Sally Potter's My World interview: “I’ve always thought of music as an equal partner to what we are seeing visually [in films]”

“It was like a great hunger that I didn’t know I had,” says Sally Potter, international filmmaker, of her later life drive to compose music. “It was like I’d accumulated all these songs and instrumental pieces in my body and head and suddenly, because of this, I had an outlet.”

At home in east London, in a large music room furnished with keyboards and a grand piano inherited from her grandmother, Potter wiggles her fingers at the computer screen, miming the magic enabled by software program Logic. “Discovering Logic was transformational”, she tells me. “Rather than laboriously writing everything out, or relying on memory, it meant I could compose on a keyboard using a sample. Or I could hear the cello I wanted and write it and edit it.”

Until a few years ago Potter was chiefly relating to music as material for soundtracks to such films as Orlando (1992), her bold adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s historical epic, and The Tango Lesson (1996), a semi-autobiographical depiction of the relationship between a female film director and an Argentinean tango dancer; and more recently, black comedy The Party (2017) and The Roads Not Taken (2020), a father-daughter drama about early-onset dementia starring Javier Bardem and Elle Fanning. A new feature-length film is in the works, but any more than that, she’s not saying.

A love for music from around the world has stocked her CD cupboard with everything from Lebanese singer Fairuz, US vanguard composer Laurie Anderson, actress-singer-muse Lotte Lenya and Ethiopian nun-musician Emahoy Tsege-Mariam Gebru to tango singer-composers Carlos Gardel, Aníbal Troilo and Astor Piazzolla.

“If I’m curating rather than composing a soundtrack I raid my collection for my favourite CDs and play tracks from them to the actors, and the tracks become part of the script. The person played by Tim Spall in The Party” – which features tunes by the likes of Bo Diddley, Ibrahim Ferrer and Ernest Ranglin – “had a record player. His relationship with vinyl told us a lot about him as a character.”

Potter’s Holocaust drama The Man Who Cried (2000) famously featured Roma collective Taraf de Haïdouks, a song by Italian tenor Salvatore Licitra, pieces by the trailblazing Kronos Quartet and a score by Argentinean composer Osvaldo Golijov: “I fell for the Taraf’s ability to play these raw, incredibly beautiful sounds by ear, these rhythms that live deep in the body. Then Kronos are such amazing bridge builders, with such careful respect for all the different cultures they collaborate with.” She deliberately leaves music out of the cutting room. “I edit a film when it’s as bare, bold and unsupported as it can be. If it can stand up under those conditions, then the music won’t be a crutch.”

“Each film has arisen musically through different approaches,” she continues. “I’ve had certain repeat collaborators like Fred Frith, whose weeping guitar expresses what we all have inside of us. I’ve always thought of music as an equal partner to what we are seeing visually, which then means that every sound in the film is also music: slamming doors; footsteps; trickling water; a plane overhead.”

A tango obsessive who trained as a dancer and choreographer (she dances throughout The Tango Lesson with celebrated tango ambassador Pablo Veron, and sings in the final scene), Potter was a member of the London Film-Makers’ Co-op, who shared a space with the London Musicians Collective (LMC) in the 70s, and this put her in contact with a thriving underground improv scene in London. It was at an LMC event that she met Lindsay Cooper and ended up joining the all-female improvising group, FIG. “Listening to improvised music taught me to listen deep, and appreciate all sound as a form of music,” she says.

The daughter of a music teacher and a poet-interior designer, both atheists and activists, Potter’s earliest musical memories involve listening as a toddler to Beethoven’s late quartets on her father’s hulking horned gramophone player (“This anarchic, emotive sound coming out”) and falling for Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and other jazz divas a few years later, around when she began playing violin and piano.

Travelling fed her love of music, literally and figuratively. “Through recorded music we are able to hear and immerse ourselves in different cultures. Music travels in an incredible way; yes, it might come from another culture, but that doesn’t mean it’s where it stays.”

Potter fell for Amália Rodrigues and fado while visiting Portugal, then for Piazzolla and tango in Argentina. “The music led me to the dance form and a line of Argentine composers who perhaps weren’t so widely heard. I went to Buenos Aires and immersed myself in the then rather obscure tango world and its music… People would spend all night in cafes and gymnasium dance halls. It was a very serious pursuit. Everyone on the dance floor knew not just about the different composers, but about the specifics and dates. They’d say, ‘Ah yes, this is Piazzolla in 1956’ or ‘This is [communist activist] Osvaldo Pugliese in 1960 after he came out of jail’.”

“The music opened up such a deepening place of melancholy, meditation and longing for me that I had to ration how much I listened to it,” she continues. “I wasn’t from that culture, but I adored and related to it as if I was. It made me question, what are our roots anyway? What do we respond to?”

Having released her debut album Pink Bikini, in 2023, Potter gifts us Anatomy, a 12-track paean to Mother Earth and a wake-up call to all who inhabit her. It’s a work that folds in blues, folk and jazz, and instruments including guitars, cello, electric bass, double bass, bodhrán and French horns to frame story-songs strafed with emotion. “I wanted to write lyrics and music that evoked the complexity of our relationship with the Earth, given that if we destroy it through climate change there is no humanity, no future, no anything. I wanted to see what I could do to acknowledge we’re at crisis point and come at it from different angles. So, there’s a song about trees, and about bird extinction, a song about the desire to go fast and fill your car with gas… There’s a song about a break-up of a love affair, about grieving and loss. I wanted to make an album that worked through that whole arc and the consequences of what we’ve done to the Earth without understanding where that leads us and what we can do.”

It’s protest music, as influenced by Patti Smith, Brecht & Weill and Bob Dylan. “There’s a lot of music or songs that, when you start to analyse them, could be thought of as protest,” says Potter. “Anatomy is a form of protest about the irresponsible silence around climate change.”

A wry smile. “It’s my small contribution to raising awareness of this around the medium of music, which creates a space in which we can feel and contemplate these things.”

+ Anatomy by Sally Potter is out now