EXCLUSIVE: Orlando, filmmaker Sally Potter’s seminal gender-bending and much acclaimed 1992 movie, is finding new life with a 30th anniversary 4K restoration and a theatrical re-release beginning Friday. It’s from Sony Pictures Classics, the specialty arm of Sony Pictures that also happens to be celebrating their 30th anniversary this year, counting Orlando It was a key part of their 1992 first year in business. It was nominated for two Oscars, one each for Costume Design and Production Design. This movie is timeless and relevant in today’s era.
Special bonus: billed with the Orlando re-release is a new Potter short called You can look at me, It stars Javier Bardem, Chris Rock. This was originally filmed for a 2020 feature she made called “The Last Man Standing”. The Roads Not Taken which starred Bardem on a road trip with a daughter — played by Elle Fanning — as he experiences alternate lives he could have had. This sequence in which he plays a failed drummer was part of that movie, but Potter, even at the writing stages, felt it didn’t quite fit the rest of the story, so she told Bardem and Rock it was going to be cut from the film but promised she would rework it as a short. She now has done that, incidentally making it eligible to compete in this year’s Live Action Short Oscar race.
For the new life Orlando, the film based on Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel has Tilda Swinton starring as an immortal nobleman who inherits his parents’ house back from Queen Elizabeth I on the condition that he “not fade,”He has an unforgettable, but disastrous affair with a Russian Princess. Then, at his 200th birthday, he wakes up as a woman who is faced with new property issues. She struggles with these issues right through the 1990s. Recently, the restoration was shown for the first time at Telluride Film Festival. It also premiered in New York a few days earlier.
Potter has not stopped making this classic in the past three decades. It is a joy to watch it now with younger audiences.
“It’s like I finished it last week and here you are, this whole new generation finding it. I mean, Orlando is a film, of all my films, it’s one that’s never gone away. It’s always showing somewhere at some festival or at some short run, or it’s being taught as the classic way to deal with an adaptation, or you know, whatever,”I heard her via Zoom, but we also had a long discussion about it at the Sony Classics dinner in Telluride this Labor Day weekend. “At Telluride, it was a mostly very young audience, and quite a few of them were students there in the symposium, and I talked to them the next day, and they were so lively and so on it, and all the stuff around gender in it was speaking directly to them and their experience, and I just had a very similar experience in New York with it showing at the Metrograph, and I did two Q&As, again, to by-and-large young audiences finding it for the first time, and a lot of them were very moved by it or excited, lots of questions. So, I really feel it’s like the character who never ages. To some degree, my experience of this film is that it has not aged a day.”
Potter continues to find new and creative ways to make Potter’s work look great, even though it hasn’t aged. Orlando She has a unique way of taking the material in unanticipated directions, which she now reveals on Deadline. Orlando, Now for which she quietly worked over the past few decades.
“I envision Orlando, Now as a ‘triple threat’ of album, live show/event and also a song and dance film. It needs to co-exist across these platforms to bring the idea fully into the present moment, reach new audiences and take the core ideas of the original film into a whole new realm, including cinematically,”She spoke. “I guess my secret ambition is to find a way to re-imagine the musical genre. I grew up loving Singin’ In The Rain and other classics – Orlando, Now will be my contribution to the form but stripped of any nostalgia and using song and dance in ways I hope will be invigorating and surprising.”
Potter composed the music for the original. Orlando but it was out of necessity; She couldn’t afford anyone else at that point. Fortunately she started out as a musician in her 20s — a singer as well — and could collaborate with others to bring the music she heard in her head right into the film.
What’s funny is that in keeping Orlando, Now secret she says she had to dodge the topic during Q&As of late when asked questions about Orlando She explains how she may approach it. IfShe was making it today.
“I’ve been biting my tongue because I’ve been working on this version of Orlando in song with a different perspective and point of view for more than three years, the music and the lyrics, even 10 years ago I found my original attempts at the lyrics. So, it’s been there a long time, but I’ve done it completely under the radar. This [on Deadline] really is literally its debut,”She said. The exclusive first-look clip is available below.
“Nobody else knows I’ve even been doing it, that I have written it. It’s 30 songs. It’s an hour and a half of music. It’s been recorded, no doubt it will get revised, but I’ve been working with a lot of wonderful musicians and singers and so on to make it happen. I wanted it to be about what I felt was lacking, if possible, in the book as well as the film: other perspectives on the 400 years of British History.
“There’s a shadow side to all of this, and so, my drive was to take the transcendent aspects of the story — immortality, a change of sex, the passing of time, the mysteries really about how we exist through time and so on — but marry them with a point of view that can speak for those who’ve been silenced during this history of empire. So, I have a narrator and I have a choir who is singing…but to set Orlando’s story against these other voices and have one comment on the other and shift the point of view and address these in song and in music, which can evoke that shadow, the melancholy, the lament, the feeling of the silenced ones and the voices that have not been heard, and kind of set that against this exuberance of Orlando’s story. I thought this could be something extraordinary if I can make it work as a live rendition and perhaps make a documentary of the making of it, the recording of the songs.”
Potter claimed that she was a bit puzzled by her own thoughts. “Why tread on this ground again?”
“It’s like it won’t leave me alone. There’s something at the core of it that is kind of eternal,”She said it, comparing it with the many interpretations of Hamlet. “There’s lots of ways of doing it and working it, but the way I’m choosing to do it now is really, really different than the film. There’s no need for me redo the film. I’ve done it. It is what it is, and it has its life, but this will be a very, very different experience, and that’s why I’m calling it Orlando, Now.
Here’s a first look at it: