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Mary Harron is this year’s recipient of the Provincetown International Film Festival’s Filmmaker on the Edge Award. |
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Lili Taylor in Mary Harron’s “I Shot Andy Warhol.” |
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Walking both sides of the edge
Filmmaker uses mainstream work to fund riskier ventures
By Loren King
Banner Correspondent
Writer-director Mary Harron jokes that a filmmaker on the edge means “living on the edge of poverty.” But, she quickly adds, it’s also about independence, artistic integrity and a willingness to work outside the mainstream, despite the bumps and bruises. "It's very difficult if what you're doing doesn't fit into industry standards of what people expect from a movie," she says.
Harron should know. With just two features — “I Shot Andy Warhol” and “American Psycho” — she’s already cemented a reputation for tackling controversial subjects, particularly in her rendering of female characters and for bucking resistance from industry honchos more interested in marketability than message. (A third film, the long-awaited “The Notorious Bettie Page,” is in the final stages of production.)
Harron will be feted at the 7th annual Provincetown International Film Festival (PIFF) with the Filmmaker on the Edge award, the PIFF’s centerpiece event, at 8 p.m. on Saturday in a ceremony at Town Hall. Harron joins a list of maverick moviemakers who’ve received the award since the festival’s inception: director-writer Jim Jarmusch (2004), director Todd Haynes (2003), director Gus Van Sant (2002), producers Ted Hope and James Schamus (2001), producer Christine Vachon (2000) and filmmaker John Waters (1999).
Although Harron’s visit to Provincetown will be brief due to the schedule demands of a shoot she’s doing for HBO, she hopes to return as she does every summer, she said, with her husband, filmmaker John Walsh, and their two daughters, ages five and eight. “We love it. We visit as often as we can,” she says, at the home of Harron’s good friend director Daniel Minahan. Harron, 48, has participated in the PIFF in the past, serving on a discussion panel with other indie filmmakers.
The festival screens “I Shot Andy Warhol” (1996) at noon Thursday at Town Hall. Lili Taylor gives a bravura performance as the infamous writer, revolutionary, feminist and misfit Valerie Solanas, who gunned down and seriously wounded pop artist Warhol (played by Jared Harris). Harron’s strong documentary background is evident in the film, with scenes of Taylor’s to-the-camera recitations of Solanas’ scabrous treatise “The SCUM Manifesto.”
But Harron’s best-known work is probably “American Psycho” (2000), the controversial film based on the equally controversial 1991 novel about a 1980s Wall Street yuppie turned serial killer. Critics called the film everything from a dark satire to a feminist slasher flick, because it was directed by Harron and co-written by Harron and Guinevere Turner. Stephen Holden of The New York Times opined that Harron and Turner had turned the Brett Easton Ellis’s novel "into a lean and mean horror comedy classic." The PIFF screens “American Psycho” at 10:15 p.m. on Friday at Whaler’s Wharf.
Harron and Turner reconnected for the much-anticipated, long-delayed biography of Bettie Page, which stars Gretchen Mol as the hugely successful 1950s pin-up model who became one of the first sex icons in America, and the target of a Senate investigation because of her bondage photos. Harron had trouble finding a distributor for her film because she insisted on shooting much of it in black and white — an artistic choice that clashed with a marketing focus on foreign and TV sales that consider black and white an anathema. But HBO films signed on, and proved an enthusiastic supporter of the film, she said, which will be released theatrically in 2006.
“The Notorious Bettie Page” reunites Harron with Lili Taylor, who plays photographer Paula Klaw (“It’s a departure for her,” says Harron, noting that Taylor’s most recent role was the likeable, sincere Lisa on “Six Feet Under”). Another of the darkly complex women characters in the Harron canon, Klaw and her brother Irving photographed and marketed the famous Page bondage photographs, and Paula Klaw preserved them, in defiance of a court order that they be destroyed.
Such unconventional subject matter seems at odds with Harron’s quiet, low-key manner and lack of self-promotion. Born in Toronto and educated at Oxford, she began her career as a journalist covering the emerging punk scene in England in the ’70s (she famously interviewed the Sex Pistols for the Village Voice) and has written extensively about punk rock. She broke into films with documentaries for British television (more recently, she was executive producer for “The Weather Underground,” the Oscar-nominated documentary about the 1960s radicals).
Harron says her director-for-hire work in episodic television is crucial to her survival, because it allows her to make a living between the long-delays of film production. She’s directed an episode of HBO’s “Six Feet Under” this season; last year, she helmed an episode of the popular “The L Word” for Showtime. She’s also directed episodes of “Oz” for HBO, among other shows.
“It allows you to stay sharp, work on your craft. And it’s a relief to work within a particular framework where you don’t have to be responsible for everything,” she notes.
Sometimes it’s nice to step back from the edge.
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In the Arts
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Jun 16th, 2005