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Grim and prim

The longest day

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The longest day

The screening for the Los Angeles Film Festival, the last such event before the film finally opens this Friday, turned out to be warm and gratifying. Flanked by Joan and Simon, as we stood on the stage after the screening, I was aware of feeling the joy and safety of giving and receiving appreciation and respect to each other in public. It is very nice to honour your beloved collaborators in front of an audience populated by many of your peers, in this instance both known and unknown to us personally. I couldn’t sit through the film, though. I took some photos of Simon in the lobby instead.

Later, sitting in the cool dark air by the pool in the gardens at the hotel, lit by flickering candles, I abandoned my serious persona – the one who talks earnestly – and sincerely, I must add - about world peace, East/West relations, the art of listening and the art of art, and instead grilled my entirely excellent agent, Bart Walker, whose company I greatly enjoy when we manage to be in the same city at the same time, about his worst horror stories of most agonizing moments in filmmaking. What relief to laugh cruelly about other directors’ suffering! And what a relief to gloat over the fact that we have all survived repeated humiliation and attack.  The stories can never be told publicly, of course. Many of Bart’s other clients are equally rugged in their independence, so my experiences and difficulties are familiar territory for him. When I said I hoped that people would go and see YES in considerable numbers so that the next film would be a little easier to finance than this one (four years on, still not paid a penny, etc), but that, no doubt, my next idea would be yet another weird risk, he replied, without missing a beat: ‘Well, I certainly hope so. I would expect nothing less’.  

It was a full moon, the summer solstice, the longest day.

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In the lobby



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Posing for fan



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The result



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LA Fest Q&A



Text © Sally Potter. All pictures © Adventure Pictures unless otherwise indicated