Film-maker Bette Gordon is having her photo taken. It might be more accurate to say that she is directing the photo shoot. No smiling, she insists firmly, and instead gives her “don’t-mess-with-me” face. Halfway through the shoot, perched on a red velvet chair, looking stylish in a black leather jacket, she casts an envious eye at the camera. “I hate being photographed,” she tells the photographer. “I’d rather be where you are.”
Gordon would like to have directed more, in fact. Her 1983 movie Variety, a radical feminist piece about female desire shot partly in a real-life porn cinema, has recently been rediscovered as a cult classic – it still delivers a jolt of subversive electricity. In the four decades since it was released, Gordon has directed just a handful of features, while working as a professor of film at Columbia University. Over the years, films have got away “for various reasons”, she sighs. But at the end of the day she is proud of her body of work. “What I can say is that I made the films I wanted to make. I had final cut. Very few directors get that. I had creative control. That was really important to me. I didn’t compromise.”
