All the Rage: An Interview with Sally Potter
Sep 10, 2009 | 2 Comments | BySophie Mayer
Sally Potter
Rage (2009) is the sixth feature film in Sally Potter’s long and varied career. Having burst onto the scene with her short film Thriller in 1979, she broke new ground for women in film with her first feature The Gold Diggers (1982), with its all-female crew. A brilliant adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s “unadaptable” classic, Orlando (1993) thrilled critics and audiences alike with its zeitgeist-tapping androgynous cool, and led to offers from Hollywood. But Potter has stayed resolutely true to her indie roots – which stretch back to mid-1970s performance art “happenings” in evening wear with the Limited Dance Company. Like her film-in-verse Yes (2005), Rage was made swiftly on a shoestring budget with a small cast of dynamic actors. It’s the most immediate of Potter’s films, resonating with our current focus on consumption, whether it’s the credit crunch and bankers’ kickbacks, obesity and anorexia, carbon footprints and wars for oil. What Potter calls her “barefoot cinema” is the perfect response to excess – set in the fashion world, the film strips away labels and hysteria to reveal beauty.
BEV asked Sophie Mayer, author of The Cinema of Sally Potter to interview Sally about Rage. Read on for the full interview. Read the full story
