Saying ‘ Yes ' to Taking Risks:
An Interview with Sally Potter
by Cindy Lucia

As the cost of film production soars, bringing countless pressures to bear on those filmmakers struggling for artistic autonomy, Sally Potter has managed, consistently, to produce highly original, often risk-taking, films. From her landmark feminist treatise Thriller (1979)—a deconstruction of Puccini's La Bohème that investigates the positioning of women in classical narrative through contemplations of Mimi's death—to her most recent Yes (2004)—a film about the impact on personal intimacy of identity as shaped by nationality, class, and gender in the post-9/11 world—Potter's films reflect her independent voice and her uncompromised vision.

As with all artistic risk-taking, however, Potter's work has sometimes met with mixed critical reception. While film scholars praise Thriller as an instance of true feminist cinema, mainstream critics remain torn between enthusiastic appreciation and vague befuddlement when writing about films like The Man Who Cried (2000), which examines decades in the life of its World War II protagonist (Christina Ricci) who encounters various forms of persecution, or about The Tango Lesson (1997), a film exploring passion and dance, in which Potter plays herself—or a character not far removed from herself. Orlando (1992), on the other hand, with its outstanding performance by Tilda Swinton, has been enthusiastically praised for its clever, playful, and visually arresting adaptation of Virginia Woolf's novel, and for its deft structuring of a story that spans centuries in a penetrating reflection upon the complications of gender and sexuality.

Yet, even in mixed reviews, critics consistently acknowledge Potter's genuine talent and versatility. Cinematically, her films are sumptuous and nuanced, with intriguing moments that border on, or plunge into, the experimental. Potter's background as an accomplished dancer is evident not only in her Tango Lesson performance, but also in her composition and joining of images—deconstructing shape and movement to levels that reach the metaphysical in Yes. Potter is also a composer who has written the original music for Orlando, The Tango Lesson, and Yes, which also features original music by Philip Glass. And Potter's writing—in her screenplays that include Yes, The Man Who Cried, The Tango Lesson, Orlando, her first feature, The Gold Diggers (1983), cowritten with Lindsay Cooper and Rose English, and her 1980 short, London Story —captures a lyricism and an elemental fascination with the sound and shape of language that echoes her dancer's interest in the essence of movement.

This is no more apparent than in Yes, written entirely in verse—an unusual choice to be sure for a contemporary story set in London and, briefly, in Belfast, Beirut, and Cuba. The primary characters are named simply “She” (played by Joan Allen) and “He” (played by Simon Abkarian), which, along with the iambic pentameter rhythms and direct address monologs delivered by her housekeeper (Shirley Henderson), establishes a broader, macrocosmic canvas upon which the characters' particular lives and stories are etched.

She is an American molecular biologist of Irish birth living a very comfortable life in London with her husband Anthony (Sam Neill), a disillusioned politician who seems never to leave home to work at his vaguely defined career. While She is out working, Anthony entertains his lover Kate (Samantha Bond) who is also her close friend. Kate's teenage daughter Grace (Stephanie Leonidas) is the goddaughter of She and Anthony. The film remains deliciously elliptical in terms of precise plot details, Anthony's career, for one, and the exact discovery—that her husband is indeed having an affair with her close friend?—prompting her to tears and restless hostility when She and Anthony attend a lavish government dinner party. It is at this party where She meets He—a Lebanese immigrant who, once a surgeon, is now a cook. Waiting tables at the dinner party, He feels powerfully drawn to her, praising her beauty with a seductive lyricism. They exchange phone numbers and embark on their affair.

Yes uses She and He, as well as her marriage and career, to explore themes as far-reaching and diverse as being and nothingness, agnosticism and spiritual belief, intimacy and alienation, American imperialism and the Middle East. Through dialog rhythms, cinematography and editing patterns often disruptive of continuity, and through the instant intimacy forged between viewers and Shirley Henderson's cleaner as she contemplates the nature of dirt—often with disarming insight—Potter manages to take hold of these very large themes, grounding them in the very concrete while ever enlarging their scope.

Contemplations of the very small—whether particles of dirt or molecular life—are juxtaposed with contemplations of the very large, creating a sense that the two are inextricably bound together. While Henderson 's cleaner is “the philosopher of the very small,” as Potter calls her, the dying aunt—a surrogate mother to Joan Allen's character (played powerfully, almost entirely in voice-over, by Sheila Hancock)—is the philosopher of the larger spiritual and ideological realm. While Henderson 's monologs, performed as she gazes into the camera, unflinching, often evoke laughter, Hancock's narration, performed as she lies dying in a Belfast hospital, evokes tears of profound recognition. As She sits at her aunt's bedside, the aunt's lilting Irish voice muses, “We are the source of all the bad and all the good things, too,” insisting that, “If and when I die, I want to see you cry. I want to know that I am dead…that I am part of you.” In one moment, when she actually speaks, the aunt also prompts her niece to visit Cuba where the “big dream” of a Communist society remains intact, however precariously.

Yes is, in many respects, a tour de force in which language, sound, image, and thematic content work in complete accord, each element extending and building upon the other, each adding texture and resonance to a remarkably unified whole.

Cineaste spoke with Sally Potter about Yes several weeks before its April 2005 screening at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York.—Cynthia Lucia

Cineaste: You've said that Yes is, in many ways, your response to the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York . Would you elaborate?

Sally Potter: The day after 9/11, I was left with a feeling of urgency, impotence, helplessness, and a need to do something with the form I work in. As a filmmaker, you can't really change objective conditions in the world, but you can work effectively on the subtle emotional body of the individual and of the society as a whole. It seemed to me that we were tending toward a cultural mythology of evil that had to be urgently interrupted. And one way of doing that is simply to humanize the so-called enemy. I decided to start writing an argument, East and West, but between two individuals who are in love—a man from the Middle East and a woman from the West—and have them speak out their respective states of anguish. That became a five-minute film, which formed the basis of Yes .

Cineaste: You identify the Middle-Eastern doctor/lover, played by Simon Abkarian, as Lebanese and the molecular biologist, played by Joan Allen, as an American of Irish birth. Would you discuss how the history of civil/religiously motivated war in both their countries became a factor in the context of 9/11 and the post-9/11 world?

Potter: Belfast and Beirut are, in a way, twin cities from opposite sides of the world. There's been warfare in the streets; there's an economic and political history both along and behind religious lines that explains the conflict in many ways, but they're also cities that have survived these conflicts. For example, Abkarian, who is Armenian, grew up in the Lebanon and France , and has friends in Beirut who are Muslim, and those who are Christian Orthodox, which is fairly typical. So alongside the history of conflict, there is also a history of multicultural friendship. One tendency in the creation of an evil enemy or ‘Other' is to reduce people to a single clichéd image of who they are—they become one homogenous thing—whereas, in reality, almost everyone I know is very, very complex with interweaving identities and histories.

Cineaste: What further dimension does her being American add to the mix?

Potter: Well, she sounds American, looks American, but she has Irish roots. By definition almost every American has got roots elsewhere of one kind or another, which is something that gets forgotten by non-Americans. Americans are not a single homogenous mass. The U.S. is an incredibly complex society of immigrants. But the baggage Joan's character brings with her into the story is the baggage of current American identity in the world. And, at a certain point in every relationship, the cultural, political, and national legacy that a person carries starts to enter in—however personal the relationship may be. That dynamic provides the opportunity for the characters to talk and listen to each other from the perspective of their national histories.

Cineaste: Also interesting is her profession as a molecular biologist. The notion of the cell—of the particles of life (that ultimately become the bits of dirt the philosophical maid muses over)—is a central theme of the film. “The mystery” of life, as Joan Allen's character says in her conference presentation “is that each cell knows its destiny.” How does this motif interact with the political dimension of the film? Does the destiny of each cell imply a religious or spiritual dimension that somehow is meant to transcend the political or ideological?

Potter: On a simple level, it's a question of scale—of looking at things from the very smallest to the very largest. The human body is somewhere in the middle of that scale. All of the characters in the film are grappling with what they believe exists or doesn't exist; what's behind it all; whether or not there is a God, or in her case, as a scientist who is also a lapsed Catholic, an interest in what's measurable. And then there's the cleaner who is looking at the very small from another perspective, and is perhaps an unacknowledged philosopher. I did a lot of research into molecular biology, stem cells, and so on, and there was originally much more in the script about science that got whittled down until it functioned mostly as an indication of the status of Joan's character as a white professional woman in the West, which creates an imbalance in her relationship with Abkarian's character. He was once a doctor, but is now a cook, and in a much lower position—a very common pattern among immigrants.

She's trying to evaluate things through a filter of objective analysis, the scientific point of view, which at its furthest outreach becomes a religious question. Einstein talked about the mind of God, and Stephen Hawking later on said he felt he was looking into the mind of God once he got into the smallest of the small because it becomes an imponderable. You can't pin life down when you get to that point. So in the film it was a way of having a running meditation on what lies at that end of the scale and on the interconnected nature of all things you find there—and that's where it starts to collide with religious belief. It's as though any thought system taken to its ultimate extreme starts exploring the same kind of area, the realm of metaphysics. When you look into embryology, you observe the miraculous. How does a cell know what part of the body to become?

In times of political extremity or urgency it is necessary to reconnect with transcendent, metaphysical dimensions—to remember what lies behind or beyond the impermanent, immediate realities. It seems to me this is something cinema can do—make links between layers of existence and evoke the invisible world.

Cineaste: As the film closes and the lovers kiss, the image becomes increasingly abstract, until it is broken down to the molecular level, with cells of their skin blending, merging. There is also an implicit spiritual dimension here, reinforced earlier by Joan Allen's confessing in monolog to her video camera (which she casts as a stand-in for God), that, “I cut, dissect to see into your mystery…The point is, God, You never lie…impermanence will never go away…Oh God, can you forgive me for not believing in you?” Is she expressing the fear of the unbeliever, just in case a god should exist? The sudden appearance of her lover in the Cuban hotel room, could be seen (on a very literal level) as evidence of an answered prayer almost. The whole thing seems very playful yet very serious.

Potter: I think the “God, forgive me for not believing in you,” is the ‘cri de coeur' of the lapsed Catholic. But anyone with any intelligence lives with doubts about their belief, or their nonbelief, because doubt is symptomatic of an active mind. We think, ‘Maybe—because actually, I don't quite know.' In the film, her confession to the camera is the first time her character deliberately looks into the lens, but prior to that, the cleaners have repeatedly looked into the lens, and so we, the audience, are the ones who have been looked at. But when Joan Allen looks into the lens it's a stand-in for God; therefore, the equation is that we, the audience, we the witness of her story, are the eyes of God. In the confession scene, the presence of the camera as an intermediary is acknowledged for the first time.

Cineaste: Throughout the film, cleaners appear very much on the periphery of the scene but gradually become the focus of our attention, as they look directly at the camera and at us.

Potter: Cleaners are probably on the lowest rung of every society. It begins with mothers, cleaning their children's bottoms, a key act of nurturing and caretaking at the very beginning of life which then becomes, increasingly, an invisible act of subservience. Looked at in a global way, our relationship with dirt and what we're generating as pollution is endangering the very existence of the planet. So the inability to clean up after ourselves, to take responsibility for the dirt we leave behind, could become fatal. It's got a serious undertow to it. In daily life there is an army of cleaners who really do see the detritus, the traces and the stains, whether in the home or on the roads. But they are the invisible ones, the ones who are themselves not seen, often quite literally. A cleaner will walk by with a broom in an airport, for example, and it really is as if she or he does not exist at all.

I thought it would be interesting to reverse that and to give the cleaner the status of the all-seeing eye, the philosophical eye, and therefore also the scientific eye—she's kind of a detective, in a way, without a mission, without a crime. In structural terms she's like a Greek chorus because she is an intermediary between the audience and the drama. She is also funny, and so allows us to relax after some heavier scenes.

Cineaste: The reflexive presence of the camera—and perhaps its transcendent presence—also struck me in the several places where you use surveillance camera footage, along with a kind of stop-motion/slow-motion filming, to suggest a ‘higher' presence—when the man and woman meet after the formal dinner and exchange phone numbers in the embassy lobby, and when the argument breaks out in the kitchen where He works.

Potter: It's another variation on the theme of the witness, the invisible seeing-eye. London has the highest number of surveillance cameras per capita of any city in the world. A survey has suggested that the average Londoner is recorded 350 times a week! But it's increasing everywhere. That's the ‘big brother' end of the scale but there's also a whole esthetic of surveillance. Whenever I go into a building where there's a bank of monitors, it's like looking at an art piece. The esthetic of surveillance has started to feed itself back into art works and cinema. Thematically in the film, it's about who is observing whom. And the audience acts as the ultimate surveillance camera.

Sitting and watching a film is like looking into a window—a point Hitchcock and others have made many times. The frame is something like a one-way mirror and it's also a parallel to daydreaming. The whole issue of surveillance and watching is a subtext throughout the story, but ultimately it is not a film about looking; it is a film about how you perceive the other, which brings us back to your first question. We live in a time of globally distorting perception—a mutually distorting perspective, East and West, but perhaps especially the demonization of the Middle East by people in the West.

The car-park sequence, which is the first scene I wrote—and became the original five-minute film in a slightly different form—is the scene where He finally gets to speak out his hidden reality, the reality others might not understand, of how the world looks from his point of view. Most people from the West are not thinking or seeing globally, since they have an inability to see how it looks from ‘over there.'

Cineaste: In the scene where she argues with her lover, Joan Allen's character says, “You crowned me goddess,” pointing out his presumption of power as male to do so. We get this clash of her feminist view of things and his position as a Middle Easterner in a Western culture. Each one is trying to assert how he or she feels marginalized. In the end, though, she comes out looking kind of like a flawed, spoiled Western female.

Potter: Yes, there is that element. We do become obsessed with our own struggles so that we don't stop to imagine what it's like to be a person with dark skin walking on the street—being in a low-status job, spit at, beaten up, or even killed for the way you look. There comes a point where you have to open yourself to the struggles of others—not give up on your own—but realize that your struggle is not the only one. The point where she feels diminished as a female is the point when she loses sight of his struggle. When he says, “I need to wash you and purify your mind,” that harks back historically and culturally to the notion of the female as unclean, secondary, inferior. She says, in riposte, “I'm not only your goddess or queen, I'm a twenty-first-century any-damn-thing-that-I-choose, including your teacher or king.” It's a battle for who is on top, who is second and who has the right to name what the other person is.

Cineaste: It's very powerful when he says, “Your people want our land and oil,” and “Your country is a dragon breathing flames, and you—blonde American—are too thin, your eyes too blue. Why do you make me dream of you?”

Potter: That's the paradox. The white, blonde Western woman with the blue eyes has become the universal icon. If you—as a nonwhite—internalize that symbol, that myth, it leads to denigrating your own people. In his mind the two things have gotten all entangled. Her image, global domination, and an imperialism of the imagination have become one. Imperialism is not just about territory but also about image, myth, dream, body type, and all those subtle and personal things.

Cineaste: When they meet in Cuba , at the end, is he giving in to the imperialism she represents?

Potter: I wrote many versions of the ending, including one where she goes to join him in Beirut . But eventually the ending came as a combination of the auntie's dying instruction—go to Cuba and go soon—and the fact that Cuba has a unique position at this point culturally, historically, and politically: it is neither West nor East, so it is neither his nor her world: it's Latin and the last outpost of the Communist dream. Cuba has a symbolic meaning much greater than itself, much greater than its internal contradictions, weaknesses, problems, abuses. The problem with the ending—any ending—is that it appears to be a resolution, a summation of the meaning of the whole film, but it's not really; it's just the point at which we leave the story.

In the story he is the one who rejected her, but he's come back because he's discovered—upon returning to Beirut , where he hopes to remember who he is—that he no longer really belongs there. This is a common immigrant experience: once you've left somewhere you can't really go back because you have changed. He has become Western in many respects. In the story, his returning to her is an acknowledgement of the fact that she's not just a symbol of big, bad America , but is an individual he loves. But who knows where the relationship will go next? The fictive space of the film is over.

It's a hopeful ending but not necessarily a happy one. I did write and shoot a scene in which it becomes clear that he has arrived in Cuba in order to say goodbye, because they hadn't been able to say goodbye earlier. In this scene, they both realize their relationship doesn't have a future. They're no longer blaming each other for the entire world and its problems, but in the very act of saying goodbye and letting go of each other, they get closer and closer and realize, that actually, it's just the beginning.

As we were shooting the scene, I became very uncomfortable with it, as did the actors. And when I got into the cutting room, it was evident to me that the scene was redundant. Once he arrives in Cuba , we don't really need to say all of this, it can be left open. It's enough that he's arrived. And as you suggest, it's a bit ‘hand-of-God-ish.' That was a kind of ironic nod to prayer, synchronicity, and wish.

Cineaste: When they argue earlier in the London parking garage, she has the typical response that, whatever America does, ‘It's not me; I'm not America ; I'm not making these decisions;' whereas, his rejoinder suggests the tendency in America to think in terms of ‘me' not ‘we.' When I think of that moment in relationship with her ‘tourism' in Cuba—with her video camera, and then later her addressing her own camera as if it were God, but again, about herself, about ‘me,' I'm left thinking that she remains focused on ‘me' rather than ‘we,' even in the midst of this Communist country.

Potter: Well, the West is a ‘me' culture—with all the self-help books—it's a culture of individualism, of self-worth, of climbing up a pile thinking about yourself, not thinking about others. In many other cultures that is not the case; the individual is subordinate to the greater good. And getting that balance right between individual dignity and freedom and yet taking responsibility for the whole is increasingly pressing. It's awful to feel a sense of shame about the policies pursued by your own government.

What can you do about it? You maybe march, as I did in London against the war in Iraq , yet the machinery rolls on. The paradox is that we're living in a time of extreme individualism, and yet we're also living in a rhetoric of fake global responsibility—the ‘granting' of democracy to other countries. All of the rhetoric seems diametrically opposed to the reality. So how can we find our way through that maze? It's a retreat to feel the only way is via a personal individual truth. You certainly can't talk of ‘the masses' because life, ultimately, is experienced singularly. But as individuals we're also in a dialectical relationship with the wider society, affected and inflected by it. And this is the dynamic the characters find themselves trapped in. They're two individuals with their own experiences shot through with pain and contradictions; the relationship initially is like an island or a bubble—a sanctuary from their respective painful solitudes—but the world and history starts pressing in, and they have to find a way to talk and to listen to each other about it.

Inevitably when you go somewhere like Cuba , you're a tourist, an outsider looking in; your view is one-sided. Perhaps as a Westerner you could romanticize it as a place of color and music in the Caribbean . But I had a strong experience being there, just as I had in East European states before the fall of Communism. Simply to be in a big city that does not have huge billboards everywhere, does not have corporate identity thrust down your throat at every street corner, is an extraordinary experience. We forget how bombarded we are by advertising and how embedded in corporate structures we are—until you go to a place where you're not. There's virtually no illiteracy in Cuba , there's free medicine for all, there are no homeless (that I've seen anyway). It's powerful to be in a place where people are at least trying to organize the society from a basis other than the profit motive. However, I have to put in the caveat: despite the oppression of gays, and other horrible abuses of human rights. But these, of course, also take place in many other societies as well.

Cineaste: Throughout the film, hand-held camera, (or steadicam), and slow-motion or stop-action punctuate moments creating a dreamlike quality, a heightened quality. What were you going for?

Potter: Exactly that. Those scenes are shot at six frames a second, and even at three frames a second in the scene in the Cuban discotheque: it feels like slow motion, though in film terms it's the opposite of slow motion, which is created by shooting at forty-eight frames per second and upwards. It began out of economic necessity. We were working with a very low budget and couldn't afford many lights. If you shoot at six frames a second, you can work with an exposure that allows you to shoot in very, very low light. Afterwards you stretch the film, by repeating each frame four times to bring it up to twenty-four frames per second. I wasn't sure it was going to work, but we did some tests and found that it was really very beautiful, creating a correlation between the still frame and the moving image—which is, itself, a series of stills. Shooting this way makes those still frames a little more visible. The emotional atmosphere it brings with it is of a slightly altered state.

Cineaste: The issue of authenticity hit me when I was thinking about this. The esthetic of the film seems to explore the question of what is authentic and what isn't in that the cleaners (particularly the Shirley Henderson character) are never shown using these effects.

Potter: Generally when you start to experiment formally in film, it's perceived as a distancing device, although it's not that for me. I find that if somebody has pushed a formal element in an extreme direction, it can be a very moving experience—it doesn't push me away, it draws me in. There isn't a correlation between abstraction and a kind of cold detachment—I think you can be passionately detached and you can be emotionally abstract. You can't package esthetics—form and content—into these discrete envelopes. But I tried to be aware of how far I could push the formal esthetic experimentation before it started to alienate. To counterbalance the visual language—though actually I believe it goes in the same direction—there was an enormous amount of work with the actors on the question of emotional authenticity. We had a three-week rehearsal period, and I worked with each of the actors one-on-one, as well as together, to really root the text and the wider themes of the film in their own lives.

Cineaste: As the Irish aunt, played by Sheila Hancock, lies dying, the shooting style is very straightforward. In their monologs, written in iambic pentameter, as the entire film is, and in the shooting style, you seem to establish the aunt and the maid as parallel characters, as characters with a kind of detached insight, with a more encompassing vision.

Potter: Financiers and others who read the script said, ‘This can never work.' We've never met the aunt, and three-quarters of the way into the film, she suddenly has an eight-page monolog. I kept saying that it's a ‘Harry Lime moment'—three quarters of the way into the story, we get to meet somebody who has been a key character. The only words she says out loud, eventually, are, “In Cuba,”and “You should go soon.” But the rest of her monolog is voice-over—a voice that we assume is hers, but we don't know for sure because we've never seen her speak. It could be the imagination of Joan Allen's character, speculating about what her aunt might be saying. So once you start to analyze it, it is not straightforward; it's a totally nonrealist moment. At this stage in the film there's a huge amount of latitude with the definition of realism. The image looks realistic, but even that breaks down. The camera is often strongly tilted, there is a lot of slow motion on Joan—in this case, real slow motion, forty-eight frames, as she's pacing around. There are mute shots when we don't hear people's footsteps—it's a soundtrack from which a great deal has been extracted. It's actually right out on the edge of realism, but by this stage in the story we feel it to be entirely real.

The parallel with the cleaner is an interesting point. She speaks her inner monologues out loud, addressing us, which is also totally nonrealistic. But she doesn't speak to anyone else, so we, the audience, have a private, intimate relationship with her thoughts as we do with the Aunt's.

Cineaste: And the cleaner, in not interacting with the other characters, takes on the larger presence of a detached observer.

Potter: But she's also an outcast. They both are. The very old are the thrown-away people; the cleaners are the outcasts. All the characters are grappling with their suffering or exile in that sense, but there are different definitions of exile. The cleaner is an exile of class and the auntie of old age.

Cineaste: And her niece treats her as such by not calling, by arriving at the last minute, which is very typical.

Potter: Very typical. I don't know anybody who hasn't done that at some point with a sick or older friend or relative and then realized it's too late. We all have this illusion that somebody's going to go on and on living, and then you realize you missed the best moment.

Cineaste: I saw Yes twice, and the first time around, I'll admit having found the iambic pentameter verse both admirable, and, at the same time, off-putting—a distancing device. The second time around—perhaps because I already knew the story and felt I knew the characters—I really appreciated the wonderful lyricism of it all, and its organic workings with the characters, the situation, with what you're trying to accomplish in the film. Can you talk about your reasons for choosing verse—about the challenges and the pleasures of writing a screenplay in verse?

Potter: For me, it's enormously pleasurable to write in verse. It may be partly because I have a history as a lyric writer—I've written loads of songs, and, in fact, each of the scripts I've written included sections in verse that were usually not used. In Orlando there were a few verses, but not many. Part of the pleasure of writing verse is that, for me, it seems to come out in an entirely intuitive way. It's as if the act of working within such a tight constraint—exactly eight or ten syllables a line, which most of this is, even when it's split between two characters in the midst of dialog with a rhyme at the end—forces the mind to shuffle the cards internally and come up with something in a different way, especially if you know the content of what you want the characters to say. I found it helpful, freeing, and flowing to write that way. My problem has been generating too much so that it's hard to edit it down.

Of course, I was fully aware that this is not the standard way to write a screenplay, and to my knowledge, it's the first that is entirely in verse in the modern idiom, set in the present day. Almost everyone I spoke to gasped, saying, ‘Oh God, Sally, not another risk. Can't you just repeat yourself once and do something you already know works?' Maybe I have a slight addiction to risk, but that aside, let's look at the history of language, of dramatic construction. Narrative spoken in verse is a very, very old form dating back to the storytellers who went from village to village, improvising what were, in effect, long poems about current events. But it is also a very new form, if you look at rap and hip hop. There's something very fundamental and very playful about words arranged not just for their meaning but also for their sound and rhythm. The pure pleasure of that gets obliterated to some degree with the dusty dryness of prose in what we call realism. The history of dramatic form is not the same as the history of photographic realism, and what we call realism in a documentary, as we know very well, is a construction, a kind of fiction.

The challenge of bringing poetry and cinema together—and I say ‘poetry' advisedly because I've tried to disguise that word in raising money for the film—was not so much in the writing, although it was a huge technical challenge, of course, but in convincing financiers that it was something that could ever in a million, million years work. The actors needed no convincing whatsoever. They knew exactly what they could do with the text, although they had some trepidation about whether I wanted them to respect the form and therefore read it self-consciously like poetry. I told them to ignore the rhyme and the meter that's inherent in the writing, but to work with the sense of it, just as they would any other kind of script. You just have to ground it and root it; you don't have to be reverent about it.

I have yet to find out how a general public will respond. But I've been with the film at a number of festivals now, and in the initial screenings nobody knew that it was written in verse—it wasn't publicized. Many people didn't notice it at first until around the first kitchen scene where the rhymes are more obvious. On the whole, I haven't heard one negative comment about the language so far. There's been more of a fascination.

Cineaste: It works well with the molecular theme, and the theme surrounding dirt, in that you're deconstructing or drawing attention to the essence of language, of words and how they fit together. Did you have in mind the way in which the language is well-suited to the film's themes?

Potter: Yes, because the main criticism I have of my own films, is that they often are very, very theme-heavy. I think it's partly a reflection of who I am—I'm trying to work a lot of stuff out all the time. But I think it may also be an unconscious tendency of female directors, or me anyway, to wonder, ‘Is this is going to be my last film? I'd better get everything into it, just in case.' That aside, what the verse form does is to allow one to incorporate, in a flowing, natural way, different levels and layers of interconnected ideas, large and small. You can sort of flow, poetically, from the very big to the very small or you can talk about things in a way that would be very hard for us to sit and discuss over a cup of tea.

For instance when the cleaner says in her last speech that there's “no such thing as nothing, not at all; it may be very, very small but it's still there…‘no' does not exist, there's only ‘yes.'” That's quite hard as a conversation, even though the words aren't long, or academic, or complicated—they're short, normal words. But verse allows you to arrange them in a way that makes it possible to explore that kind of metaphysical idea, the idea that ‘no' does not exist. That's a very hard, obtuse idea to explore in prose.

Cineaste: Is the verse written in rhyming couplets or in the pattern of a Shakespearean sonnet?

Potter: Both. On the whole, especially in the auntie's soliloquy, it's written in rhyming couplets, but not everywhere. And because of the way the line wraps around, you don't always hear it as rhyming couplets, and sometimes there's a double rhyme halfway through the line.

Part of the goal was to evoke a state of mind in which people are thinking and feeling simultaneously, and not just one or the other—reflecting on their emotions as they're having them, a state of loving detachment really. What I have noticed about audience reactions so far is that it has been more emotional by far, than for any of my other films—people have been weeping and laughing a lot. So the verse can't be all that distancing—perhaps the opposite. What's interesting to me is that second time around it was different for you. Why was that?

Cineaste: I think the first time around, I wanted to feel something different about the relationship between the man and the woman. At first I couldn't believe in their attraction, to tell you the truth. It struck me that Allen's character is a careful, deliberate individual, and I found it difficult to believe that she would take this leap into an affair, no matter how she may have felt about her husband. I felt that if she were going to have an affair, she would do it in a safer way—maybe with a coworker in her lab or somebody she knew. When He says to her that she sees him as ‘Other' and that she wants him only for his flesh, he speaks a truth. But she doesn't strike me as the kind of woman who would necessarily want that or know that she wants that. The second time, I think I had already given myself over to this.

Potter: My observation of is that people do often act ‘out of character.' It's sometimes hard to understand why people have affairs, yet it's usually because of a deep need that isn't met in their lives. What comes out in the film is that these are two characters who understand each other very well. They think it's a physical attraction, and he makes her laugh for a few minutes in what's otherwise been a miserable time, which is enough to make her act on this mad impulse. But she's actually been attracted to something else in him, without even knowing it. It's a deeper recognition of some other dimension in life. Even attraction is often misunderstood.

Cineaste: You handle the relationship between the woman and her husband Anthony quite skillfully, suggesting that both really are equally responsible for the breakdown of communication and love—particularly in the dinner scene when they argue. She accuses him or neither fighting, shouting, nor attempting to “argue their way out,” as he accuses her of neglect—in failing to call her dying aunt, an extension of his feeling that she neglects his emotional needs. It seems they're both right.

Potter: It's easy to forget the loneliness of the place of the white middle-aged powerful man—the one who is blamed for everything, for all the ills of all societies. At one point, this was an innocent little boy. In the English educational system, a little boy who was probably sent to boarding school, torn away from his mother's presence at the age of seven and expected to become a man, and brutalized in subtle and not so subtle ways. I wanted to explore some of the suffering of that place—of being the one who's blamed. I wanted to evoke the prison that such a person lives in.

Cineaste: We never see him outside the home, yet he seems so out of place, so uncomfortable there, particularly in the scene when he stands doing paperwork, kind of vaguely dancing to music, with a drink.

Potter: Yes. Such men usually are terribly uncomfortable in their own skins. But perhaps he wasn't always. And what the scene with the air guitar implies is that he was a child of the Sixties and Seventies, went to rock concerts, was probably a radical, in fact, not unlike Tony Blair. Many of these powerful men were once young radicals with dreams—they were rock ‘n' roll guys who thought that they could get into positions of power and change the world—and then they got power and were changed by it to become almost indistinguishable from anyone else in that situation. But he's not accused by me, as the writer, or by the film; he's accused by her in their relationship, but they're also accusing each other. And that's what happens when a relationship breaks down. They're trapped.

Cineaste: It's also interesting that she proposes “arguing their way out” at a moment when she seems least committed to the relationship, when her preoccupation is with her lover with whom she's also arguing. Is she “hedging” her bets in this scene?

Potter: This is something I've observed, not just in others, but in myself too. You don't know you're doing it at the time—but what you're accusing the other person of doing is the very thing that you know you are capable of yourself. If you're really honest, you know it's what you could do, or have done, or are intending to do. In affixing blame in relationships, there's an enormous amount of denial and projection involved. But that is what an intimate relationship is—a sort of playground in which you are able to explore the things you find difficult or have had problems with in your primary family relationships. But in the male/female dynamic—the man being blamed for not expressing things and the woman being blamed for being overemotional—in a way, it's just a division of labor.

Cineaste: It strikes me that the design and use of color in their home clearly echoes the emptiness in their lives. I was especially struck by the kitchen, with not a single utensil or canister on the counter.

Potter: It is as if they don't live there. The design as a whole was a lot about taking things out, so that what remains becomes saturated with meaning.

Cineaste: Here's something that remains unclear to me: is the husband having an affair with this wife's friend Kate, and/or has he seduced his goddaughter Grace?

Potter: He is having an affair with Kate, but in my mind he has not seduced his goddaughter. I realize there's ambiguity there. I think that what happens with a man like this is that he does tend to act in inappropriate ways because he doesn't know how to be genuinely warm. So, reaching out with a hand on a woman's arm can feel and look really creepy. But he doesn't do anything really; he just holds Grace's hand for a few seconds. Yet our eyes and our associations with that stir us to think, “Oh my God.” But it's nothing. Also, now of course, it's become increasingly difficult for adults to relate physically to children. It's like a nightmare—the codes of behavior have become impossible. So, of course, there's going to be tension if there's a middle-aged man in a room with a pubescent girl. But he is having an affair with his goddaughter's mother, and so there's guilt, there's secrecy in the room.

Does she sense that her godfather is having an affair with her mother and her godmother doesn't know? That's the classic keeping of a family secret. Maybe she half knows. I was exploring that area of the loneliness of the teenager who knows too much. It's difficult being a teenage girl anyway. She's in trouble with her own body—she thinks she's fat, which, as we know, is an epidemic at the moment—making her position all the more complicated.

Cineaste: The relationship between Joan Allen's character and Grace involves a genuine intergenerational appreciation, particularly at a period in feminist discourse where much attention is paid to conflicting generational values between second- and third-wave feminists.

Potter: What's important to remember is that each generation of women is standing on the shoulders of the previous generation, and is only too aware of their mistakes. But rather than that being a source of mutual criticism it can also be a source of mutual learning. At its best, younger women can look to older women, and appreciate the risks, the sacrifices and the difficulties they faced—going back to the suffragettes and beyond. We've been able to live a different life because of what they fought for and were able to endure.

But each generation makes some mistakes as well. I feel that I can learn a lot from younger women because they've been born into a situation where they can take certain things for granted—like the right to a public life or the right to work—though they may be trapped in some other rigidities. Relationships like the one between the godmother and goddaughter can be incredibly mutually nourishing, particularly if the older woman does not look down on the younger woman as being the one who doesn't know. The reality is that it's hard to be a young woman. In the West, for the generation from about the ages of thirty-five to sixty, there's the advantage of having gone through a real explosion of politicization that was literally liberating, and the younger generation doesn't have that. In fact, they're dealing with a huge backlash. I adore being with people of different ages and am fortunate to have younger friends as well as some friends who are much older than me—in their late seventies. Respect for elders should come, not out of the false notion of their authority, but out of a genuine feeling of appreciation for their lived experience.

Cineaste: Do you see connections between Yes and your earlier work?

Potter: Other people seem to see the connections much more clearly than I do. I always work under the illusion that I'm starting from scratch and that it's a completely fresh thing. But the questions of belief, mortality, personal and political relations, male-female dynamics, identity and exile are, I guess, running themes that have taken different forms in my work. And there's always the excitement of exploring new forms esthetically. The love of the form itself is very strong, balanced by an intuitive sense of what's possible for an audience—what will push them away and what will draw them in. It's a private juggling act—a balance of passions.