I tend to work on my own, I’m not very good at trusting people, if I have one assistant more often than not it’s my boyfriend Jose - he took that picture of me in the African head dress, he has a really good eye and is a professional dancer and choreographer so there are parallels there.
I had a bad experience in India that put me off for life. I decided I wanted to make a film about how Vogue Magazine was due to launch in India, my assistant (my younger brother - he was great, he didn’t put me off!) and I took a flight out there. I was totally clueless, I had been to India before but I had never really worked with film and I had never tried to work with people in this way. India is an amazing place, but also one of the most stressful places in the world. The idea was that we would ask people on the street to wear masks of fashion personalities (Naomi Campbell etc) and say immortal fashion one-liners, almost to create a dress rehearsal of when the real fashionistas come to town.
To start with virtually no-one could understand that I had no money and needed them to act for free, eventually I started to pay people, which opened up this whole can of worms nightmare of bartering prices, people pointing and laughing at me, people talking about me in hindi. However the resulting film was a great success due to all of the above, what I intended to be a slick clean pastiche of fashion TV, was chaotic and dirty, saying a lot more than I had originally envisaged.