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It takes an ambitious person to make her debut feature film a highly-stylized blend of vampire horror with the moodiness of a Spaghetti Western. Add to that a film that's in black and white in Farsi with subtitles, and it might seem like an impossible feat to pull off for a first-time filmmaker.
But Ana Lily Amirpour's debut, "A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night," is defying the odds and gaining accolades since it debuted in the "Next" category of this year's Sundance Film Festival.
Described as "the first Iranian vampire Western," Amirpour's film tells the story of a lonely, chador-cloaked vampire known only as "The Girl." She roams the streets of a fictional Iranian town called Bad City (the film was actually shot in the central California town of Taft), where pimps, prostitutes and addicts swirl together in a culture of violence.
When Amirpour stopped by The Frame recently, we asked about her history with horror flicks, the joy of designing characters, and pitching a "black-and-white Iranian vampire Western with a dope soundtrack."
When did you first start getting into horror movies?
At 8 or 9 I started watching horror movies, and I consumed them ravenously for, like, five years. Everything. I watched "Faces of Death" when I was like 10. I don't think my parents knew what the hell was going on. [laughs]
"Faces of Death" was a compilation of people actually dying; it was basically a legal snuff film. So you have an obsession with death and morbidity?
I did, I did. My father was a surgeon, and, when I was 12, I went into the operating room with him. I watched him amputate a leg, which is really medieval, surprisingly, because you'd think they'd have a more futuristic way to do it, but it's just with a saw. So I saw my dad sawing off this guy's leg. But the thing that I've always really been into is fairy tale and fantasy. I like "The NeverEnding Story," [Richard] Donner's "Superman," "Back to the Future." You know, films like that.
If you took a lot of the images out of your film, it would look as if it were a graphic novel. How do all the images and ideas start to coalesce around a script?
For "Girl," I really started with the chador — the cloak or the cape that she wears. I put one on, and I felt like a bat, or a stingray, or some kind of creature. And then I thought, "Oh, yeah, of course, this is an Iranian vampire. That's her." It's a brilliant disguise. And I was really obsessed with this character, and the whole story grew out of her. I think designing characters is great, and the fun of that is seeing where each one leads; you know, the Persian James Dean, the prostitute, the pimp ... designing a gangster is so much fun.
Do you write visually? Because if you took all the dialogue in your film and boiled it down to a screenplay, it would maybe get 10-11 pages of dialogue. Do you write very specifically about the look and the visual composition of each scene?
I do that, and I reference other movies that moments or characters are inspired by, too. "Enter the] Ninja" from Die Antwood was one of the muses for one of the characters in the film, for the pimp. And just because there's not dialogue doesn't mean there's not a lot happening. I'm a huge fan of Sergio Leone's Westerns, where you have all this pregnant space, but there's something happening in that space. Actually, the best thing to me is tension; it's delicious, juicy.
This film is set in a fictional city called Bad City. You're also filming in a city that, in many ways, is kind of on the periphery of California: Taft, outside of Bakersfield. Does the city itself become a character in your movie?
Totally and completely. I think it's interesting to think about it in terms of the edges, because in the major cities in America, things are a certain way — we have our lattes and our appointments and our quinoa salads, or whatever. You drive one hour in any direction, and most of America is stuck in a past decade, and people look strange and talk strange, and the physics and laws of those worlds are very much unto themselves. And I think that's America. I think Taft is definitely one of those places. It's a small oil town, very economically depressed, and I got to know these people, and they're really lovely, warm, interesting, strange people.
You're the child of Iranian parents, you were born in England, and you grew up in the United States. The film itself is in Farsi, and set in ...
The Iran of the mind.
How much of your own ethnic background informs the place in which this film is set?
It's interesting. There's this question of authenticity or something, like how Iranian is it, or how American? I think, really, the film as a whole — it's kind of an epiphany I've had over the time of talking about it so much — is a very accurate depiction of just how Iranian or just how American I am. It's a mashup, truly.
One of the shorthands that's been used to describe this film in at least one review is "Middle Eastern feminist vampire romance." When you were trying to get this movie going and you were trying to attract people to back you, did you run into difficulties getting people to believe in this movie?
The word "feminist" was never my word. Somebody else put that word out after the movie came out. When I was planning the movie it was a "black-and-white Iranian vampire Western with a dope soundtrack." That was my elevator pitch. I think what happened was, because I kind of really fully packaged this film myself — I had all the cast, I had all the music, I had this town, I had the '57 T-Bird, I had the cat — it's so weird and freaky, that it very quickly and efficiently made it clear who was "Team Girl" and who was not. You're either in or you're out.
And didn't Elijah Wood come in at one point?
Elijah heard about the film when I was raising money and getting it going. He heard from a friend, Sheri Davani, one of my producers, and she [told] him, "My friend's doing this black-and-white Iranian vampire film." And he got really excited and wanted to read the script. He read the script and was like, "I love it." He was starting SpectreVision, his own production company, and he wanted to make freaky, awesome, weird, next-level art films.
So did he end up investing in the film?
Yeah, because of him we were able to raise the rest of the money to make the film.
Your movie has been incredibly well-received. Now that it's about to come out, what do you want to do next? And how has this movie helped you present yourself as a filmmaker who has great and other interesting ideas?
Knock on wood. [laughs] That's really the point: I just want to keep exploring myself, what's inside myself, and take a look at it. It's a constantly changing thing. I think the first film is a very, very fragile and important place, because you don't really exist as a filmmaker yet, and your first film becomes this outward identity to audiences and the industry and all the people— so your first film is really like picking a fragrance. You see who it attracts, and you want to attract the right people, the people that get you and get the freaky stuff that you want to do, the people who want to see more of that. And that's happened, so I'm shooting my next film this spring, and I'm really excited about it.