Sally Potter on Our Climate Crisis, Overcoming Self-Doubt, and <em>ANATOMY</em>
As a visionary filmmaker, Sally Potter broke inconceivable boundaries for women on the silver screen across multiple decades, but it’s with the release of her second solo album, ANATOMY, that she calls for us to do something even more prodigious — she wants us to save the world.
Known for her incredibly imaginative, bold, and oft-woman focused lens in cinema, Potter first captured filmgoers around the globe with her 1992 supernova, Orlando, the Virginia Woolf adaptation that gave Tilda Swinton her breakout role.
After completing nine full-features, numerous short films, and a duo of captivating documentaries, at the age of 73, she turned her attention to releasing her first solo album, Pink Bikini, a stirring record that recounted her experience of growing up female in 1960s London.
Now back with her second solo release, ANATOMY, Potter poses a question imperative enough for all of us to ponder — what kind of world will we have if there is no longer a world at all?
KP: ANATOMY itself explores “our species’ symbiotic relationship with the Earth, all while reflecting on the emotional threads that intertwine us all as people who share this planet,” quite the admirable focus in such a disjointed, disharmonious world. What led you to explore such principles?
SP: I think I've had a lifetime of trying to engage with the world as it is — with its problems and not just my own bubble of a personal world. But I think by any logical look at what's happening, the most important thing is that we have a world at all — an earth at all — that will survive. Otherwise we're all dead. Humanity's over. The species is over. Everything that we've been evolving to do for many thousands of years is over. So in a way, it dwarfs all of the other problems that we need to deal with.
Many things — political structures and so on — will pass. They've come and they've gone in the past. They will pass again. It doesn't seem like it at the moment, but it will pass. But the future of the planet is not arguable with — it's something that has to be saved by human action.
So then the next question is, okay, how do I deal with that in song form? It's one thing to write a story or a film or a book or an essay, but songs are not essays. They are a very personal, small, ancient form that allows us to feel things, above all, but to think things, too, that are close to us. And in one sense, all songs are love songs, because they're about affairs of the heart.
So I thought, “Okay, let's think about this as love songs to the earth.” Then they won't be like a lecture. They won't be about making people feel guilty or over-anxious or helpless, but rather about exploring different facets of the ways that we can think about our relationship with the earth as if it is a love affair — a body — the body of the earth and our bodies, how they interact all the time, how dependent we are on the earth, and so on.
And so I started lyrically writing from that perspective whilst in parallel working on the musical structure and the feeling, the heartbeat, the rhythm, the chords, the harmonies, and all the rest of it.
That was the starting point, and I carried on doing that. I overwrote. I wrote many more songs and then cut them down to vinyl lengths, essentially.
KP: Wow. Well as you said, it’s probably the most pressing issue that we're facing today just in terms of our planet's future. And I think the world is so completely upended right now that people often ignore it.
SP: Yeah. Or they don't believe that it's happening! So they go into denial because it's too terrible to contemplate — it can't be right. But it is. 99.9% of all scientists agree. This is evidence-based. This is not a fantasy.
KP: Absolutely. Speaking of our disharmonious world, I think your track “Walk Away” perfectly encapsulates the world that we’re in. It starts, “I’m looking around / Got truth on my mind / Don’t like what I see / Don’t like what I find / Walk away, walk away / The rich get richer / And what they do / Ruins this earth / For me and you / Walk away, walk away.” It ends with, “If you don’t like the truth / Walk away.”
I have many questions in mind when it comes to this track, but I think I’d prefer to leave you the space to speak to it yourself. What keeps you sane in such a wayward world?
SP: Well, to start, what keeps me sane and grounded is working, so I'm always producing something. I'm either working on a film or a song or some instrumental music. At the moment, I'm releasing this album and working on a film that I'm due to shoot in the autumn, so I’m keeping productive. Why? Because it's what I've always done. That's how I deal with the world and with everything I see around me — I take it in, put it through this process of transformation that is making a piece of work, and then I put it back out again as a part of conversation. That's how I keep sane. And literally, if I don't work, if I'm not making something — whether it's a song or a film or whatever — I start to feel mad. I start to feel ill, actually. It's as if that processing state is how I deal with everything and how I feel that I’m in a healthy relationship with reality, because I'm doing something — even if it's a small thing. We don't know what effect really any branch of the arts has on people's consciousness, but I know that many parts of the arts have had effects on my consciousness. So I hope that the things I might put out there can just be comfort, solace, and rest from anxiety, all of those important things at the moment.
Well, very literally, actually, the lyrics to “Walk Away” — which I was just running through this morning, relearning them for the live gig that I'm going to do in May and thinking about the structure of the verses — that line that you quoted, “The rich get richer / And what they do / Ruins this earth / For me and you” — we know this to be true. At the moment, wealth is a… how can I put it? It's a sort of deity, and it's being worshipped, however complicated and corrupt it may be. So the rich, with their ownership of resources and so on, are starting to ruin the earth. Profit, the desire for profit, is doing many, many things, such as destroying the natural environment. And then the next verse is like, well, if it's down to me, I've got to say what I see. “My head is clear / My feet on the ground / What I think / I say out loud / If you'd rather deny / Then join the crowd / Walk away, walk away.” So I just sort of thought I'd take those thoughts for a walk through the different verses where the choice is denial or facing up, walking away or looking at. So again, it's not like a lecture, but nevertheless, it walks through the ideas and the kind of thought processes about the choices that we have.
And meanwhile, the music is very playful. It refers to blues riffs and jazz riffs and guitar riffs and stuff. So it's playing around with ideas that, of course, are actually quite serious.
KP: Yeah, I picked up on that. Absolutely. “Honey” explores the oft-overlooked crimes that we commit against our planet. You write, “When all that’s left is plastic / Dangling from the wasted tree / When we can’t remember honey / For there’s no more bumblebees … Where is the church that rages / Against the dying of the light? / Where is the priest to shelter us / Through this perpetual light?”
It’s an incredibly touching track, one whose importance is paramount today in a society that values convenience and greed over nature. What inspired you to write “Honey?”
SP: Well, first of all, I personally love honey. I love it. I have it every morning for breakfast, and, therefore, I also love bees because bees make honey, and it seems to me like an endless miracle. How do they do it? They go, and they find the flowers, and they take the nectar, and then they fly back to the hive, give it to them, and they fly off again — they've got this amazing sort of radar. And in the midst of all of that, they're cross-pollinating everything! So if honeybees become extinct, we won't have any more agriculture because we rely on bees to cross-pollinate and allow different things to grow. They are crucial to the future — to our food chain and to our future. And, of course, pesticides at the moment are killing a lot of them, and they're getting all kinds of infections, but they just keep going.
But I wanted to write a song that imagined a point where the last bumblebee has gone. What are we left with? “Plastic dangling from a wasted tree,” as in the last verse.
And I also felt there's been so much noise from the Christian right, generally, but there hasn't been the right kind of noise mostly — with some exceptions, some wonderful and beautiful, courageous exceptions. So that's why each verse ends with, “Where is the church that rages against the dying of the light? Where is the priest to comfort us through the burning night?” and so on.
So it’s quite a despairing song, I would say, actually.
KP: Yeah, it definitely is. And I couldn’t help but see so many visuals in my head while listening to the album — it’s quite cinematic, particularly “Come Back.” As such a prolific filmmaker, I didn’t find this surprising. [Laughs]. Do you ever find yourself visualizing scenes or environments while you write or record?
SP: Well, yeah, probably. I mean, for example, for “Come Back,” I was inspired — if you can call it inspired — by spending some of my life in France, where I write in a village. Every year there's migrating birds, swallows and swifts, that come through and spend a while in the village, historically always on their way — I don't know — they may be going to Africa or something; it’s an incredible flight path when you read about it. And I noticed that each year — I wasn't sure if it was an illusion — but there seemed to be less of them. And then talking to other people, the villagers there, they’ve also said that the numbers have just gone down, down, down, and down. So that evoked the feeling of, you know, well, could I see the last bird, hear the last song?
It's really me singing to those birds, hoping and calling them to come back, hoping that they can come back and survive the temperature of the oceans, the dried-out plains where they usually would stop and drink, and so on.
So yes, do I visualize? Yes, I was visualizing what it looks like when you see the arrival of birds in the sky, and they're moving — as I think I put it in a line — like a charcoal drawing in the blue sky, a beautiful thing. So visualizing that, visualizing them settling down in the trees or on the telephone wires, and singing and something.
So yes, I have that very strong visual image of birds singing, coming, going, the mystery of their flight, the mystery of the fact that they have this kind of radar, they know where to go, they come back to the same places, then move on. And the question and sadness about it.
But yes, I think as a filmmaker who's been used to telling stories through images as well as sound, I can't help but to tell stories through the lyrics, as well as just using words poetically. They often seem to have a shape to them, and they often do indeed evoke an image of some kind.
KP: Speaking of, you’ve scored many of your films, from Orlando to The Roads Not Taken. Do you feel that this has translated into or informed your albums in any way?
SP: Yes, it's given me many years of almost under-the-radar practice about how to structure music, how to do arrangements, how to choose what kind of instruments to use, what kind of sounds work together, and how to evoke things differently. And building up a soundtrack is exactly the same as building up a record in the sense that it's got musical shapes — the different cues have different musical shapes.
It's true that they have different functions when they're a film, although I've never thought of film soundtracks as being something you have in the background that you're not supposed to notice. I've always thought of film music as something that you actively hear while you're actively absorbing the image, so they're partners, if you like, in the totality. I think it helped in that way.
So, when it came to really making an album without any film attached, I had many, many years of building up sound and music — and I'm calling all sounds on films a form of music — so I had a kind of awareness of how to structure sound. And then as the technology became graspable for me as a composer — Logic Pro being what I use — then this transformed a lot of the way that I was working. And to my surprise — as I'm not particularly fast with digital, internet stuff — I became very fluent, very fast in Logic, because it was a tool that I could completely understand and relate to, as it was so similar to working with film, actually.
KP: That's very interesting; I could see how that would translate.
On the topic of Orlando, perhaps the most inspiring thing about the film itself was the fact that so many people did not see its inherent value at first, calling it “unmakeable, impossible, far too expensive, and anyway not interesting.” You pushed past the critics, wrote the script, raised the money, and it went on to gross eight figures, win multiple prestigious awards, and be lauded as “the most subversive history film ever made” by the BBC three decades after its initial release. No doubt, Orlando is a sheer testament to your resilience and your confidence in yourself.
SP: Well, the criticism of it was before it was made.
KP: Right.
SP: Once it was made — on the whole, with just a few small exceptions — people really, really liked it. Critics really liked it. It was just that the financiers and so on could not imagine it being possible when it was in script form. They couldn't believe that I could pull it off, but that was already very familiar to me. It seems kind of insane to say it, but I was one of — well, the first female film director in the UK, I think since the Second World War — to make a full feature, which is kind of mad.
KP: That’s astounding!
SP: I mean, now it's obviously a totally different situation. Any woman who wants to make a film now is not facing the things that I faced at all. I knew that the world would be completely against me; I knew that would be the case. I had no sense of entitlement. I didn't think that anyone would open a door and go, “Oh, yes, here's a check for your lovely idea.” [Laughs]. It just wasn't going to happen. So, I think, therefore, I knew that my best asset in that situation was persistence, a kind of fighting determination to do it.
Now, as for doubt and belief, that doesn't mean in my case, for example, that I was super confident all the time. Not at all. In the dark hours of the night, I would be thinking, “Can I really do this? Oh my God, how can I do it? What can I do?” And so on, of course.
But what I've learned over the years about doubt — I've been helped by many of the great philosophers who have, let's call it, an appreciative relationship with doubt, because doubt means that you're in a questioning state of mind. All of the great artists I've met, I mean all of them, all have incredible levels of doubt that they battle all of the time.
The people that don't have doubt are the happy amateurs. And I don't mean that disparagingly, but I mean people who say,” Oh, I'm going to go and do a painting as therapy. Isn't it fabulous?” They love what they've done — they feel good about themselves and so on — but their work isn't necessarily particularly good. Some of it is — amateurs, like amateur choirs, can make the most fantastic sound. There's nothing wrong with that.
But I think people get this kind of inverted form of confidence when you doubt. It means that you know you can do better. And so, you're aiming at that. I've found that doubting is a good thing to do. When I suffer from doubt, I try to remember that it's because actually I know that I can do better. It's not a bad sensation to have. It's helpful when one is rewriting a script hundreds of times to know that it’s not a weakness — it's because you have this critical opinion of your own works, so you're continuously working to improve it.
And then the other thing I try is to sort of outrun my doubts. I sometimes say — if I do a workshop for students or something and they ask me about doubt, which a lot of students do — is that I try to write faster than the speed of my doubt. And it really is like that, you know? Just keep going. I can hear the voices of doubt coming. I can hear all the little voices going, “Oh, that won't work.”
KP: You finish it before they can get to you.
SP: Exactly.
KP: And to speak to one more of your films — and I thought this was incredible — at the age of 46, you put yourself in your own film, The Tango Lesson, dancing the tango with the best tango dancer in the world — it was an experience that you called “terrifying.” How did you overcome your fear in order to film? How do you push past fear in general?
SP: Well, you know, I was writing a story about somebody who couldn't dance and who learned to dance, where that led, and what the balance of power was — how it kind of reversed as time went on in the story. And it’s semi-autobiographical, putting a fictitious version of myself in this story; I won't even bother to give myself another name, and so on. I later possibly regretted that because I never thought for one moment that people would assume it was 100% real and autobiographical. It was a fiction, a fictionalized version of things that I had lived, and I used my experience as a research base, if you like, and met lots of people that I could then work with on the film.
But the terror, yeah, well, the terror was just about outweighed by the desire to dance tango specifically and to shoot the film. So that kind of longing to embody — which now, looking back, I can see that age 46 is a good age to reclaim your body, if you’d like. And to do something “age inappropriate,” you know? People at the time sort of thought it was an act of gross self-sabotage… you've just made this sort of successful film that everybody loves, Orlando, or nearly everybody loves, and then you go and put yourself into a film about the tango. Are you mad? So, I think it was an act of determinedly age-inappropriate action. It was like I was a provocateur, actually, in a way.
And then I was intrigued to find — and very surprised — the number of people who have written to me to say that it was that film that transformed their lives, because it made them make choices that were much braver, or that other people perhaps disapproved of, or something that they'd always wanted to do but had denied themselves. An amazing number of people have written that to me. I wasn't expecting that at all.
KP: Yeah, that's incredible. That's very inspiring.
Although you’ve been working with music as a medium for decades, you just started releasing music yourself in your 70s, 2023’s Pink Bikini being your first solo album. I admire that so deeply — I am someone who believes that every day holds the chance for a new beginning, that every minute brings the opportunity to begin a new adventure and a new life.
In a world that so often wants us to believe that a woman’s life ends at 30, what advice could you lend on embracing aging? Are you happy that you waited to work on this solo music?
SP: Well, I feel that I didn't really wait, because I was working with music on the films, but my primary devotion for many decades was to be a film director and to make features and enough shorts and so on.
But every feature film is a big palaver — it takes like four years. That's why I’ve “only” made nine feature films, because of being a writer, a director, the cycle of writing, the quick sprint of a shoot, then the long edit, and so on. It’s what it takes. So, films are very big, but I can write a song relatively quickly, though it takes a while to make it worth listening to. Actually, putting an album together is almost like making a film — it seemed to take about a year and a half or something, to put it together.
So I don't feel like I waited, but at the same time, when I did give myself permission to do it, it was like an explosive sensation — I had so much music in me wanting to come out. And I hadn't quite realized that until I really started to do it. I almost can't control myself with it.
But, you know, you mentioned something: me releasing my first album in my 70s — that's what you just said, isn't it?
KP: Yes!
“You don’t need to be told how to do it or in which way to do it — you just need a hand on your back that tells you that you can.”
SP: I went, “70s?!” Because I don't think of myself as a person in their 70s. It just doesn't match who I am or how I experience myself day to day or in general, at all. None of the numbers I've ever had have matched. For a long time, I was always told that I was too young. I made my first film at 14. At 16, I put in my passport that I was a film director, and people would laugh at me in the face, you know? So I'm so used to people telling me that I'm doing everything at the wrong age, and then the wrong gender, of course. “Women don't make films,” or women this, or women that, or women the other. And then suddenly, it's “older women” this and older women that. It's like, there's always a category that tells you that you're wrong for the thing that you want to do.
So, it seems like the golden rule number one is: ignore all of the above. Assume the possibility of rightness at any stage.
And age is not about denial. It's not saying it's just a number — although the number is weird since it doesn't match what I grew up thinking that number would look like, sound like, or how they’d spend their time.
But, you know, aging is real, and things come with that. But they don't determine what you do.
KP: You’re exactly right. And you’ve had such a storied, hallmarked career across so many decades that I would be remiss if I did not ask two very simple questions. What is one thing you know now that you wish you knew before, and what is the best or worst advice that you’ve ever received?
SP: Okay, one thing that I wish I'd known then…
Well, I think, first of all, things pass. And this is good to know. When you're in a particular state, you always feel that you're there forever. But no… things change. Everything changes all the time. Life is impermanent. I think that grasping the nature of impermanence is very, very, very important, and it took me a very long time to really begin to understand that.
But the time waster in my life, I think, was probably anxiety. So, it goes back to what you were talking about before… doubt, you know? Fear — all of those things that hold a person back.
And, despite the fact that I have the reputation of not having held back and doing a lot of things, my own experience is that if I hadn't had the levels of anxiety that I have about whether I could or couldn't or would make it or whatever, I would have done more and better and with a higher amount of ease, whereas I feel that I've fought for everything a lot. I've been a fighter always. And it'd be quite nice not to have to be a fighter all the time, maybe. So, that's what I wish.
And, well, I haven't had that much advice because I left school at 16, and I'm self-taught in everything that I do. I have no formal music training, no formal film training, nothing. So, I've tended to rely on my own advice. And I probably badly advised myself quite a few times.
KP: Me too! [Laughs].
SP: But let me think. I think the best thing is to not take advice from others. The thing that I really value when I look back and I definitely did receive — in particular from two people, my grandmother and my mother — was encouragement. I remember my mother, when I would create a painting when I was about four or something, she would look and she'd go, “Oh, that's beautiful!” Whatever her problems were, she was an encourager of me. And I'm forever, forever grateful. She had lots of problems of her own, so she wasn't always present, but let's not talk about that — let's just remember that she was an encourager. And similarly, my grandmother. So, in the female line, I've had those two women telling me that I could do it. And that's all anybody needs. You don't need to be told how to do it or in which way to do it — you just need a hand on your back that tells you that you can.
KP: I really love that; that’s a beautiful sentiment. And for our last question that we ask everybody, what do you feel makes a provocative woman?
SP: Possibly, well, somebody who speaks out, for a start. The great oppression of women is silence. So, it's no wonder at all that under really repressive regimes and so on, women's voices are silenced. So, speaking out is very important.
And then, I guess going against the limiting expectations that are placed on women. The oppression of women always has this facet, this appearance of limitation. It's a sort of lack of expansiveness — a sort of shrinking. Also, thus, dieting and stuff, you know? Shrink.
KP: Expand.
SP: Expand and speak out. And then you are — without just even saying one word — you're already provocative.
Photography: Courtesy of Adventure Pictures
