

ORLANDO is an unusual film based on the novel by Virginia Woolf. Woolf’s writing is dense, complex and highly literary, and director Sally Potter ingeniously translates that medium-specificity to create a film that is purely cinematic: visual, lush, and evocative.
Potter and star Tilda Swinton spoke to Slant Magazine about the importance of the film in their respective careers. For Swinton this role established her as a formidable actor: “It was the first of a kind of working experience that I have come to make bedrock of my working life — which is a long, very, very close collaboration with a filmmaker on an impossible film! This was the first Sisyphean task in my now, it feels, pretty much regular day jobs of Sisyphean tasks in collaboration with filmmakers. And very often with relatively inexperienced filmmakers — more so than Sally was at the time. Obviously, it was a very particular working relationship because Sally is a very particular person, but it set a successful working paradigm for me that I have been wedded to ever since.”
For Potter, the film was a kind of breakthrough: “It was a turning point, which you can see by looking back. At the time it was just normal. It was the passion of a very long road, and enormous amounts were learned during it. I think in the eyes of the world what was different was this one went wider, broader, and was more visible and was more accessible. But we didn’t know that. It was so unknown how it was going to be received […] But that’s the big difference in a certain sense, the catapulting into this very public place after years and years of Tilda working in one area and my years working in another area. This was not actually for either of us a first film or a first working experience by a long way, but that’s how it was perceived because we were suddenly so visible.”


