Looking at Sally Potter\'s film version of Virginia Woolf\'s novel, \'Orlando,\' specifically regarding it\'s intertextual nature.
When Tilda Swinton and Sally Potter were being interviewed at the BFI, they both talked about how passionate they were about creating Orlando the film, and they hoped that they could replicate the way the novel made them feel and succesfully represent this on film. As discussed in a seminar, one person's 'feelings' about a novel can vastly differentiate from another's (usually hindering the audience's enjoyment because they did not feel the same), so, when translating a medium from novel to film, which idea will resonate with all? Potter has chosen the ideas 'death' and 're-birth.' What is also interesting, is that a screenwriter will usually begin a script perhaps not totally aware of their controlling idea. Therefore, is the key to succesfully adapting a novel to film finding the 'controlling idea' of a novel and reproducing it cinematically?
From historical event to novel to sketch to film...
The location influencing the film. The maze available at Hatfield House is visually dynamic, and encapsulates the imaginative nature of the novel. SP 'The maze wasn't in the script...but the maze was in the location.' Using the maze to cross 100 years.
The house ever-present in the background, because it was, of course, Virginia Woolf's inspiration for the novel's extended period of time.
Sally Potter's 'cinematic realisation' of Orlando.
'It was never supposed to be a documentary about history. Rather, a kind of exploding of a nostalgic myth: England's imagined history of itself...visually, that was done by taking an imagined essence of each period with clues from paintings and artifacts from that time and blowing it up.'