Sally Potter: 'The Party is the opposite of Brexit'

The British director of the star-studded political comedy, which premiered at the Berlin film festival, says it is ‘absolutely a political statement’ about ‘a broken England’

Sally Potter has described her latest film, political comedy The Party, as a portrait of “broken England”.

The film-maker who both wrote and directed the film, which has a star-studded cast led by Kristin Scott Thomas and Timothy Spall, said everything about it was a “political statement”, including its Jerusalem soundtrack and that it had been driven by “the feeling that people were losing political life.”

“I did start writing this just before the last general election in the UK, at a point where it seemed that the left in the UK was very much losing its ability to be sincerely brave about its policies and was trying to disguise itself as something very centrist, so that left and right were almost indistinguishable,” she told a press conference after the world premiere of her film at the Berlin Film Festival.

“Now that’s changed. It’s polarised since I started writing. But what was central to it was the feeling that people were losing political life, losing the ability to even know what the truth was. That’s why truth-telling is so central to the politics in this story … All kinds of truth-telling in personal life and political life.”

Watch the trailer for The Party.

She said the Brexit referendum, which happened during the two-week shooting schedule, had made a considerable impact on the production.

“Half the crew and cast turned up weeping that morning as we found out the result. There was a feeling that the film – I realised as events were unfolding – had a slightly prescient sense of what can go so very, very wrong when people lose touch with their principles.”

The result she said was “absolutely a political statement, as is everything else in the film”, and a “light and loving look at the state of England, of a broken England.”

She had also come to recognise the importance of “the healing power of laughter for things that are horrific or tragic”.

The film, centred on a gathering of friends to celebrate the promotion of Janet (Scott Thomas) to the role of shadow health secretary, quickly descends into farce, owing to the characters’ deceitful behaviour towards each other. Shot in black and white and set in the confines of a London house, the film – which also stars Patricia Clarkson, Cillian Murphy, Cherry Jones and Emily Mortimer – nods strongly to the relationship dramas of Harold Pinter, Edward Albee and Iris Murdoch.

The Swiss actor Bruno Ganz (Wings of Desire, The Downfall), who is cast as a kindly esoteric German and the partner of Patricia Clarkson’s mouthy American character, said he had taken pleasure in the role particularly because he wasn’t used to playing comic roles or good Germans (in Downfall he played Hitler).

“I wanted to make madame Merkel happy, so she can see a good German in a film, as we are all good now, and that was my goal,” he joked.

Potter said it had been a dream of hers for years to work with Ganz, ever since she had seen him in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire. “I wanted to take the quality of profound compassion in that role … and tease it out and put it in this role, along with a brilliant comedic light touch,” she said. “When I look at Bruno I want to laugh because there’s a little bit of irony there all the time.”

Patricia Clarkson quipped that she had done one better than Sally Potter by playing Ganz’s lover. Timothy Spall, who plays Janet’s husband Bill, said he had been luckier still. “I get a kiss of life, full on the mouth from him,” he said, referring to Ganz’s character’s attempts to resuscitate him.

Potter referred to the deliberate “internationalism” of her film, pointing to its Russian cinematographer, Argentinian designer, the US actor Clarkson, and Murphy, who plays an Irish banker, as “the opposite of the dynamic of Brexit. It’s something that feeds everybody and is of the benefit of everybody,” she said.

• Reviews of The Party are embargoed until 6:30pm GMT

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