February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
“I was really prompted to start writing it the day after 9/11 and out of the feeling of necessity, really, to make some kind of positive contribution to the awfulness of the situation and the feeling that things were probably going to get worse,” Potter related in a recent telephone interview.
The story of a passionate love affair between an Irish-born woman (Joan Allen) and a cook (Simon Abkarian) who was a doctor in his native Lebanon, this sensual independent film with a $1 million shooting budget takes place mostly in London, but travels to Belfast, Beirut and Havana, and has the distinction of being the first contemporary movie written entirely in poetry.
“Jurassic Park” star Sam Neill plays Allen’s philandering, politician husband, while “Intermission” actress Shirley Henderson offers comic relief as the philosophical maid who witnesses the trail of dirt the other characters leave behind.
Although the film touches on numerous hot-button issues, Potter worked hard to ensure it is provocative and entertaining, without ever feeling too sober or heavy-handed.
“I was very aware of wanting balance,” said Potter.
“We knew it was a political film,” Allen recently told reporters in New York. “But we knew before that, we needed to play it as a love story and we talked about that aspect of it a lot because if you hammer these thoughts that are very big — these political ideas — it can be a big turn-off and Sally so wanted to keep the audience engaged.”
Potter said she initially decided to have her two main characters, known only as “He” and “She,” hail from Beirut and Belfast because these are two cities that have a lot in common, despite their locations in two such vastly different parts of the world.
“In these cities, people know what it is to have fighting in the streets, know what it is to live with and survive civil war and have families divided on different lines,” Potter remarked. “Different kinds of wars, different kinds of barriers that they have to deal with and sometimes they’re drawn along religious lines, also. I felt that if these two characters came from those two cities, they would understand each other in some sense quite deeply, even though so much about their cultures were different.”
“‘Yes,’ of course, is the last word of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” and I thought of his great work and some of Virginia Woolf’s, too, because the project is stream of consciousness — of the artist or writer trying to listen to the inner life of the character as it really is, as we experience when we walk around, the world that we secretly inhabit in our heads,” Potter reasoned. “And I thought it would be interesting to try to take that river, that stream in and out where you dive into someone’s mind and out again into their speech in kind of a seamless way and I wanted to see how that would work because what the film is doing is trying to access the secret life of each of the characters and find that each is in their own kind of solitude and in that solitude they each have a lot in common.”
“Yes” opens in select theaters Friday and expands to wider release later this month.