PJ Harvey names her favourite filmmakers: “I love their work”
PJ Harvey’s entrance into the music world was hard to ignore. Releasing her debut single ‘Dress’ in 1991, her words were unflinching as the guitars rambled forward with frantic energy. “There must be a way that I can dress to please him/ It’s hard to walk in the dress, it’s not easy/ I’m swinging over like a heavy loaded fruit tree,” she sings, encapsulating the pressures experienced by many women to get dolled up and search for a partner under the beaming lights of a dingy nightclub.
With her debut album, Dry, the singer continued to explore femininity in a multitude of ways, tapping into love, longing and raw sexuality, sometimes bringing violence into the mix to create a complex portrait of how it feels to navigate womanhood in a harshly patriarchal world. Stamping over the demands placed upon women, Harvey wielded her voice and her instruments to create a landscape where her desires and insecurities could be placed on full display without care for judgment.
Harvey has continued to make bold and influential records, like the Mercury Prize-winning Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea and Let England Shake, as well as the grunge-adjacent Rid of Me and the beautifully poetic Is This Desire?. The musician has also made various soundtrack contributions over the years, including an album of original music for the theatre production of All About Eve starring Gillian Anderson and Lily James, as well as a score for the show Bad Sisters.
While Harvey has contributed a few original tracks to movies like Stella Does Tricks and The Crow: City of Angels, she has never scored a whole film – something that many fans would love to see. This is something that Harvey hopes to do at some point in her career, telling The Believer, “I really enjoy working with visual images or in the theatre. I love working with actors. I have so much respect for them. I love working with directors—theatre, film, TV directors. So it’s an absolute joy. I’d love to do more because it’s lovely to collaborate and to be one part of a whole, of making something great if you can.”
But who would she love to work with? In the same interview, Harvey revealed some of her favourite filmmakers, citing various important and rather experimental figures. “I have some favourite filmmakers. People like Paul Thomas Anderson, or Yorgos Lanthimos, Jonathan Glazer, Quentin Tarantino, Céline Sciamma. I could go on. Jane Campion. Joanna Hogg. I love their work,” she said.
Filmmakers like Sciamma, Campion, and Hogg, best known for movies like Portrait of a Lady on Fire, The Piano, and The Souvenir, respectively, all use carefully crafted narratives to tell distinctively female stories. The sexually charged yet tense atmosphere of The Piano feels distinctively Harvey-esque, while Portrait of a Lady on Fire is full of the kind of longing that the singer embodies in songs like ‘Oh My Lover’ or ‘The Letter’.
Meanwhile, filmmakers like Lanthimos and Glazer are known for their rather transgressive methods of storytelling, often shocking audiences with their bold approaches to exploring themes like sexuality, specifically female, and the surreal ways in which humans treat one another.
Perhaps one day Harvey will collaborate with one of these filmmakers, although she is aware that many of them “already have really great relationships with composers.”
She explained, “I can understand that they would want to keep working with those people. You know, Jon Glazer works with Mica Levi a lot. Paul Thomas Anderson works with Jonny Greenwood, etc, etc.”
