Q&A: Sally Potter has been making movies for 50 years. She is now in her seventies and has released a debut album
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Award-winning director Sally Potter has challenged British society throughout her 50-year career with films such as “Orlando,” “The Party” and “Ginger and Rosa.” Now, at age 73, Potter’s creative determination continues with her first studio album, ‘Pink Bikini’.
Self-released Friday, the LP is a semi-autobiographical collection of alternative songs chronicling Potter’s adolescence in 1960s London.
Through 12 songs, the filmmaker looks back at tumultuous relationships and oppressive social restrictions.
“There is something very life-affirming about working in a different medium, learning a new skill or making a change at what was considered a point in someone’s life where you should know exactly who you are and what you are going to do do,” Potter told The Associated Press.
Potter found lyrical inspiration in notebooks that she filled with poems during her lifetime. Coincidentally, the numbers are up “Pink Bikini” cover a variety of different topics, including frustration with beauty standards (“Ginger Curls”), a “ban the bomb” march (“Black and White Badge”), and female authorship (“Ghosts”), delivered atop small keys and seductive instrumentals .
“Some people say I have a rhyming gene,” says Potter.
The AP spoke to Potter about moving from movies to music. Answers have been edited for clarity and brevity.
AP: Your background is interdisciplinary; you have co-composed or curated music in your films. But when did this album start for you?
POTTER: It’s kind of a mystery to me, actually. Why now? Why this? I think I felt a very strong desire to work with the apparent simplicity of the song form. After making big movies that always involve huge numbers of people and a lot of money… the appeal of the short form is so enduring and so emotionally rich and so direct and so intimate.
AP: What was it like going back to your adolescence on this album, at this stage of your life?
POTTER: I’m actually not sure she ever left me. I’m not sure if any of our young selves ever leave us. But revisiting those memories is such a strange thing, and that’s one of the things the songs (are) about: Do I remember this? Or do I remember a picture of this? And then as you tell the story, because each of the songs is a little story, you kind of start rewriting history.
AP: How do gender dynamics affect your songs?
POTTER: I chose these teenage years because (it’s) the moment of intense crisis around gender identification, when you first notice that you’re being treated according to the sex you were born with. If I’m just talking about myself, and my generation of girls, as we entered puberty as a time of great loss, loss of freedom, dynamism… all of a sudden (you) have to think about the impression you’re making and the limitations of being a woman. At the same time, it is an incredible form of growth, brimming with hormones, feelings, confusion, trauma, intensity, and discovering so many things about yourself in the world. It’s a very brilliant, intense period to write about.
AP: In “Pink Bikini,” are you exploring what it means to be like a woman reclaiming artistry?
POTTER: I’d say not winning back so much as continuing whether people want to or not.
AP: Songs like “Ginger Curls,” “Pink Bikini,” and “Hymn” are intertwined with a sense of shame. Does shame touch your sense of femininity?
POTTER: I think young girls learn to feel shame. (Even) before social media, we had a very problematic relationship with the body, where it’s a double message. On the one hand you have to show (yourself) and be proud of it, on the other hand you have to hide it. Because if you show it too much, you’re a slut. And if you hide it too much, you’re frigid. That was really something from the sixties and seventies – those impossible, contradictory demands of all women.
“Hymn” is a struggle against religious oppression. It’s a fight against shame. A show of love between people of the same sex. That was actually more the feeling of all the songs, about the tightness that suddenly comes.
AP: You bring up nuclear warfare in “Black and White Badge.” Your films are also about this period and political dissent. What was it like exploring your life and those feelings in music compared to film?
POTTER: In film, you can tell the story in a more rounded way through characters, put words in people’s mouths, stage the situation, and get a lot of visuals. In a song it is evocative in a distilled way, an era of simple language. I thought, “How can I write about something that was so important to me – climate change, essentially the threat of an apocalypse – and not make it too heavy?” I wanted to make it lighter. I sang in a fairly undramatized way. You can be a 12-year-old girl on the march – militant against the existence of nuclear weapons on the one hand – and worry that you don’t look cool enough on the other. There is a bit of humor between the fear of the apocalypse, the ultimate terror.
AP: Are there any questions from your childhood in the 1960s that you think will be relevant in 2023?
POTTER: One can’t mention climate change too much because I think the fear of everything ending – what could be bigger than that? There is nothing greater than that. It’s paralyzing.
The Cuban Missile Crisis, which (happened) when I was 11, was very much like World War III. I think the sense of crisis (of this generation) is similar to then. Confusions around sexuality… and domestic life. There are so many things in common, and those are the simple things.
