Interview: Mary Harron

[Editor’s note: I’d like to introduce y’all to Mr. Jameson Kowalczyk – our newest NYC correspondent has joined ioncinema.com veterans Justin Ambrosino and Marcello Paolillo in an effort to provide YOU folks with the best in indie and foreign film coverage. Jameson has been writing fiction for over twelve years – is a published short story author, and in 2003 he published his first novel, Bottle Caps and has dabble in short-filmmaking with Choplin (2004), and Peepers Creepers!(2005). Welcome to the team Jamie!

In her 2000, film American Psycho, writer/director Mary Harron (see also, I Shot Andy Warhol) explored America’s relationship with and reaction to violence – or perhaps, lack of reaction. Now Harron brings us The Notorious Bettie Page, the story of the 1950s pin-up model who would go on to become a cult icon of sexuality. With this film Harron has explored America’s relationship with and reaction – or perhaps more accurately, overreaction – to sex. Though NBP is a much sweeter, more optimistic work that Harron’s previous films, it is no less thematically complicated and raises significant questions about many aspects of American society both past and present, ranging from sex and religion to politics and capitalism.

At one time a music journalist, and the first to interview English punk band The Sex Pistols for an American publication, Mary Harron has previously directed two feature films, produced numerous documentaries for television, as well as directed episodes for television series such as “Oz,” “Six Feet Under,” Homicide: Life on the Street,” and the new HBO series “Big Love.” Here, in her third feature film, Harron displays the same flair for both setting and character as she has in her previous work, projecting the story of Bettie Page through visual style and tone of 1950’s era films. Film is a historical medium, and Harron understands, that for an artist, history can work as both a source of inspiration and a means of expression.

I will admit that the film was not what I expected, and this is by no means a bad thing. Though familiar with the image of Bettie Page — I’ve seen her picture countless times on a variety of merchandise ranging from shot glasses and lunch boxes to t-shirts and posters (I also know two people, one male, one female, with Bettie Page tattoos), after seeing this film, I realized I knew relatively nothing about who she was. I went in expecting a story about a sex icon that rose from the seedy side of New York City circa 1950. The story I got was something far different and far more interesting.

Gretchen Mol (The Shape of Things)is cast perfectly in the title role. She nails the wink-and-a-smile kind of playfulness that has made Bettie Page stand out among the other pin-ups of her day. The thing about Bettie Page is, you look at a picture of her wearing only fishnets and boots, and what you can’t take your eyes off of are her eyes and her smile. Here, Mol projects the same sexiness that is both mature and girlish, naughty and innocent. At times, I couldn’t help but smile back.

Lilli Taylor (I Shot Any Warhol, High Fidelity) and Chris Bauer (last year’s Broken Flowers, Animal Factory) play Paula and Irving Klaw, the brother and sister that run a Mom-and-Pop style photo studio that supplies the demand for pictures of beautiful women in “unusual footwear” to their private clientele. The environment of the Klaws studio is anything but seedy, but actually rather wholesome; the group of models and photographers are somewhat of a surrogate family for one another.

Biopics have been a trend in recent years, and Harron takes a different approach to the subject, posing the question ‘Who was Bettie Page?’ instead of attempting to define who she was based on the events of her life — a mature approach by a mature filmmaker.

Recently I sat down at a roundtable discussion with Mary Harron while she was in New York.

Q: Have you had a chance to meet Bettie Page?
MH: No I haven’t had a chance to meet with her or talk to her at all.

Q: Was it harder making the film having not met her?
MH: It was harder because I certainly would like to have asked her, not about being a pin up but about religion, because she talked a lot about being a pin-up, you know, and she gave so many interviews of the years I don’t think there was much new she would say, but nobody ever talked to her about her faith.

Q: Has Bettie seen the film?
MH: Bettie saw the film at the Playboy Mansion with Hef and his three girlfriends. And [pause] she said it was a little difficult. I think she liked Gretchen a lot, she said ‘She’s pretty, I was never as pretty as that,’ and I think she was really enjoying it and then the senate hearings got to her, she didn’t enjoy that very much I don’t think, bringing that back, and she said she doesn’t like the title, she feels that it’s criticizing her and that’s not what she wanted to be at all.

Q: Do you think Bettie Page’s career as a pin-up girl had a negative effect on her life?
MH: No, I don’t think so, because look at what she was brought up to do, you know? She was brought up to stay on the farm basically? Know what I mean?

Q: Do you think she would have been happier with that kind of life?
MH: I mean, she had terribly bad things happen to her, but and very good things. The other thing that interested me was what happens to beautiful girls, particularly in that era and the young beauty queens. My first stepmother was a Hollywood starlet for a few years, and I grew up hearing stories about and absorbing what it was like for someone that beautiful that you were sort of plucked out of the crowd and they had some kind of celebrity for a while or some kind of fame and fortune and then it’s kind of over and you go on with your normal life, but it’s like how you look transforms your life for a few years.

Q: Who was your stepmother?
MH: She was known as Virginia Leith, she was in Stanley Kubrick’s first film, she was discovered by Stanley Kubrick and she was in a Kiss Before Dying and she was basically on contract for a year.

Q: Do you relate at all to Bettie Page?
MH: [pauses] I hate being photographed, so in that sense, no I hate being photographed, [laughs] and I’m comfortable being behind the camera. [pause] I wanted to get on a bus and leave difficult situations, I totally related to that. That song that I put in, that Patsy Kline sings, “Life is like a Mountain Railroad,” I really relate to that view of life. And I somewhat actually related to her religion, even though I’m not a religious person, but from what I could sense of her religion, of her search for that, I responded to it.

Q: There was a long process of finding the right Bettie, how did you decide on Gretchen Mol?
MH: We had already had a lot of people in, and also I had looked at a lot of tape, every famous brunette basically, and there were people whose way and attitude just didn’t seem like Bettie, you know? Think Jennifer Connelly, who is a fantastic actress, but she’s very sort of womanly, she’s a serious presence. We went through many, many people, and then Gretchen came in and it was like everyone else was straining at it, everyone was trying very hard, and they’d come in and act sexy, they’d come in black leather, they’d come in black wigs, and they’d be vampy and pushing the pin-up stuff and with Gretchen it was like she was just born to play it, it was as natural as breathing, and one thing that makes acting great acting is that it’s natural and unforced. If someone is straining it’s very hard to watch. And if someone is straining to be sexy, or straining to look like a pin-up, it’s hard to watch, and for her it was just effortless.

Q: Do you remember her audition?
MH: She did the scene where she was in the woods saying, ‘Oh I’ll just take this little top off.’ She did the scene in the coffee shop where she’s talking about losing the scholarship, oh I think she did the scene at the end when she’s in the saying ‘I am notorious.’ She had not only the light, playful side, but she also had the melancholy. You can’t just play it light, Bettie in many ways is a sad story.

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Q: Most of the film was shot in black and white, but not all of it. How did you decide what needed to be shot in color?
MH: It was completely instinctive, I was just always very set that I saw the fifties in New York as black and white, partly because my favorite movies, The Sweet Smell of Success, Pick Up on South Street, these are all black and white, beautiful New York movies. And then when I got to Bettie in Florida when she was photographed by Bunny Yeager, I made the decision to go full color. It seemed so wrong not to do Florida in color.

Q: In the end of the film Bettie doesn’t testify to the Supreme Court. A lot of other directors might have been tempted to change that fact, why was it important that Bettie didn’t testify?
MH: One reason they didn’t have her testify was that they didn’t care what she had to say, and I thought that was telling, that it wasn’t considered important, her voice in it, her opinion on it.

Q: With your background in rock and roll and especially Punk magazine, I’m surprised you haven’t done more films drawing on that era.
MH: My next project is that.

Q: What made you finally decide to do a movie about that era?
MH: I guess I didn’t want to do that at first because it was very personal to me and I wouldn’t know how to do it but then I thought, ‘Well I’ll be really annoyed if someone else does it.’ And that’s how I came to that decision, that someone else doing it would be worse than me doing it.

Q: Do you miss the heyday of punk at all?
MH: I don’t know, not really because for me it’s like punk was when I was young and then it’s just like, life changes. I miss New York Bohemia, I miss downtown, I miss a time when not every single corner was objectified or when everything wasn’t as corporate, I miss that more.

Q: In between films you direct TV shows, how is film different than coming onto an existing project that’s going on week after week?
MH: You have to kind of check your ego a bit because it’s not yours, and you have a very different status as a director for hire and you’re working for the producers and writers and it’s their show, they create the tone and you are not a very important person in that process. And then you have four days to edit and then you’re out. But in a way there is also the advantage of that, because you don’t have that huge weight of responsibility, it’s not all on your shoulders, and you can kind of try different styles without it being a huge commitment. If I was going to do a movie, that’s going to take me two years of my life and then I have to go and defend it, but when I’m doing a TV show I can do all kinds of different things and I really enjoy that, and it’s also a chance to be more mainstream than I have been in my work and that’s kind of fun too. I’m trying to do “Prison Break” next.

Q: So, I Shot Andy Warhol you have the quintessential man-hating character, American Psycho you have this horrible, violent, misogynist man, and now in this film you have a bondage queen, sexual fetish icon, what’s your take on feminism?
MH: [Laughs] I really don’t know because I don’t approach movies with an ideology, with a message. I think I approach them with a perspective. I want to tell stories from a female point of view. That doesn’t mean I’m trying to teach a lesson, or that I have a line that I am trying to push, because I’m interested in contradiction, I’m interested in questions I can’t answer, that are hard to answer. But I think that with Bettie I wanted to tell a story from a pin-up’s point of view. Everyone has said that if they had done the story, it would have been the icon or the iconic object or the sexual object or the glamour. But I wanted to know what it was like for her, what was her life like, and also just taking with that the banality, the banality of making images. And all women know about the creation of an image, and the boring scene behind the scenes, and anyone who has done any filming knows it can be very boring too.

Q: What do you make of following among women Bettie Page has garnered over the years?
MH: I don’t think in the fifties she had a huge following among women. Her greater celebrity and indeed her large female following I think happened after 1980, and it’s some kind of maybe post-Madonna, in the last 20 years girls have been interested in adopting and playing with and dressing up in different costumes of femininity or different kinds of sexuality in kind of a playful way. I think that the number of things like Bettie Page nights at nightclubs where girls go out dressed up as Bettie and they wear costumes and they pretend to whip each other, [laughs] it’s as kind of silly as those movies are. And I think it’s the goofiness of the movies, I mean if those were really hardcore, powerful S&M movies that the Klaws were doing I don’t think they would have a huge cult following among young girls, I think it’s the silliness of them, that allows it to be played with.

Picturehouse Films releases The Notorious Bettie Page on April 14th in limited release.