Sally Potter

“The next one I would pick out is Come and See. Come and See, directed by Elem Klimov, is I think the best anti-war film ever made. What I can tell you about Come and See is that the shoot took about a year and they stopped when it was time to evaluate, I think rethink, they would stop for a few weeks and think. When I heard this I thought, luxury. The possibility of actually reflecting on what you're doing while you're shooting rather than being in this kind of mad sprint, this kind of race against time. I saw this originally because I was looking for a Russian DP to film my very English film Orlando, but which I was going to film sections of in Russia, and so I watched Come and See to see the work of Alexei Rodionov. I was particularly intrigued by his extraordinary Steadicam work, which often Steadicam makes one feel a bit seasick, but somehow he used it in this fleet-of-foot way. And I discovered he shot with Steadicam, he shot barefoot.”

“Now, A Matter of Life and Death, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. I was fortunate enough to get to know Michael Powell towards the end of his life. He was very helpful to me, something of a mentor, a totally a mentor in terms of his life's work, but I had the opportunity to actually be in a room and with him and have him speak to me about filmmaking. I told him A Matter of Life and Death was my favorite of his films and he said, "Well, it is my favorite too." And it is extraordinarily well written by Pressburger. It's in a way a courtroom drama about history and about the relationship and the influence, the influences of Europe on America and vice versa, and who, where people's roots are and where we all really come from, what's new and what's old and in terms of what the generations are and people's national identity, who we consider to be, when we've come from somewhere else.”

“Now poking out at me here is Dance, Girl, Dance by Dorothy Arzner. That's an amazing film to see and an early female director who was doing really, really, really interesting things in a kind of modest, celebratory way.”

“Fish Tank, Andrea Arnold, incredibly interesting filmmaker. It's really exploring the life of a teenage girl as she struggles her way through the limitations that are imposed upon her by poverty and her life in Britain. But what she does, Andrea, so amazingly, she makes something that makes you fall in love with the people just and their ability to survive despite their difficult situations. Beautifully crafted and it's beautifully shot.”

“La strada, just have to say a last thing about La strada. I rediscovered early Fellini recently and where I remember when I first saw Fellini thinking that this film was sentimental. When I saw it recently, no, it's not, it's not. So I then had to watch all of early Fellini again, of course 8 1/2 and so on. So I'm sorry I've got back into it because it's difficult to say goodbye to such wonderful works.”

“I'm going to start with The Apu Trilogy. These are life-changing films that I've watched many times, but you can't watch them too many times because they are themselves an education in the compassionate gaze of the filmmaker.”