Mary Harron: Masterclass and Retrospective
Birds Eye View welcomes a truly world-class talent – surprising, controversial and just darned brilliant, this is the woman who brought us American Psycho, I Shot Andy Warhol and The Notorious Bettie Page. Watch all three and meet the woman who directed them!
Presented in partnership with the Directors Guild of Great Britain
Mary Harron Masterclass
ICA Cinema 1 Sat 7 Mar 1.30-3.30pm / £10
In this in-depth masterclass, Harron will share her journey and reveal her top tips for a successful, creative career. Come, be inspired, and learn how it’s really don
The Notorious Bettie Page + director Q&A
ICA Cinema 2 Sat 7 Mar 4pm
2005, 91 mins
Bettie's legendary pin-up photos made her the target of a Senate investigation into pornography, and transformed her into an erotic icon who continues to enthrall fans to this day. Complemented by an ensemble cast of acclaimed actors, such as David Strathairn (Good Night, and Good Luck) and Lili Taylor (High Fidelity), the film brings to vivid life Bettie's fascinating world.
In an incandescent performance, Gretchen Mol (The Shape of Things) stars as Bettie Page, who grew up in a conservative religious family in Tennessee and became a photo model sensation in 1950s New York.
Mary Harron Double-Bill + director Q&A
The Gate, Notting Hill, Sun 8 Mar, 2pm
I Shot Andy Warhol
1996, 106 min A remarkable character study of Valerie Solanas, the extreme and arguably insane pre-feminist author of the SCUM manifesto (Society for Cutting Up Men), who shot Andy Warhol in 1968. A deeply provocative and entertaining take on late 60s New York subculture, with outstanding performances and a cracking John Cale soundtrack. Starring Lili Taylor.American Psycho
2000,101 min Harron’s adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis's novel about a spoilt, rich banker with a penchant for good-looking girls and chainsaws is less than ten years old, but it already feels like the darker zeitgeist partner to Oliver Stone’s classic Wall Street – but with more crunch to its credit. Quirky, gruesome and deliciously funny. Starring Christian Bale.
Mary Harron
A former reporter of the punk-rock scene whose entree to filmmaking came via British TV documentaries, Mary Harron made the jump to features with the much-awaited I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), the story of Valerie Solanas, who in 1968 shot and wounded the art-world legend.
A Canadian raised in London, Harron moved to New York in 1976, delighted to leave the stuffiness of her Oxford education behind to work for an alternative film company running its kitchen. She began writing for Legs McNeil's Punk magazine and in 1977 penned a lengthy piece for Village Voice that explained and explored the London punk scene, introducing what had been a somewhat underground movement to mainstream America.
Seemingly a constant presence on pop culture's cutting edge throughout her career, Harron, who participated in and observed the Studio 54 era, the last chapter of the sexual revolution before drugs fell out of favor and AIDS and other STDs prompted more circumspect behavior, remained fascinated by the Warhol "Factory" scene of the late 60s that had so intrigued her as a teenager.
Back in London working as a researcher for the prestigious English arts documentary program The South Bank Show, Harron was walking to work one day when she passed a used bookstore and found a copy of the SCUM Manifesto written by Solanas, a lesbian feminist on the fringes of the Warhol circle. Though she began toying with the idea of a documentary on Solanas, she took no immediate action.
After hosting UK Late (1990), a smart-set talk show, she returned to New York in 1991 to produce segments of Edge, a PBS documentary series, for awhile sharing an apartment with a pre-drag RuPaul. She showed her proposal for the Solanas documentary to producers Christine Vachon and Tom Kalin, who encouraged her to make a dramatic feature film instead. Eventually, American Playhouse International financed I Shot Andy Warhol, which attempted to capture the spirit of the artist at his most creative, before his celebrity became greater than his work. Lili Taylor delivered a brilliant portrayal as the delusional Solanas, supported by Stephen Dorff as Candy Darling, Tahnee Welch as Viva and Jared Harris as Warhol. Convincing in its period detail, it debuted at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival and enjoyed great critical success after its release.
Invited by producer Edward Pressman to have a go at adapting Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho (2000), Harron approached the material as a black comedy, believing that the excessive violence in the incendiary novel had blinded people to its satiric look at the 80s and the decadent Wall Street culture which dominated New York City.
With Harron attached as director and Christian Bale set to star, American Psycho found a home at Lions Gate Films, but when a hot-from-Titanic Leonardo DiCaprio expressed, she dropped off the project she had nurtured to that point. DiCaprio's case of cold feet led to her and Bale's return. The story of vacuous broker Patrick Bateman, the personification of the yuppie excess who frequently ends his nights of expensive dining, drinking and cocaine snorting with cold-hearted sexual encounters and vicious murders was slapped with an NC-17 rating, reportedly over a sex scene involving Bateman and two prostitutes. American Psycho debuted at the Sundance Boasting a supporting cast including Willem Dafoe (the detective pursuing him), Reese Witherspoon (a girlfriend), Jared Leto (his arch rival) and Chloe Sevigny (his secretary) opened to mixed reviews, with most critics praising the acting but questioning the need for the film to be made.
The Notorious Bettie Page released in 2005, is about the 1950s pinup model who became a cult icon of sexuality and who helped popularize pornography. Harron shows Page as the daughter of religious and conservative parents, as well as the fetish symbol who became a target of a Senate investigation of pornography. For this project, as well as for I Shot Andy Warhol, Harron had to do historical research and interviewed several friends of Page’s, as well as her first husband. Page was legally bound to another project and was thus unable to do an interview, but not being attached to Page meant that Harron was free to create a subjective representation of Page. Harron saw Page as an unwitting feminist figure who represented a movement for women’s sexual liberation, ironically similar, yet dissimilar to Solonas’.
Like Page, Harron also does not follow a strict feminist ideology, but has instead openly explored issues, instead of tying herself to a single perspective on gender. She is not aiming to create political films, but may end up doing so anyway, in her attempt to express a woman’s point of view. She says in an interview:
"I feel that without feminism, I wouldn't be doing this. So I feel very grateful. Without it, God knows what my life would be. I don't make feminist films in the sense that I don't make anything ideological. But I do find that women get my films better. Women and gay men. Maybe because they're less threatened by it, or they see what I'm trying to say better." (Hornaday)
