Sam Taylor Wood : Killing Time/16mm

Marcelo Spinelli: Maybe we could talk about your show at the Showroom with Killing Time.

Sam Taylor Wood: Was that the only thing I did after Wonderful Life?

MS: No, no. There were other shows but maybe we can come back.

STW: I was just suddenly worrying about my own history for a minute!

MS: I was just thinking about it being your first solo show. How did that happen?

STW: Well, Kim Sweet who runs the Showroom saw a piece of my work in a magazine, (I think it was Art Monthly in the interview there), and she liked the idea of some of the things that were talked about by Michael Archer in the work.

MS: Was that the Piss and Tell article?

STW: Yes, that's it. And so she just called me and we met, and she asked if I'd be interested in making a show for the Showroom, which of course I was. And it was really good for me as my first solo show in London, because it didn't have the pressure of being in a large commercial gallery. But it did have proper funding. I could make a decent piece of work that I'd had on my mind for a while, and make this work without the pressure - and so it was totally perfect.

MS: And was that the first video piece that you did?

STW: I'd made a film piece before that.

MS: The 16mm?

STW: Yes. Which was for the show Lucky Kunst.

MS: It was called 16mm and it was a woman dancing to the sound of machine guns.

STW: It was shot on 16mm, but I also called it 16mm because of the sound of the machine guns.. It's to do with bullet sizes. I mean, you don't get 16mm bullets - 'cause they'd be massive. So, she's kind of dancing, but really erratically [?erotically] to this music, this machine gun, which from one speaker is close-range and from the another speaker it's like a retaliation, and she's like caught in the cross fire when she's dancing. And the girl who's the dancer listened to the sound of it for the whole day and then...Well, she found, I don't know, a kind of rhythm in it, and just danced in accordance to that. And I just asked her to dance as long as she could, so there are times where she gets really tired and just drops. That was projected on a loop in a small dark room.

MS: Was she a professional dancer?

STW: Yes, she was from Ballet Rambert.

MS: And was that the first time that you decided to use someone as a performer rather than yourself? Why was that?

STW: Well, I didn't want to... On some works you want to work with someone else because you don't want it to be too much about yourself or too personal in that way. And that piece was very much not to do with me personally. I just liked the idea of this woman dancing and you couldn't tell whether she was just dancing to the rhythm, or because there is gun fire and she is caught in the cross fire, or just this feeling of endlessness and having to keep going. You know, sometimes using me works for different work, and not all the time. I didn't want to get caught up in a Cindy Sherman style.

MS: Right. But there seems to be something important as well in some other pieces, in terms of you using professional performers.

STW: Well, I like the sort of collaboration and being the director, really, and saying exactly what you want and having someone else perform it... But going back to Killing Time, that was four friends of mine.

MS: Who were not performers.

STW: No. It was quite important that they were not performers. I wanted just to use four friends of mine and ask them to do something fairly extreme: each person had to learn all the words of a German opera, to their character - they were each given a character. So one girl had to learn a full hour of German opera, which is fairly excrutiating if you're not an actor trained to memorize lines, or an opera singer trained to learn that in terms of having to sing it. So they all learnt it, and it took them like a good couple of months for them to learn.

MS: And then when they are not singing, when someone else is singing, they are just waiting for their bit to come. And it's in real time.

STW: Yes. Each of them was filmed separately as well. They are filmed in their own homes. The idea was that the camera was switched on, the tape machine with the music was switched on, and then they listened for when they had to mime their words in synchronization to the music. But also I said to them, don't be theatrical, be nonchalant and relaxed, bored, or whatever you are feeling; just let it go and don't express anything. For example, the main woman: it was very easy for her in one way because she just had to remember everything that she had learnt all the way through. But for one guy, he only had two lines or something, so for the rest of the time he was very conscious that he was on camera for that whole hour and had nothing to do, nothing to play with. And so he kind of huffs and puffs and looks around and looks very bored. So there's this really nice conflict between the high drama of the opera which is so explosive and very passionate, and then these four people looking so completely and utterly bored by the whole thing, without any expression or feeling towards what they are hearing.