter, now 68, did not go into film-making to see her name up in lights, let alone across people’s chests. One of Britain’s most staunchly independent writer-directors, she has mostly resisted the lure of mainstream attention and awards in order to work on her own restlessly inventive terms: tackling Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1992), once deemed unfilmable, with Tilda Swinton switching genders across a 400-year timespan; directing herself in the semi-autobiographical terpsichorean meditation The Tango Lesson (1997); writing and directing contemporary culture-clash romance Yes (2004) entirely in iambic pentameter. These are not the choices of a film-maker hungry for mass audiences or an Oscar, though she cocks her head when I say “small scale”.

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from The Guardian http://ift.tt/2y3vX0Q