April 2006
The Outsider
In a departure from her usual homicidal subjects, director Mary Harron’s latest film examines the sinister side of beauty By Olivia Stren
Image credit: Courtesy Alliance Atlantis
Mary Harron suggests we meet at a café in Brooklyn’s gentrified Carroll Gardens. It’s a cozy neighbourhood haunt: vegetarian specials are scribbled on a chalkboard, indie rock plays at excessive volume, and freelancers with artfully tousled hair read the Times’ arts section. Harron lives a few blocks away with her husband, John Walsh (who is also a director), and her two little girls, Ruby, age eight, and Ella, five. The café’s broad windows face the kind of atmospheric fall day New York specializes in: quaint streets basking in honeyed light, as if the view has been art-directed. It’s a scene from a happy-ending movie. In other words, not the sort of movie Harron makes.
Harron is pale, with tomboyish cropped hair, and she speaks softly and quickly about her craft, her blue eyes working their way around the room as if she were scoping out a swift exit. Her first film, I Shot Andy Warhol, is a sensitive, almost sympathetic portrayal of Warhol’s disturbed shooter, Valerie Solanas. “I was interested in creating an alternative history: in taking the most obscure and reviled person in a famous world and telling a story entirely through their perspective,” she says. Her second film, American Psycho—shot in Toronto in 1999, with such locations as The Senator and The Phoenix standing in for ’80s Manhattan—was based on Bret Easton Ellis’s best-selling novel about serial killer Patrick Bateman. What was most gruesome about the film wasn’t the violence, but the ordinariness of the murderer: Bateman is a hand-shaking, meticulously appointed corporate everyman who happens to express his aggression through homicide.
Due out this month, The Notorious Bettie Page (with the world’s most famous pin-up played by a radiant Gretchen Mol) is a disarming telling of Page’s development from guileless Nashville girl to whip-wielding sexpot. Her experience being photographed is portrayed as one of pure, almost religious exaltation.
Harron is plainly more comfortable talking about the lives of her characters than her own, glossing over her childhood like it’s a negligible plot point. She was born in 1953 in Gravenhurst. Her mother (a producer for CBC Radio) and father (comedy legend Don Harron) divorced when she was young; the family moved around a lot, from Toronto and Stratford to the States. Her mother married Hungarian novelist Stephen Vizinczey (In Praise of Older Women) and they moved to Rome, then London when she was a teenager, with Harron returning to Toronto every summer to be with her dad. She spent free time during her adolescence attending poetry readings and watching movies; one of the most affecting for her was Fritz Lang’s M, about a serial child killer. As in American Psycho, the point of view alternates between the murderer and his hunters.
But it wasn’t until much later that her interest in film morphed into a career. With a degree in English literature from Oxford, she wanted to be a journalist, so she set out for New York. She worked as a rock critic for Punk and interviewed such bands as The Ramones, the Sex Pistols and the Talking Heads. But Harron envied friends who were making documentaries for the BBC: “That seemed really interesting to me—doing in film what I had been doing in journalism.” Eventually, she landed a job at a popular BBC show researching documentaries (including one on Andy Warhol).
Similarly, Harron was first inspired to make a movie about Page 12 years ago, when she read a fanzine article. But she’s always been intrigued by the notion of female beauty as something burdensome and potentially nefarious: “I’m interested in what life is like for women who are beautiful, and whose fame is so connected to their beauty.” She’s just finished writing a script for a film called Please Kill Me (based on the book about the ’70s punk scene) and has directed an episode of Big Love, an upcoming HBO show starring Chloë Sevigny and Bill Paxton, about a polygamist marriage in Utah.
We leave the coffee shop to visit her daughter at school. When we arrive, Ella (who tells her friends “my mommy makes dark movies”) scampers over and gives her a kiss through the playground’s wire fence, whispering that the Rice Krispies square in her lunchbox was yummy. It’s the kind of too-sweet scene that in Harron’s movies would foreshadow something horrible. But her films can also make reality seem like a relief, as Ella skips safely back to school under hopeful sunshine.
Harron is pale, with tomboyish cropped hair, and she speaks softly and quickly about her craft, her blue eyes working their way around the room as if she were scoping out a swift exit. Her first film, I Shot Andy Warhol, is a sensitive, almost sympathetic portrayal of Warhol’s disturbed shooter, Valerie Solanas. “I was interested in creating an alternative history: in taking the most obscure and reviled person in a famous world and telling a story entirely through their perspective,” she says. Her second film, American Psycho—shot in Toronto in 1999, with such locations as The Senator and The Phoenix standing in for ’80s Manhattan—was based on Bret Easton Ellis’s best-selling novel about serial killer Patrick Bateman. What was most gruesome about the film wasn’t the violence, but the ordinariness of the murderer: Bateman is a hand-shaking, meticulously appointed corporate everyman who happens to express his aggression through homicide.
Due out this month, The Notorious Bettie Page (with the world’s most famous pin-up played by a radiant Gretchen Mol) is a disarming telling of Page’s development from guileless Nashville girl to whip-wielding sexpot. Her experience being photographed is portrayed as one of pure, almost religious exaltation.
Harron is plainly more comfortable talking about the lives of her characters than her own, glossing over her childhood like it’s a negligible plot point. She was born in 1953 in Gravenhurst. Her mother (a producer for CBC Radio) and father (comedy legend Don Harron) divorced when she was young; the family moved around a lot, from Toronto and Stratford to the States. Her mother married Hungarian novelist Stephen Vizinczey (In Praise of Older Women) and they moved to Rome, then London when she was a teenager, with Harron returning to Toronto every summer to be with her dad. She spent free time during her adolescence attending poetry readings and watching movies; one of the most affecting for her was Fritz Lang’s M, about a serial child killer. As in American Psycho, the point of view alternates between the murderer and his hunters.
But it wasn’t until much later that her interest in film morphed into a career. With a degree in English literature from Oxford, she wanted to be a journalist, so she set out for New York. She worked as a rock critic for Punk and interviewed such bands as The Ramones, the Sex Pistols and the Talking Heads. But Harron envied friends who were making documentaries for the BBC: “That seemed really interesting to me—doing in film what I had been doing in journalism.” Eventually, she landed a job at a popular BBC show researching documentaries (including one on Andy Warhol).
Similarly, Harron was first inspired to make a movie about Page 12 years ago, when she read a fanzine article. But she’s always been intrigued by the notion of female beauty as something burdensome and potentially nefarious: “I’m interested in what life is like for women who are beautiful, and whose fame is so connected to their beauty.” She’s just finished writing a script for a film called Please Kill Me (based on the book about the ’70s punk scene) and has directed an episode of Big Love, an upcoming HBO show starring Chloë Sevigny and Bill Paxton, about a polygamist marriage in Utah.
We leave the coffee shop to visit her daughter at school. When we arrive, Ella (who tells her friends “my mommy makes dark movies”) scampers over and gives her a kiss through the playground’s wire fence, whispering that the Rice Krispies square in her lunchbox was yummy. It’s the kind of too-sweet scene that in Harron’s movies would foreshadow something horrible. But her films can also make reality seem like a relief, as Ella skips safely back to school under hopeful sunshine.
