STORIES
88
Words by James Kaelan Images by Megan McIsaac Makeup by Juniper Garza Shot on location at Ace Hotel Downtown LA
the girl from
Bad City How Ana Lily Amirpour developed her brand of New Wave, high-style horror
On a single-digit night in Park City last January, 18 hours before her debut feature, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, premiered at the Prospector Square Theatre, Ana Lily Amirpour (“Lily” to her friends) stepped onto the balcony of her rented condo, slipped on a film of ice, and hit her head on the railing. By the time she examined her injury in the bathroom mirror, the gash above her right eyebrow—nearly as wide and long as her pinkie finger—was pouring blood. It required an inch-long row of stitches to close. Six months later, the scar on her forehead has nearly vanished. But Amirpour carries a picture of the wound on her phone as if it were a talisman. From concept to Sundance premiere, A Girl, seeded with crowdfunding money and made without the traditional support of a major agency, took only two years to complete.
Produced under Elijah Wood’s Spectrevision label and filmed in the desert town of Taft, CA in a hard black and white that seems to petrify its landscape of empty streets, scrub brush hills, and palpitating oil pumps, A Girl—shot mostly at night, and entirely in Farsi—is a narrative without country or era. That is not to say A Girl is preoccupied with identity or the politics of displacement. Rather, like Amirpour herself, the film is a hybrid of geographies, histories, and genres. Equal parts acid western, violent Nouvelle Vague existential inquisition, and compassionate vampire character study, A Girl takes place in the fictional ghosttown of Bad City, and gathers its look and tone from films as diverse as Once Upon a Time in the West, Vivre sa vie, A Rebel Without a Cause, and Let the Right One In. But like the best postmodern pastiches, it is greater than the sum of its references. The eponymous Girl (the magnificent—and mostly silent— Sheila Vand), swaying slowly in her basement apartment to Glass Candy’s “Dancing Girls,” with her striped shirt and winged eyeliner, recalls the tragic-but-playful sensuality of Anna Karina in Godard’s early films. And Arash (the German-Iranian newcomer Arash Marandi), with his white t-shirt, troubled smile, and relativistic ethics, recaptures some of the magnetism and mischievousness that James Dean gave Jim Stark. “I think it’s snobby,” Amirpour says, “to think you aren’t affected by the 10,000 movies you’ve watched in your lifetime. You fuck by putting certain parts in certain places, but that doesn’t mean we all fuck the same.”
waters of the English Channel. “It’s kind of like the Detroit of England,” Amirpour remembers. “It had this old amusement park”—Dreamland—“where these guys walked around with little monkeys in suits. The monkeys would jump on your shoulder as you walked by. And there were hedgehogs.” Amirpour’s father founded a successful medical practice in Margate, but her parents knew they wanted to come to America, which they considered “the land of opportunity.” When Amirpour was eight, the family settled in Miami before heading further west to the rural city of Bakersfield, California—two hours north of Los Angeles. There, Amirpour attended Catholic school, listened to hip-hop, wore jean shorts with cowboy boots, and drank on pickup truck tailgates. “It was Like Footloose,” Amirpour recalls. “But with less dancing. And lots of Mexican gangs.” With her Persian complexion, Amirpour was often mistaken for Hispanic. “At parties out in the fields,” she says, “the Mexican girls—cholas with the giant bangs—they’d always come up in groups and stand around me and be like, ‘What, you think you’re too good?’ Like talking shit because they thought I was trying to pass as white. And they were like, ‘What you gonna do if I hit you?’ And I was like, ‘Bleed?!’” In high school Amirpour drew incessantly, and each year during homecoming, worked constructing the parade floats. “Growing up,” she says, “I was always making shit.” In junior high, Amirpour decided to build a haunted house in the backyard of her parents’ home. But without the human
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fter the fallout of 1979 Revolution had irradiated even the liberal academic enclaves of Tehran, Amirpour’s parents—both born and raised in Iran—left for Europe. “They’re very progressive,” Amirpour says. “And they knew they needed to get out of there.” Amirpour’s father and mother, a surgeon and nurse respectively, moved to Margate on the southeastern coast of England—where Amirpour was born. A seaside town in the Thanet district of East Kent, Margate stares out onto the rough
and capital resources to raise a wooden frame, she needed to figure out a way to erect a maze with walls and a ceiling. “I knew I had to be able to make it dark in there,” she recalls, “so that it would actually be scary. If the rooms were just open to the sky, it would be too bright.” Amirpour’s solution was to utilize the sturdy trees that flanked both sides of the yard. Between them she strung five taught ropes, eight feet off the ground, that extended the width of the lawn. From these “beams” she hung tarps—whose
seams she sealed with staples—creating long, pitch black, interconnected hallways and rooms. “If you looked at our backyard,” Amirpour remembers, “for two weeks, it was a disaster zone. I kept being like, ‘Mom, I need $40 to buy more plastic.’ And my mom was probably like, ‘What the fuck is wrong with this kid? What the hell is she building?’” When Amirpour premiered the house on Halloween night, the line of kids waiting to walk through the maze stretched
out to the street and around the block. “It was a huge hit. Everybody in the neighborhood came,” she says. “I should’ve charged money.” Coursing through a series of rooms—each with a unique set, and manned by a live actor—the haunted house had the basic linearity and rude arc of a film. “I cast all my friends,” says Amirpour. “Even Sina [Sayyah]”—her cousin, who would go on to produce A Girl—“came up from Los Angeles. He was really into Homey D. Clown, so he stood at the end of
the maze and hit people with a sock as they left.” Prior to that comic catharsis, though, Amirpour remembers the house as legitimately terrifying. In one room a girl lay stiff in a coffin. The crowd had to circumnavigate her in order to leave, and just before exiting, she would sit up and startle them. But two of the rooms were markedly different. In one, a girl dressed as an old woman, with her silver hair in a bun and a shawl around her hunched shoulders, sat knitting in a rocking chair. When someone entered the room, she would look up and scream: “Get out of my attic! GET OUT OF MY ATTIC!” In another room, Amirpour herself played, as she describes the character, “A demented homeless person by a trashcan. I’d feel someone approaching,
and I’d jump out screaming, ‘Help me! Help me! Please give me some food!’” The ordinariness of the old woman and the vagrant seem to prefigure, years before she saw Blue Velvet or Mulholland Drive, Amirpour’s attraction to David Lynch—whose nightmares feel rooted in reality rather than the supernatural. “When I see his films,” says Amirpour, “I feel like I’m seeing someone’s dream. He fully opens the floodgates to his mind-cave, and I think he’s extremely generous with what he’s willing to show about himself.” Like Lynch, one gets the sense from Amirpour’s developing work that she empathizes with the grotesque, that in her films the most appalling images reflect inborn deformities. Amirpour’s Girl is born with a need for blood, and like the Elephant Man, she’s the prisoner of
that physical defect. Both pose a danger to the world only so long as they remain misunderstood.
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rom the age of nine through high school, Amirpour consumed hundreds of “B” horror films. On the weekends during junior high, she’d watch as many as three a night. “My dad was always down,” Amirpour recalls, “because he assumed that if I liked horror films”— where people were being eviscerated, or chopped to pieces—“it meant I was interested in anatomy. My parents were stoked because they thought it meant I was a future surgeon.” Amongst Amirpour’s favorite movies as a girl was a VHS tape of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” containing an extended making-of documentary. “I watched it every day,” Amirpour remembers. “I was
completely fascinated by how they made Michael look like a werewolf, how they choreographed all the dances, and how they did the long dolly shot where the girl leaves the theater, and Michael sings and dances around her as she walks down the street.” At the time, Amirpour didn’t realize the “Thriller” video was teaching her about filmmaking. But she was consciously fascinated by how the documentary juxtaposed a finished narrative and the intricate processes required to manufacture that story. “Thinking back,” Amirpour says, “I wasn’t wondering how they made the film. I was just very aware that, ‘This is how they’re doing it.’” One night when she was 12, when a group of her friends slept over at her house, Amirpour proposed they make a movie. Editing in-camera on a Sony Hi8,
Amirpour mounted the production of an eight-minute slasher movie in which one girl—Amirpour’s friend, Laura—wanders around the house methodically killing the residents with a knife. “I remember showing it to my class at school the next week,” says Amirpour, “and everyone got scared. People would jump when Laura came through the door to kill some-
one. I 100 percent consider it my first film. It’s actually good!” To achieve continuity when a character passed through a door, Amirpour would rewind the tape and watch for the precise moment of the cut, then record the succeeding shot. “When I read Robert Rodriguez’s Rebel Without a Crew,” Amirpour remembers, “I found out he
did the same thing when he was a kid.” When you don’t have the resources, you come up with whatever technique you can to make what you’re doing look how you want it to look. “Now maybe I over think things,” Amirpour adds. “I’m still just trying to be a kid with my mind.”
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fter high school, Amirpour enrolled in the biology program at UC Santa Barbara. Though she’d expressed interest in creative endeavors since she was a child, she felt pushed toward a more pragmatic career. “If you’re Iranian,” she says, “you’re either going to be a doctor or a lawyer.” But worse than disliking her studies in college, Amirpour felt confused. “I was in biology and chemistry classes, trying to do this stuff and felt cross-eyed; all I’m good at is writing and drawing. Physics? You throw the rock, it hits the ground. A car is coming and I can roughly gauge when I should cross the street. But that’s the limit of my knowledge of the laws of gravity and motion.” After her first year at UCSB, Amirpour moved into a house high up in the Mission Hills above Santa Barbara. Four-
teen people lived in the main domicile, and another 10 or 12 were camping on the grounds. “It was a really crazy mix of people,” Amirpour recalls, “and essentially had a commune vibe.” The day Amirpour arrived, she got out of her car and approached the house. On the porch was an African man in a colorful robe, roping a drum. “His name was Mamadu,” Amirpour says. “Who knows
what was true, but he said he was a prince from some island.” The house was full of compelling residents, but Amirpour was most fascinated by a pair of identical twins. “They both had long brown hair,” Amirpour remembers, “and they were smoking hot. I mean, it was like two identical Kate Beckinsales were living in this house! One of them was fucking everybody. The other one—although I could never tell them apart—was always working and never talked to anybody. But who knew? They looked so alike!” At the house, every inhabitant paid nominal rent, but had to complete a quota of common chores. “You could polish the silverware,” Amirpour recalls, or you could take out the plastic windows of envelopes that came in the mail so the paper could be recycled separately. “I did that one a lot,” she adds.
There was a plethora of house rules, including a moritorium on flushing the toilet (it wasted too much water) so each bathtub in the house contained a bucket that collected spill-over from the showerhead. If you used the bathroom, the only way to flush was to pour this excess gray water into the bowl. Amirpour only stayed a few months. During Christmas break that winter, she and a friend flew out to Colorado, where they spent two weeks snowboarding. When Amirpour returned, she declared to her family that she was dropping out of UCSB and moving to Breckenridge. “I told my parents,” Amirpour remembers, “and they were like, ‘If you do that, you’re on your own.’ So I got a job in some coffee shop, saved up my money, and bought a plane ticket.” That season Amirpour and her friend shared a tiny apartment and snowboarded nearly every day. When spring broke and the snow melted, they moved to a secluded spot on the shore of Lake Dillon, where they lived completely off the grid for 14 weeks in a 10-man tent with a German Shepard puppy named Lenny. Amirpour had two part-time jobs: at a bagel shop and at Haagen Dazs icecream franchise. “I’d gotten my nose pierced,” Amirpour says, “but I did it wrong and it got infected. Imagine me with my dirty fingernails and this green ooze coming out of my piercing, scooping ice cream for tourists. ‘Do you want to try the butter pecan?’ The manager was like, ‘You can’t work here anymore.’” She was fired within a week. In late September, with the weather growing cooler, Amirpour’s father came out to visit her. “He saw how we were surviving out in the woods,” she recalls. “And I’ve gotta give him credit. He played it really cool—when a lot of people might have freaked out seeing their kid living like a gypsy.” Instead of chastising her, he offered to rent her a hotel room where she could take a shower and sleep in a clean bed. “I was pretty worn out by then,” Amirpour adds. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I was ready to get out of Colorado.”
Perhaps understanding fully for the first time how important a life of creative work was to their daughter, a few months later Amirpour’s parents presented an offer that a year earlier she couldn’t have conceived. “They came to me and said, ‘Whatever you want to study, wherever you want to study it, we’ll support you 100 percent.’ And I was like, ‘Really?! Then I want to go to art school!’”
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mirpour moved to San Francisco the following fall to major in fine art—with a focus on painting and sculpture— at the Academy of Art. During her time in the Bay Area she started an art-rock band called Flut (“The Breeders meets psycho nursery rhymes”) that toured the country several times—playing shows in Portland, Seattle, Salt Lake City, Denver, Kansas City, Austin, and Los Angeles. To pay rent, Amirpour worked at a gallery near Union Square that sold Chagalls and Picassos, and taught art to children at Fort Mason. In her free time, she wrote songs for her band, and began experimenting with short fiction. “I wrote a story that got published in the Soma Literary Journal,” remembers Amirpour, “and this producer calls me up and asks, ‘Did you write this story, “Betty Page Bangs”? I think it’d be a really cool idea for a half-hour pilot for a TV show. Can you write a pilot?’ And I was like, ‘Sure I can!’ Then I hung up the phone and thought, ‘What’s a pilot?’” Amirpour had never seen a screenplay, and had no knowledge of structure. “I literally Googled ‘Seinfeld pilot,’” she recalls, “and manually copied the formatting into Word.” This first foray into screenwriting didn’t go well. She turned the script over to the producer, who didn’t pursue development further. “But,” Amirpour says, “that was the first time I realized I could write a movie.” Her final semester of college (she’d transferred to San Francisco State University to complete her degree), Amirpour—writing in her spare time—composed two featurelength scripts. One, entitled The Stones, concerned a young gay man whose parents send him to Tehran to “reform” him,
but where, instead, he becomes part of the hardcore underground party scene. “The Stones is what got me to where I am today,” Amirpours says. Besides winning the Adrienne Shelly Fellowship and the BlueCat Screenwriting Competition, and earning her slots in the Film Independent Lab and Tribeca Access, it was her ticket into the MFA screenwriting program at UCLA. In four years, Amirpour had gone from living in a tent in Colorado to securing representation at a top-three agency— where she had a set of in-demand scripts circulating. But the transition was jarring. “I felt like everyone was lying to me all the time,” Amirpour says. “My representation was always saying, ‘We think you’re great, we’re so excited about this.’ But when I wanted to direct my own film, they refused to attach me. They wanted me to rewrite scripts and water them down and take out anything that was risqué—which for me is everything. Things weren’t happening, and I wasn’t happy.” In 2011, when the Berlinale invited Amirpour to spend five months in Germany and shoot a short film, she parted ways with her agent and manager, flew to Berlin, and set to work on a stop-motion/live-action short film about a depressed cockroach called “A Little Suicide.” “It’s so different in Europe,” says Amirpour. “It was so awesome to be alone. All I cared about was pure creation, which is pure risk. You’re away from the business bullshit and the sense of urgency and competition and the rat race cheese fucking thing we have over here.” Amirpour views her time in Berlin as a period of awakening. Production on “A Little Suicide” required 21 shooting days, during which Amirpour crawled around on the ground, moving an articulated cockroach model a few millimeters at a time. The resulting short is a little under 10 minutes, but required the effort and time commitment of a much longer film. “I realized,” Amirpour says, “that in the time I made ‘A Little Suicide,’ I could’ve just as easily shot a full-length film.” So, when she returned to Los Angeles, she consigned her-
self to making a feature. “I was going to write a script that I could make the following summer. With no representation, and no one’s opinion to listen to but my own, I put aside all the other projects and ideas and asked myself what really turned me on. What do I really want to make?” Before her sojourn to Berlin, Amirpour had made another short. Filmed in black and white, it told the story of a girl in a chador—an ankle-lngth, open-faced head-covering—pursued by a man down a dark street. When he corners her, she reveals herself to be a vampire, and kills him. It was called “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night,” and starred Nazanin Boniadi (Sheila Vand had been attached, but was forced to drop out after being cast in a Broadway play). “It was a simple story,” Amirpour says of the prototypic short. “And at the time I didn’t really think of it as anything more than a 5-minute movie. But while I was in Berlin I kept thinking about this character, this vampire, and had the growing sense that there was more to it, that a whole film could evolve around her.” In March of 2012, on a trip to New York for a festival screening of another of her works, “Pashmaloo” (“Hairy”)—starring Vand—Amirpour and Vand walked around Manhattan. As they strolled, talking about the work they wished they could do, Amirpour turned to Vand and said, “‘I want to do this Iranian vampire film this summer. A feature. And I want you to be the vampire. But you have to cut your hair short.’” At the time, Vand’s hair fell to the middle of her back. “I bring that story up,” Amirpour continues, “because Sheila is hypnotically special. And an actress’ hair is a big deal. For her to agree to cut hers off—for my film—that showed me exactly how committed she was. And I couldn’t have done it without her.”
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ome of the most pivotal sequences in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night take place in the apartment belonging to Atti (Mozhan Marnò), a prostitute whose honor Vand’s vampire indirectly avenges. But when Amirpour and her crew arrived at the shooting location, they were devastated. “When we saw what we had to work with, it was like we were inside a flat box. A fucking rectangle without character. It made me feel sick.” The assistant director, Daniel Lugo, sensed an untenable delay. “Lugo was getting extremely worried,” Amirpour remembers, “because we’d switched to nights, and everyone was tired. He was like, ‘We have to get this stuff tonight.’ And I was like, ‘I don’t care. I fucking hate it. This is going to ruin the film.’ And that’s when Sergio stepped up and said, ‘I need three hours. I can fix it.’” For half the night, while the crew waited, Sergio de la Vega—the production designer on A Girl, re-dressed the space completely. Besides introducing furniture and other props, he removed the front door—and the moulding around the jamb—and relocated it on another wall so that they could shoot the entrance to the apartment and the kitchen in the same shot. “Sergio fucking kicked it out,” Amirpour says. “He made that room look fucking awesome. And in the end it was totally the right move. If I wouldn’t have insisted, it could’ve ruined the film for me.” Two days before the Sundance premiere, de la Vega passed away from a sudden illness. He was 35. “He’s in every second of everything that you see in that movie,” says Amirpour. “He did so many magic tricks, and he never even got to see a cut of the film.” To be in Park City without him, Amirpour tells me, was surreal. “He passed
away on the 17th of January, I cracked my head open on the 18th, and the film premiered on the 19th. Because of all of that, I had this subatomic awareness of my time at Sundance. I was really chill and mellow and peaceful, and grateful to be alive.”
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hen I visited Amirpour in May, she had a polished draft of a new screenplay—a desert-set, cannibal/ prey love story called The Bad Batch— sitting on her table. Since the film’s premiere at Sundance, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night has opened the New Directors/New Films series at MoMA in New York, is scheduled to inaugurate the Sundance Next Festival in August in Los Angeles, and has gathered an avalanche of positive press. Amirpour has also been courted again by the same agencies with whom, only a few years ago, she parted ways. “I think I make films to make friends,” Amirpour tells me, sitting in the living room of her home near the Fairfax neighborhood of Los Angeles. “Existence is so fucking lonely. Not in like a ‘I’m going to jump off of a building’ kind of way. But in a beautiful, arty, poetic way. The experience of being alive is so personal and intimate and singular to each individual, it’s hard to make meaningful connections.” “But on set,” she continues, “you’re not lonely. It’s like fucking! It’s like fucking 60 people. It’s like a giant orgy. And when the movie comes out, it’s sort of like a perfume that will attract people to you—new friends, new actors, the critics that like what you do. Because if you do this thing and you really did it from your own steamy soul matter and then you put it out there, you can connect with people for a little while.” “Then it wears off,” she adds. “And you have to make something else.”