BBC Four: What led you to the subject matter of Three Salons? Philippa Lowthorpe: When I was working at the BBC with Peter Symes he showed a group of directors a film made in the 1950s by Dennis Mitchell called Morning in the Streets. I thought this film was wonderful, but another director said you could never make a film like that today and the kinds of people in the film no longer existed.
I knew he was wrong about that so I decided to make a film about these old ladies in a Blackpool hairdressers. Old ladies aren't normally at the cutting edge of documentary subjects. They are section of our society which gets overlooked. But I thought the ones I found were wonderful - very interesting, moving and witty - and they came out with some very profound things too. I just really liked them.
BBC Four: Did you give the women at the salons any assistance with directing, or were you a fly on the wall? PL: This film is highly constructed but made to feel like it's observational. There's lots of imagery too. The old lady who has had the same hairdo for 20 years provides the spine to the film.
It took us a whole day to film her having her hair done. We put lights up outside the window to make her hair look luminous and filmed a lot in slow motion to give it a dream-like quality.
There's also lots of interaction between the ladies and myself in the film. It was hard to be a fly on the wall with a six-foot tall cameraman and the rest of the crew in a tiny salon. I spent a long time in the salons with all the ladies before we did any filming so they knew me really well.
When the crew came they just accepted them as friends of mine and basically ignored us. Although one of the ladies said in a loud voice about the camera assistant, "Hasn't she got lovely teeth?"
BBC Four: The film has a very distinctive film style - do you feel more restricted when filming documentaries or are you easily able to capture your subjects imaginatively?
PL: I don't much like rules so I like experimenting with ways of filming and I like the cross-over between drama and documentary. The challenge is always to try and capture people as imaginatively and truthfully as possible. Sometimes it works out better than others.
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