Interview With Mary Harron, Filmmaker on the Edge

Each year the Provincetown International Film Festival presents a Filmmaker on the Edge award to someone in the film industry whose work is, well "edgey." This year, the recipient is Mary Harron. According to Festival Programmer Connie White, it's been a long time coming.

"She s somebody we'd wanted to honor for a while...I think she is painstaking, she knows what she wants and she stays and fights for what she needs," says White.

Mary Harron began her career in the entertainment industry as a rock journalist interviewing punk bands like the Sex Pistols and eventually moving into television in 1983. It wasn't until 1996, that Harron's first feature film, "I Shot Andy Warhol" was released. Since then, she also made the highly controversial "American Psycho," with Christian Bale, in 2000 and has only just now completed a film called "The Notorious Bettie Page" due for release in 2006.

"I always was really interested in films. I didnt know any women directors, though, so it seemed not possible... I thought I would write them," she explains.

In between, Harron's directed several episodes of television series like "Oz," "Pasadena" and "The L Word," and continued to work on various scripts of her own.

"You can kind of never work on just one thing because I have to make a living," she explains.

Harron's projects are unique in their subject matter. While "I Shot Andy Warhol," a fictionalized account of Valerie Solanas, the radical feminist who shot Andy Warhol in 1968, may seem a far cry from Harron's notoriously violent horror/black comedy "American Psycho," based on the Brett Easton Ellis book of the same name about a misogynistic Wall Street stockbroker/serial killer, they do share some common bonds. For one thing,the subjects are not easy to take on because the lead characters are so difficult to connect with as an audience. These are extreme personalities, not your average everyday criminals.

In "I Shot Andy Warhol," Harron takes us inside Solanas' mind, providing us with a snapshot of a very bright, but mentally ill young woman, played perfectly by Lili Taylor. We don't necessarily identify with her in the traditional sense, but we are able to at least understand her insanity to some degree. Likewise, Harron does not try to get us to like or identify with Jason Bateman in "American Psycho." She explores the environment of the young Wall Street narcissist, again demonstrating his mental illness, this time not as successfully, perhaps because the film tries to be a comedy at the same time and is too appalling in its subject matter to achieve that.

"I guess they're all isolated characters isolated form the world around them," Harron offers.

Her upcoming "The Notorious Bettie Page" is another film focusing on an outsider character, starring Gretchen Moll in the title role. This time, the film is a biopic about controversial 1950s pinup girl Bettie Page, who disappeared in 1957 at the height of her career for nearly 35 years. Page, who was tracked down in 1992, turns out to have spent part of her self-imposed exile institutionalized for schizophrenia, after attempting to stab several people to death in the early 1980s.

The project itself has been in development since before "American Psycho," but just took a lot of time to put together to Harron's satisfaction.

"It was just a very difficult project to get right.," she says. "To take one person's life story and turn it into a dramatic structure is difficult.... A lot of times people impose a lot of melodrama or make events more dramatic than they really were or create characters that didn't really exist. I wanted it to be the shape of real life, which is more episodic. And to give it some coherence is hard."

The film focuses on Page's heyday in the 1950s to the early 1960s. From a production standpoint, the film is interesting because it is almost 80 percent black-and-white, a creative choice that was not easy to defend agains the concerns of her producers.

Asked for her own take on Page, who was famous for her dominatrix-style photos - shocking for her repressive time, Harron is tightlipped, saying only "well, you'll have to see the film." As for her creative vision for that film, though, she's more open.
"I just always saw it as black and white. I always saw it in black and white," Harron explains. "But then after we did it," she adds, "we realized how important it was, because it kind of put a distance on the sexuality... (That's) one reason it took so many years to make. Even with (co-producer) HBO it took convincing."

But the cable channel was willing to take a risk and so Mary got her way.

"It had a long edit through the autumn, (but) later today I'm going to check the print. So it's finally finished," she says, sounding relieved.

Now that "Bettie" is complete, Harron is focused on her new feature, "Please Kill Me," an adaptation of the Legs McNeil book of the same name. This one, she says is a "more personal" film for her. The film, not yet in production, "is the story of punk rock in New York," Harron says. "It's a world that I knew directly," she adds.