| Anna Biller Innerview
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I should've done my home
work, but since I'm interviewing the teacher herself: what's your personal
background? Are you a Lost Angeles native, or did you drift here from other
zones? And, whether local or imported, how is it that you wound up in Hollywood
making these strangely iconoclastic flix? I mean, it's not that they're not
like Hollywood movies; only, they're like Hollywood movies from fifty years
ago!
I think a lot of it has to do with my parents. My mom is
Japanese from Hawaii. She grew up on a coffee plantation, and every night she
would  go
to the theater and see these incredible movies, with these women in these
dresses by Adrian and Orry-Kelly, and all of the feathers and white satin and
all of the glamour. She told me that when she was a little girl, she used to
dream about becoming a costume designer. Later, when she was married to my dad
and lived in L.A. and had four kids, she opened her own dress shop in West
Hollywood. She would stay at home with us kids and sew all day for her store,
and we would watch old movies and musicals all day
long.
I also remember that her store was really glamorous. A
 lot
of celebrities shopped there, and it was the end of the era of Hollywood
glamour. There was still vaudeville on TV, you know, Carol Burnett and Flip
Wilson and
 Sonny and Cher, and there was Liberace and all this flashiness.
Everybody in Hollywood was into the fantasy of Hollywood, especially artists
and gays. That was the time of 70's deco and the rediscovery of Busby Berkeley.
I guess what I'm trying to do with my work is reassemble the history of
Hollywood the way it appeared to me as a child-that is, all mixed up and
arbitrary, with all of the visual excess intact, but with my
 distorted childhood brain translating everything as if it relates
only to me. I think everyone actually does that with movies, but unconsciously.
That's why I think my films are like dreams, because they appeal to the
collective unconscious of movie fans.
But there are other things too.
For instance, my dad was a painter, and my mom sewed, and they made absolutely
everything. Even our bedrooms were like
 these weird
sets with unwieldy handmade props in them. That's how I got the idea that if
you want something, you have to make it. And my mom is beautiful like a movie
queen, like a Japanese Ava Gardner or maybe more like Michiko Kyo, and I always
wanted to be like her. And I didn't go to film school until very late. I
studied art and theater, like the first movie directors.
Let's talk about your approach to flickmaking. It
reminds me of the story of when Jack Nicholson was asked what it was like to
work with Kubrick and he said, "Redefines the word meticulous." You basically
"do it all," though like any flickmaker, that's only to a certain logical end
point. But given the collaborative process is so pre-planned by yourself --
from scripting to starring to designing to directing to editing to lighting to
-- it must take an enormous amount of time to produce your movies. Or
not?
No, the turnaround is never fast, it always takes an
enormous amount
 of time. This can be really frustrating, but I won't shoot something
until I think it looks good. But the "Incubus" pre-production was a little
extreme, even for me. I spent so many hours working on getting the costumes and
colors and casting and everything else right, it seemed kind of insane, like I
was literally a madwoman. And post-production was the same way, because I
couldn't find the right music and ended up having to write a pipe organ piece
and stuff for banjo and all of these things that were new to me.
Sometimes I drive people crazy on my sets because I'm trying to sew or
mend something or touch up a prop when everybody's waiting-or,
 I'm
making petticoat ruffles the night before the shoot and don't get any sleep --
or I'm buying set objects the morning of shooting and I'm late-but without a
luxurious budget, that's the way it goes. It's kind of like "Hey, kids, let's
put on a show in the barn!"
But seriously, my process is that I'll work
for a year or two alone, will work with a crew for a total of maybe six days,
and then spend another year in post production alone. I think on my next
feature I'm going to have to adjust this a little bit. Sometimes I have these
nightmares that my hair has turned white and my room is filled with cobwebs,
and I'm living with these props I've collected but still haven't shot the
movie!
I'm sure you get
justifiably tired being asked about sexism in films and how you feel being a
"woman director," as it's akin to being asked what it's like to be a "gay pop
singer" or an "African American senator" (not that there is such a thing). So
without accepting the label as such, can you digress and tell us a bit what it
is like at the turn of the century making artistic projects that still largely
(in the collective, non-critical sense) embody centuries old patriarchal
viewpoints and values?
I'm very much a woman director, both in
terms of the way I work and the kinds of movies I make. When I first started
making movies on video and then on Super
 8mm, I
would create these very simple scenarios about my own fantasy world. I realized
very quickly that while some people were enchanted, there were always others
who were quick to ridicule my ultra-feminine vision and unabashed pleasure in
being a woman.
 Later when I went to graduate school at CalArts, I had
to fight to assert my rights to make feminist work that was feminine and about
pleasure, although these were topics that were just beginning to creep into
feminist theory and were gaining some ascendancy there. So I had to fight to be
taken seriously there, and I still have to fight to be taken seriously by many
academic and traditional institutions. But the more flack I get, the more I'm
interested in pushing the concept of feminine pleasure in my work.
When
I first started out I had no idea that being a woman trying to put your own
fantasies into movies could create so much hostility, suspicion, and ridicule.
But that's why it's so important to do it. Each film is like a new experiment,
where I
 push
the theme a little further. As expected, I'm getting more suspicion from men
about "Incubus" than I did about "Queen," because I'm going further. "Queen"
was just about asking for the space to have my fantasies; in "Incubus" I
actually create much more anxiety, because there's this point at which my
character Lucy stops being a victim of the Incubus and shows that she has her
own complex sexual fantasy life.
And this is where men often feel
threatened. This reaction has really opened my eyes to how bad things have
gotten, if it's that threatening for a woman just to have her own desire. The
thing that really bothers a lot of men seems to be that Lucy takes her revenge in a
feminine way, by asserting her charms and winning the adoration of the cowboys.
This makes men jealous because they can't do it. But we live now in an age
where women aren't even allowed to be women anymore. Drag queens usurped the
territory of extravagant self-display long ago, and most of the sex symbols in
Hollywood now are men, and there's
 even
this trend where the new Hollywood movie posters mostly feature men. Women in
films tend to be plain, whiny, self-deprecating, etc. A woman in a film may be
violent or strong on the surface, but she is not allowed to assert her will
over a man's will.
Of course, there are always men and women who are
completely enchanted with this whole notion of the power of the feminine. Stars
like Marlene Dietrich and Mae West and many others from the 30's and 40's
projected an unutterably feminine quality of power and seduction,
 which
is why this is my favorite period for films. Mae West wrote and directed her
own movies and always portrayed herself as a wonderful gift to mankind, which
is more like what I do, whereas the Dietrich-Von Sternberg films are about
woman's power to attract but also destroy, more of a male point of view (a
woman doesn't usually consider herself to be destructive). But those films are
also a tribute to woman's power, and are ten million times more respectful and
admiring of women than any film today.
One more thing: my method of
working with actors and crew is also along Mae West lines. I don't bully or
threaten, I try to seduce and give pleasure and make
 people
share in the fantasy world and get caught up in it. The actors are usually
living right in the moment, carried away by the sets and costumes, and that's
one way I get such authentic performances out of them. But in terms of the crew
I get bossed around quite a bit, sometimes even by the gaffer or a camera
assistant or just anyone at all, because they smell blood when they see other
guys hot on the trail of a woman who's trying to assert her world. And I'm
standing there in a headdress or a bee costume or something, and they refuse to
take me seriously. So I've had to be, as the saying goes, ten times more
competent than any man just to be able to control my own set.
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