Interview: Mary Harron
From her Cannes-crashing, award-winning debut I Shot Andy Warhol to the controversial bloodbath that was American Psycho, Mary Harron has never ceased to put out provocative work.

In her latest film, Harron presents the legend of 50's pin-up queen Bettie Page with depth and respect one might not anticipate from a biopic about a girl who earned notoriety via fetish photographs, Playboy spreads, and S&M short film romps — all of which would be considered tame by today's standards. The Notorious Bettie Page stars Gretchen Mol as the Southern sweetie who inadvertently ended up contributing to a Senate investigation on pornography before giving it all up at the top of her popularity in favor of anonymity in a striking comment on the tightrope we all walk between public and private life.
Picturehouse and HBO Films release The Notorious Bettie Page in theaters on April 14.


It's great to have a film showcasing so much female talent — you as director and co-writer with Guinevere Turner, along with producers Pamela Koffler, Katie Roumel, and Christine Vachon. It's just so uncommon, even today in this era of so-called progress. Why do you think women still have difficulty infiltrating the film industry?

I don't really have a theory on it but it is difficult to get projects off the ground. I suppose part of it is that you can't direct something until somebody takes your idea. There are more women producers now but still something like Bettie didn't go the way I wanted. It didn't automatically appeal to people as, "Oh, this will make a great movie!" Generally, people aren't that interested in female stories; that may be part of it. And then I think it just takes a lot of time. I do actually think a lot of progress has been made in the last three years, but it's going to take another twenty years.

There are two things to think about in that regard, which is telling women's stories as well as women in positions of business or creative power within the industry. Maybe there are plenty of women execs or directors out there, but the stories that are being told aren't necessarily about women. It's odd in the case of Bettie Page — you'd think that a story about a pin-up queen would be quite appealing to men.

Yes, I was surprised! But with Bettie there were other things like the fact that I wanted to shoot in black and white; that was what made it hard to finance, that was the single hardest thing. And I hadn't chosen a big megastar. At any one time there's only about five actors that are considered by people who can finance a movie.

Right – if you'd had Gwyneth Paltrow for it, it probably would have been greenlit immediately.

Yeah!

I spoke with Guinevere Turner prior to the release of American Psycho and she was talking about the fact that you two were trying to get a Bettie Page project going. I recall her saying she was to star in it as well.

Yeah, she was originally going to play Bettie.

So why did that change?

Well, that was the other thing that took a long time: we were trying to finance with her in the lead and that proved impossible with the kind of budget that I needed because I couldn't shoot it very low-budget. I didn't want to shoot it on digital; I felt like it had to be shot on film and because it’s a period film it just had an automatic price – you couldn’t shoot it for under $5 million. It was a little more than that in the end.

So it comes back to figuring out which name star would at least make that money back.

Yes.

How do you think Bettie's story would have been different if it had been a film made by a man? Were there certain things you were told to do with the film by men who were in a position to finance it, changes they asked you to make?

No, I had very little interference with how I wanted to shoot it. I don't even know how it would be different, but I just feel very strongly that it would have. For men, it would be much less from her point of view and they'd be much less interested in her experiences. I was interested also in some of the sadness of being a beauty queen and that the photo shoots aren't all sexy and erotic – they're just photo shoots. It's just like filming—it's banal! I've talked to friends who've been on porno movies and they're very banal. These things aren't done in an atmosphere of frenzied sexiness; they're just like, "Move the light. Lift your chin up." It's all technical, really, and I wanted to capture that banality and that for these girls it's a job. I wanted to capture the behind-the-scenes quality of those things, of what life is really like for a pin-up girl or a glamour girl or someone making these erotic movies, and also what it was like for her to be the object of attention. So that was really what I was interested in; it wasn't her as a sex object, it was, "What was it like for her?"

I think one theme that makes a period piece like this so absolutely relevant to today is the presentation of that duality between private life and public persona, coupled with the fact that the government is constantly trying to regulate what people do privately, whether it's pornography or sexual orientation. Bettie has become a symbol of public versus private; was that a conscious objective for you to achieve with the film?

Well I was definitely interested in it. When Sam Green — who is a documentary filmmaker now, he did The Weather Underground — gave me the idea, he was a researcher on a TV show and then did the research on Bettie later when we came to make a film about it. He found these fabulous Senate transcripts of the hearing, which was so interesting to me and I would've had pages of it but people said, "You can't have so much of that, it gets boring!" But to me it was very fascinating because of how similar the debates are. In some ways they're different because everyone in that world is so naďve about what fetishism is, asking, "What does this mean?" and "What's a perversion?" and "What's corrupting?" But at the same time the parameters of the debate don't seem to have shifted at all; it's all about "Will this image cause such a devastating effect on a young person that they will infect their whole community?"

It definitely makes you wonder about the fact that so much progress has been made in terms of women's roles and women's rights in just a short amount of time, but for other areas of sexuality, things have not changed at all.

Yeah, that's true. This is a very puritanical society. It's both very sexually obsessed and puritanical.

I like the idea of these things being put forth through a vessel like Bettie who comes across as so open to things. Gretchen does a great job of getting that across.

Yeah. I think the fact that even though Bettie was brought up in a judgmental religious tradition — one that is as puritanical as the Southern white Protestant church — by nature she was very non-judgmental. She was very open. I think she felt like, "Well, if it's not hurting anybody, then what's wrong with it?"

Did you have any contact with her in the making of this film?

No, because she had sold her life rights to another project so we were not permitted to talk to her directly. But we met a lot of people and even went to Nashville where we met Billy Neal, her first husband. We had a chance to meet with her brother, Jack, and Sam also met a lot of people — photographers, another 50's pin-up model, someone who had been in one of the camera clubs, and someone who had been in her acting class. We put together a lot of people who'd known her; plus we had optioned this book, The Real Bettie Page, by the guy who had actually done the first interview with her when she was sort of found again. We had a lot of material.

Has Bettie seen the film?

She has seen it. She's processing it. I think she liked Gretchen. It's so difficult for her to see things that aren't quite, in some cases, as she remembered them — little details that are different, things like that. It's a hard thing; I mean, I would hate it! Can you imagine a film made of your life? (Laughs) I think it was just very weird for her.

When I was watching it I noticed a tendency your films have, which is the fact that you're using the art of cinema to examine how pop culture is a reflection of society throughout certain eras. It's like a mirror held up to a mirror reflecting life. It also makes a viewer realize that when you take a step back, nothing is really objective; a biopic is by no means any sort of objective portrayal of anybody and neither is memory or autobiography, for that matter.

Yeah! One thing I also feel I'm consciously working against is a main notion of cinema biography, which is that there's an explanation for everything and that it's usually based in childhood trauma and that it can be expressed very clearly and tearfully and that's the answer to the mystery of who a person is. It's not that there isn't childhood trauma or that we're not affected by all the things that happen to us. But the idea that these things are unlocked with just one key is something I don't agree with. I think what makes a person is a combination of all kinds of things; one is the childhood they had but another is the era they group up in, the time. Another is class, another is their individual character, then there's their destiny, and then there's chance, what happens to them.

Right — action and reaction and the decisions you make to survive or just deal with things around you. Particular scenes in the movie provoked thought or questions but presented no definite resolution. There's one striking example of that in the film which I won't mention for those who haven't seen it, but it happens and it's never referred to later on in the film so it makes you think, "Did this really have an affect on her or did it not?"

One thing is that she didn't talk about [that incident] or tell anyone about it until she was 70, I think, much older. I wanted to get across that idea that in the 50's you just didn't talk about it; she would've just buried it and moved on.

Again, a comment on the time and place she was living in which seems so critical to your films. I think if this movie gets any flak it might be because it doesn't tidily tie things up.

Yeah, some people object to that quite a bit. The people who don't like it don't like it for that reason.

It's exciting that it has the capacity to make people think, maybe make them angry or say, "Why didn't the director just say what that was about or have a resolution for it?"

And it's also to make people wonder.

I wanted to also talk about your attraction to period pieces. I consider American Psycho a period piece, even while that period wasn't so long ago. Then there's I Shot Andy Warhol and now this film. Has this pattern been a very deliberate choice for you?

At some point I do want to do something contemporary because it's hard making period films, although a lot of the ideas I have for some reason are period and I don't really know why. But then I go out and direct TV shows and those are contemporary. But I would like to do something contemporary; it is on my to-do list. (Laughs)

What kind of advice would you give to low-budget indie filmmakers when they're trying to tackle a period piece without a lot of money or resources?

Well, you can do it without a lot of money, but one of the things that annoys me about period film is that people aren't interested in really going back and thinking about what that world was like, so they have people behaving and talking in a totally modern way. If you go back even 20 or 30 years, there's no therapy speak. Recovery culture isn't part of things; self-help and the rest are all things that have become very strong in the last 25 or 30 years. But you can't set a thing in the 1960's and have people talk that way! I've read scripts people have sent me set in the 19th century where the women are talking like they're sitting around Starbucks, like they're sexually liberated, talking about sex in a way that no Victorian woman would ever think of talking! Don't people care what the world was like? So I think language is important because people talk differently. I immerse myself in photographs and magazines and novels and books about the history of the times to really try and capture how people talk.

You mention the fact that Bettie had given the rights of her life away to this other project, but then you had the rights to this book. Are the legalities of portraying someone's life too prohibitive for an indie, low-budget filmmaker to think about?

Well, they're public figures. I also had that same situation with Warhol, but again, he and Valerie Solanos were public figures and they had been involved in public incidents, so in that sense you have the right to cover their story. It then just depends on whom you get to talk to. In some ways being authorized can be hampering, too. It's tricky; you get a lot more access if something's been officially authorized, but it's also kind of restricting.

You have to feel more conscious about pleasing the person or not offending them.

Yeah, or there may be things that they don't want you to say.

How do you think that your background as a journalist contributes to your work as a filmmaker, especially when you're talking about doing this kind of research?

I guess because I was so used to doing it; I did it for so many years that's how I approached a story—I had a background of immersing myself in the sources.

How did you transition from that role into filmmaking?

While I was still a journalist, I had already started writing scripts with a friend even before I started TV. Then I got a job in TV and then I worked in documentary for a few years, still working on scripts. Then this woman who runs the Wooster Group — I'd done a documentary about them — asked me to come and write a script with her because she was doing something about Jackson Pollack and she knew I knew about him. So I had that experience even though in the end the film didn't get made; I learned a huge amount from that. And then I had this idea: I'd met Warhol and I'd written a lot about the Velvet Underground and I was working on a documentary about Warhol, and I had this idea to do a film about Valerie Solanos. When you have an idea that you really like, then the idea kind of propels you forward; I had a lot of faith in the idea of the subject being interesting so that gave me the courage to direct it because I thought, "Well, even if I don't direct it very well, the idea is strong enough that it will carry it."

It's intriguing that I Shot Andy Warhol and The Notorious Bettie Page might be considered hybrids given there's so much concern about genre and categorization and what is documentary or what is feature narrative by definition. Biopic cinema crosses a lot of those lines.

Yes, I think they do cross lines; people talk about my stuff as being very distant, but I think that's just a different style that people aren't used to but I don't think it lacks empathy, really. In the end I feel strongly about the people I'm filming. It's just a different style, really.

Your films defy neat or restrictive categorizations; there's nothing very simple about them.

A lot of people objected to American Psycho being both horror and satire. People found that very hard to take. Now, people are fine with it; now, it's kind of found its place but when it first opened, a lot of people didn't know what to make of it – they didn't know whether to laugh and people were made very uncomfortable. But people got used to it.

That's how one could talk about Bettie Page — the stuff she did then is totally tame now. There's much worse out there, stuff much more difficult to deal with. What about talking about the difference between TV and film work for you?

I like TV; in fact, right now my husband and I are working on a TV pilot we're interested in doing. I do a fair amount of episodic TV and I actually really enjoy doing it; I'm interested in that as a form. So I don't have a big thing like, "Oh, I can only do movies," because I started in TV and I spent my teenage years in England watching really great TV so I have a lot of respect for it as a form.

Do you think that it's become a much more attractive option for filmmakers to get into?

Yeah, I think actually most of us couldn't keep alive if we couldn't do it. But it's also great because if I didn't do TV I would only film once every five years; it would be terrible! But instead I get to do a lot of different kinds of shooting. There's a lot of very interesting stuff on TV that I really like, so I like to keep open to that, too. Again, there are no categories!