CinemaSpy: Can you talk about your decision to film against a green screen background? Aside from the expediency of doing away with sets and the attendant economic benefits, what was the decision-making process behind your color palette for each character’s individual scenes and how it informed the viewer’s perception of them? Also, to what degree was the aesthetic informed by the knowledge that the film was destined for the Web and phone devices?

Sally Potter: Well, I always wanted the release pattern to reflect the story itself, to be part and parcel of it, to find a completely new way of putting the film out. And in this case it is a completely logical consequence of the story itself which happens over seven days, is filmed on a cell phone and is put out on the Internet. And low and behold, this film is coming out in cell phones over seven days and on the Internet. So it really is an integral whole, and that is rare. But it was designed to be that way. It wasn’t like me trying to stuff any old film into a cell phone. No, this comes naturally in seven segments. As for the colors, I had filmed on backgrounds of green screen. I had thought that I was going to put a whole bunch of other backgrounds in and then when I looked at them in the cutting room, it was distracting. It was too complex. And I realized I needed to really take this notion of an austere but rich aesthetic all the way, as far as I could take it. And that meant actually using simple color backgrounds.  

And so finding a logic for that was initially intuitive, and then I started to discover a system which was to take a color from somewhere in that person’s face, body, clothes or whatever and to tie it to the background so that it began to have this kind of organic, integrated feeling. But funnily enough, that often then became the emotional tone of the character as well or was reflective of or was a counterpoint to the emotional tone. I always knew when it was right. When you have got the wrong color, it is just wrong! And that itself is fascinating.

CinemaSpy: Perhaps now more then ever, the world of fashion is reviewed, analyzed and a deconstructed through fashion blogs, in films like The Devil Wears Prada and The September Issue and through reality TV shows such as America’s Next Top Model and Project Runway. You say it is clichéd, overstated and overfamiliar yet you embrace the clichéd in some of the platitudes the characters offer up, such as "everybody has a price and everybody is for sale," "beauty is power" and "money and fame is all that is important..."

Sally Potter: The lines that people speak interesting because people often do speak in platitudes. If it is accurate to the character, a platitude is a good thing. It is correct for them. It doesn’t mean one agrees with them. Some of the platitudes really do sum up the attitudes from the industry. The industry is extraordinarily cynical and exploitative and really does believe that there is a price for everything. I hear teenager after teenager after teenager say "I want to be famous! My dream is to be famous!"

CinemaSpy: I want to step back and ask you about the success of Orlando. In retrospect, did it enable you to gain access to funds, resources and talent that may have perhaps been harder to attract?

Sally Potter: To some degree, yeah. I think probably actors, although I had already worked with Julie Christie on my first feature film. I don’t know. I seem to have a way of having actors who seem to want to work with me. This is a lovely thing. That has not been my struggle. Funding is a struggle for me because of the fact that none of my films have quite resembled the last one. So it is always a new risk from a financier’s point of view. None of them wanted to make Orlando, I can assure you. I had a file inches thick of rejection letters from people about Orlando who were convinced that it couldn’t really work, shouldn’t really work. So, however, post-Orlando, the fact that the film was very widely praised and seen and so on, I think people were more predisposed.

But then I went and a made another risky thing, Tango Lesson. It was not as widely loved although very intensely loved by those who did love it. I think that I have just got this got this reputation as a risk taker and as somebody who never knows quite what the hell she is going to do next. And that is not a financier’s favorite.

CinemaSpy: I recently spoke with Tilda Swinton. When I asked her about the role that she perhaps regretted or that she had a feeling that she didn’t have quite a grip on, she spoke about Orlando. She said that she had hated it for 10 years but now that she has seen it again she is very, very proud of it. She mentioned that she had worked on it for five years and had this image in her mind that she was making a "93-hour epic." Now she thinks it was very unfair for her to have ever felt dissatisfied. She was an unknown actor before Orlando with limited filmmaking experience. You often work with a mix of experienced actors and actors with less film experience...

Sally Potter: I don’t quite see it that way. For example, with Tilda, once I knew that I wanted to work with Tilda and that she should be Orlando, there was no way that I was going to think of anybody else, and at the time I was under pressure from financiers to cast somebody else because she was not very well known then. Of course, subsequently everybody saw that she is extraordinary. We got incredibly close during the working process and I learned an enormous amount from that working relationship because I had never been that close to an actor before. It had never been intentional to take that long but it was so bloody hard to finance. It just took that long and so we were inevitably shoulder-to-shoulder. She was, I have to say, working on other films during that time. It wasn’t that she was waiting out to do Orlando.

I, on the other hand, didn’t have that possibility. I had to keep pushing that engine up the mountain until it was time to do it. That she was extraordinarily committed to that was enormously inspiring. But more than that she became the embodiment of this creature. And it was difficult when we finished. Partly for her, it finished at the end of shooting. I went straight into the cutting room into which she never came, until it was all done. And I was working desperately against the clock to get it finished, watching her every day so I felt like I was still in a relationship with her in a way, with her image by exploring all her tapes, trying to find the jewels and treasures that he had given.

But for her, it was kind of a cut-off, an end of a process and she went into a state of mourning. That is how I perceived it. And it is a different kind of mourning too because once you have done Orlando it is quite hard to imagine that you are going to get such an all-round role again. Four hundred years of both genders and in every scene of the film is kind of hard to beat [laughs]. I am glad to hear that she told you that she eventually came around to it because I know she had a lot of difficulties.

But you know, the other thing that is really odd is that, for both of us, in different ways, the success of Orlando was hard to deal with. Now that seems a very strange thing to say but it was overwhelming, really overwhelming and confusing, even on the level of suddenly from one day to the next, from being a pariah, rejected as that ridiculous woman who wants to make Orlando to 'day two' after it comes out and 30 bouquets of flowers in my hotel room from all the top agents in Los Angeles and everybody suddenly wants to meet me. Wait a minute! I’m the same person I was five minutes ago when I was a leper from England. And that is really disorientating.

CinemaSpy: Tilda Swinton also mentioned during the interview that during the 1980s the British Film Institute fostered a very creative environment, allowing directors like yourself, Peter Greenaway and Derek Jarman and others to flourish. Is it really more difficult to fund and finance projects today then it was then for you?

Sally Potter: Even as I have gone on and become more well-known, I have had to slash my budgets down. They haven’t gone up. But I’ve got a survivor’s attitude. In a way, I’m trying to use that as a source of inspiration, rather than learn about it. But...the digital era is here so one can make things more footloose and fancy free, cheap—which was not possible at that time.

CinemaSpy: On your blog you describe Rage as a film for lean times. I find that an interesting concept because it seems to be in the zeitgeist. For example, Vera Lynn currently has the number one problem in the United Kingdom and there is the argument that because we are in a recession, people want simplistic things, pure and unadulterated entertainment. Do you buy into that kind of concept?

Sally Potter: Well that is rather different than the kind of aesthetic that I was thinking about which is rather austere and not pure entertainment in that sense. But there probably is a visible cycle. But Vera Lynn is not just nostalgia. She was singing in time of war, and that may be what people are connecting with, and she was singing about what matters to people in times of crisis. Home, the family, love, the big things that get forgotten in times that are less tense. So, it may be that.