Word: potter
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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English director Sally Potter brings Orlando to life...
That's a lot of sweat for one movie. So why Orlando? "Woolf created a believable, sensual world within an unrealistic story," Potter says. "In a light way, she dealt with some profound themes. Orlando's long life as a man, and then as a woman, lets you appreciate the essential human self that transcends genders. She just blows away the cobwebs of mystique about masculinity and femininity. When I first read the book, as a teenager, I found it such an exuberant liberation from any false notion of femaleness. And Orlando's 400-year life-span...
...Just now Potter is ecstatic at her film's success and artfully dodging questions about gender roles in filmmaking. "When I'm working," she says, "I don't feel male or female. After all, what did Virginia Woolf call the mind of the artist? 'The androgynous mind.' " Say, then, that anyone -- man or woman or a new, improved species -- could have made Orlando. But until Sally Potter, nobody did. Nobody dared...
...novel Orlando, inspired by Woolf's love for Vita Sackville-West, is a gay lark disguised as a historical biography. Centuries and genders fly past, each one bending like a willow to accommodate Woolf's puckish feminist insight and hindsight. Potter's movie, faithful in spirit to the book, is something else. It is, in the best sense, a travesty, a masquerade, a cross-dressing comedy of eros. Yet moviegoers do believe in Orlando, in the breadth of its canvas, the immediacy of its emotions, the palliative power of its wit. They can swim in its gorgeous images: the fruit...
Getting it made is another matter; it's not easy to finance a film of one's own when one is a woman. Potter, 43, wrote her Orlando treatment in 1984 but found no takers. "Investors," she says, "often have trouble believing that a woman can handle large sums of money and lead a team, that she has a sufficiently firm hand." So Potter directed for TV: the series Tears, Laughter, Fear and Rage (1986) and a 1988 documentary on Soviet women. Still, she says, "Orlando wouldn't leave me alone. So five years ago, I got my script...