![Ana Lily Amirpour [Credit: Myrna Suarez]](https://blogs.iu.edu/establishingshot/files/2017/02/Amirpour-Credit-Myrna-Suarez-1xqo7n8-783x1024.jpg)
Katherine Johnson on A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
Dark, slow, and quiet, Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) shows you a story—it does not tell you. The saying “Show, don’t tell” is a writer’s mantra, but it seems so obviously crucial to the art of filmmaking. And yet I often find that film, particularly narrative film, still struggles to tell a story in its own language, not one dependent upon novelistic or theatrical conventions. And yes, I am perhaps overgeneralizing here; but when was the last time a film spoke to you through visual style alone, through music and sound filtered through convention, but not shaped or limited by it?Amirpour’s film seems not to want to tell a story at all—“Iranian vampire Western,” as it is so often described, style (visual and aural) appears to be the key. The film wants to convey something, something hard to put your finger on, to describe. It is something you can see, you can hear, you can feel. I felt it more than a year ago when I saw the film for the first time, and that feeling still haunts me. Perhaps that is the best way to describe this film: it is haunting—in style, in impact, in the very idea that A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night oozes Amirpour herself. I cannot help but to feel her in the Girl, as she rides her skateboard down the black and quiet night streets of Bad City, her chador streaming behind her like a cape or bats wings, the sound of wheels on road the only thing to be heard as she flies towards the camera.
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is a film that exemplifies the stories film can tell; what a vampire love story can be; what the Western in its many different iterations can do; and most importantly in my book, what kind of hero a Girl can be.
Jesse Pasternack on Why You Should Be Excited for The Bad Batch
Matt Zoller Seitz has written about the tendency of TV shows to find their voices in their second seasons. He thinks that a second season can make or break a show. Likewise, a second film can be very indicative of where the career of a director will go.
First films tease you with the promise of their filmmakers, while a second film shows the fulfillment of that promise. The flashbacks and razor sharp dialogue of Reservoir Dogs get you interested in Quentin Tarantino, but the blossoming of those same qualities in Pulp Fiction is what makes you want to watch anything he does next. Paul Thomas Anderson can impress with cool steadicam shots and a unique spin on the idea of creating a makeshift family in Hard Eight, but if he hadn’t taken those stylistic and thematic concerns to the next level for Boogie Nights, he wouldn’t have been able to keep the momentum of his career going to make a masterpiece like There Will Be Blood.
Second films are what separates the good from the bad, and the bad from the ugly. Not every filmmaker can make that transition, as a look at what RKO did to Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons shows us. But based on everything I’ve read, it looks like Ana Lily Amirpour is going to jump over the second film canyon like Evel Knievel.
Consider The Bad Batch, her follow-up to her Iranian vampire spaghetti western A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. Amirpour irresistibly described her new movie as “Road Warrior meets Pretty in Pink with a dope soundtrack.” That potent mixture is apparent from researching the film. From a visual standpoint Amirpour and her cinematographer Lyle Vincent do a good job of making The Bad Batch look like it could fit right into the Mad Max universe. Its relationship drama between lead characters Arlen and Miami Man suggests some John Hughes elements. A dope soundtrack is always a good reason to watch a movie.
The cast features excellent actors such as Giovanni Ribisi and Diego Luna. Amirpour makes fascinating casting choices, such as having action movie legend Keanu Reeves play a cult leader known as The Dream. Suki Waterhouse grounds the cast with her central performance as Arlen. Waterhouse has been in several films, but this has the potential to be her breakout role.
A second film can make or break a director’s career. But it seems like Amirpour has built upon her first achievement through her ability to meld different genres into something new and exciting. I cannot wait to buy a ticket to The Bad Batch.
David Carter on Ana Lily Amirpour’s Influences
Ana Lily Amirpour is one of those artists that wears their influences loud and proud right on their sleeves. This isn’t to say that the director of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night and the upcoming The Bad Batch doesn’t have her own original vision she brings to her work, but that she pulls from a plethora of places and filters it all through her own unique eye. What makes her pool of references so interesting is how seemingly disparate they are.
Born to Iranian parents in England with a move to Miami, Florida at a young age, then settling in Bakersfield, California as a teenager, Ana had a large cross-pollination of ideas and influences since a young age. Her Iranian background was vital to the look and design of her creation of Bad City (the fictional setting of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night) and the protagonist of “The Girl.” The idea of a vampire that wears a chador (eastern clothing) came from her skateboarding (western sport/pastime) in one as a kid and enjoying the sensation of it: “It’s felt like the wind…like I was a stingray, a creature. It was amazing.” Also as a kid Ana had an obsession with American pop culture. Some her earliest filmmaking and life lessons came from constantly re-watching the making of Michael Jackson’s Thriller video, stating “It taught me how to be American.”
In line with Michael Jackson, Ana’s choices in filmmakers are ones that encompass different parts of 80’s ephemera. She’s a fan of genre filmmakers John Hughes, George Miller, and Robert Zemeckis. Zemeckis in particular holds a special place in her heart. She cites Romancing the Stone as an influence on The Bad Batch and Back to the Future as one of her favorite films. The character Doc Brown is one she identifies with when it comes to her creative process, “He’s a madman alone locked up with his ideas but he does whatever he wants.” It becomes interesting when in the same breath she’ll mention other less conventional directors in the pop cultural landscape. Alejandro Jodorowsky, Alex Cox, Harmony Korine and David Lynch all spill out in her work. However these two camps of contrasting filmmakers do have a commonality that’s indicative of her approach to storytelling: The element of fantasy. As she states in an LA Times interview, “I’ve always loved fantasy. When I look at filmmakers I like, it’s Robert Zemeckis, David Lynch — it’s a light fairy tale or a dark fairy tale. I like [Quentin] Tarantino. Harmony Korine. They’re all creating their own worlds — magic and fantasy, limitless storytelling. When I was a kid, it was all The Never Ending Story and Back to the Future.” Even in her early short films, this element of light and dark fantasy is present. Her 2010 short film A Little Suicide is a journey across a city with a cockroach trying to kill itself. True Love is a darkly funny story about a lonely man trying to order sex acts off of a menu surrounded by couples.
Ana Lily Amirpour is a unique and carnally passionate filmmaker whose voice sings with the sounds of both the commercial and the high-minded, but her films and her psychedelic fables are solidly her own song.
Independent Filmmaker Ana Lily Amirpour is scheduled to be present for all four events in IU Cinema’s Ana Lily Amirpour: Her Way Film Series taking place February 23: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (6:30 p.m.) and Ana Lily Amirpour Shorts Program (9:30 p.m.) and February 24: Jorgensen Guest Filmmaker Lecture (3:00 p.m.) and a The Bad Batch (2017) – Sneak Preview Screening! (6:30 p.m.)
Katherine Johnson, currently a third year legacy PhD student in Communication and Culture, studies film and media, genre (particularly the Western), gender, and performance. She has a BA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an MA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and has been obsessed with film since the beginning.
Jesse Pasternack is a junior at Indiana University and the co-president of the Indiana Student Cinema Guild. He writes about film, television, and pop culture for the Indiana Daily Student. Jesse is a moderator at Michael Moore’s Traverse City Film Festival and a friend of the Doug Loves Movies podcast. He has directed two short films.
David Carter is a film lover and a menace. He plays jazz from time to time but asks you not to hold that against him. His taste in movies bounces from Speed Racer to The Holy Mountain and everything in between.