Sally Potter Quotes

You can't really divorce women's struggles in the world from women's in the cinema. As long as there's hierarchy it means that women are somehow secondary or second class or less than. That's going to be reflected in movies because films are the most powerful medium to reflect back society's view of itself

I think yes is the most beautiful and necessary word in the English language.

A narrative thread gives people permission to think about other things whilst being carried by its flow. It does not mean that one has to compromise one's vision, or question formal concerns. It's just being more subtle and clever by having one accessible thread.

I think that the word feminism doesn't imply enough in terms of solidarity with other liberation struggles. I am firmly committed to the notion that no one group can be freed until all groups are freed.

The language of cinema as it has evolved has also excluded vast swathes of human experience. The forms we find in the process of making a film can start to redress this balance and venture into uncharted territory. This is not just about unsung identities but about the subtleties and nuances of contemplation, the drifting spaces in which the worlds of the very small and the very large collide. Camerawork is a part of that.

As the director, you have to hold in your head the widest possible vision. Not just the idea and the story, but the conceptual content. But at the same time, you have to consider the tiniest, tiniest detail.

To me there is an intimate relationship between austerity and more lush aesthetics. They're two faces of the same coin.

My writing method is to sit in a very small hut absolutely alone. I write in total solitude. And I write on paper, on hand, and then it gets typed. Normal for me.

I am not interested in making didactic polemical statements. That is not the way I want to make films. There is a place for polemics, but I don't think that it is in fictional cinema. Fictional cinema works subtly and deeply.

I've always traveled with the films because I want the audience to be my teacher so that I can learn for the next one.

The female struggle implies the black struggle, it implies the struggle with anti-Semitism, it implies all of the other struggles. That is the only possible way to think about human liberation.

Between the postwar fifties - domesticity, people happy to be alive after the Second World War, wanting to build a home, make a family, make a nest. Women were pushed back into the home after having been active in the Second World War. It was a big Doris Day moment for women, which didn't suit all women.