Anna Biller
BY
Gracie Hadland
An interview with filmmaker Anna Biller.
The Love Witch plays 7 Ludlow as part of Handmade Horror.
Anna Biller’s The Love Witch, despite being made in 2016, has an uncanny timelessness. Through her distinct art direction and production design, Biller created a sumptuous cinematic world that operates according to its own logic, building upon that crafted for her 2007 debut feature Viva. The story is of a woman named Elaine (Samantha Robinson), recently moved to a small town in California, who practices witchcraft in the hope of meeting the man of her dreams. Using potions and spells to make men fall in love with her, she initially performs for them the role of a submissive and docile female, only to become bored and turned off by each man’s cloying obsession with her, and so she kills them. It’s a unique femme fatale story with a campy undertone, whose look—employing shiny plastic wigs, stage make-up, and costumes crafted with bright, synthetic materials—lands somewhere between a pulpy B-movie from the 1960s, a spoof like Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), and the lush Technicolor musicals of Jacques Demy.
The Love Witch begins with an archetypal scene: a woman is driving down a coastal road in a red convertible, her jet black hair hardly moving despite the car’s rapid speed and open top, as her right hand, nails painted red, lights a cigarette. Like one of Hitchcock’s blondes, Elaine has a hard yet enigmatic glint in her eye. In another scene that takes place inside her Victorian-style apartment, in which Elaine is concocting her potions, each detail of the props and set, aflush with burning red candles and Pagan imagery, has been arranged as carefully by Biller as have the precise rituals performed by Elaine. With her spells and voodoo, Elaine—like Biller—ends up as a kind of auteur directing her own life.
In every aspect of the film’s production, Biller leans into artifice. Instead of attempting impossible authenticity, she draws attention to the highly constructed and coded nature of cinema, gender, and romance. She plays with tropes in order to observe some biting truths, and uses studio lighting, painted scrims, and extravagant costumes to bring the viewer further into her idiosyncratic world.—Gracie Hadland
Viva (2007)
GRACIE HADLAND: I am really interested in the anachronism in The Love Witch—the way the film does not reflect a particular time period but rather appears to be a conflation of different periods. Elaine drives an old car, and then another character pulls up in a new BMW, much like the notorious shot in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006) where a pair of Converse lie amongst the Queen’s 1780s silk slippers. I think it really embraces the freedom of filmmaking. What effect did you want this to have?
ANNA BILLER: Since I’m trying to depict a world of female desire, I choose costumes and objects according to my attraction to them. I want to get excited about each dress, each couch, each painting. So, I guess the effect I want is to recreate the excitement I have around these objects… not because they’re retro, but because they’re part of the world of desire of the movie. I think of it as a kind of feminist project, to focus the desire not only on the actress’ body, but on her wardrobe. I think the reason this feels so retro is not just because I’m using vintage dress patterns, for instance, but because classic movies were also very focused on wardrobe and color. It’s a style of filmmaking that has gone out of date.
That said, The Love Witch is set in the present day. It’s got computers, DNA, modern cars, cell phones. No typewriters or rotary phones. Everything that feels retro is something that’s also in style today. The thing is, most of the people I know are into vintage clothing and furniture. When we shot Elaine’s street in Eureka, all of the cars parked on the street were vintage—we didn’t change any of them out. Why do movies always have to have people who drive the latest car and dress in the most boring modern clothes? [Laughs]
The Love Witch (2016)
GH: I’m always interested in period pieces inflected with the contemporary moment. Movies like McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), which uses colloquialisms and is clearly informed by the aesthetic of the time in which its set, yet has a very ’70s style. It’s impossible to completely preserve a movie in one particular period; the contemporary moment will always come through. Are there certain period pieces that you’ve been inspired by?
AB: I watch tons of classic movies, and I have been doing so since infancy. I can’t pinpoint a specific movie. I think it’s just that thousands of hours of watching old movies has made them become part of my body. They inform everything—my scripts, my dialogue, my choice of actors, my visual choices.
GH: The lighting, especially, gives The Love Witch a remarkable early Technicolor quality. I thought of Hitchcock’s color pictures and Douglas Sirk’s melodramas that take advantage of that lighting and color so well.
AB: Those are exactly the films I was watching with my DP [M. David Mullen]—Hitchcock and Sirk Technicolor films, Leave Her to Heaven (1945), The Red Shoes (1948), etc. I just find them incredibly beautiful. And I love rear projection photography. It’s the only way to get that unreal feeling of glamour when people are driving a car. I love to light actors’ faces, and furniture even, so that it looks dimensional. The art of lighting used to be about trying to create three dimensions in a two-dimensional space. Everything had its own light—every chair, every table. And actors often had eight lights. Their clothes had a light, their eyes had a light, their faces had several lights. And flags and scrims and cucaloruses to create shadows. My DP would make these little grids out of black tape and project them onto a wall so suggest a facing window. I know I sound like a nerd, but this is the kind of thing that made me fall in love with cinema.
John M. Stahl’s Leave Her to Heaven (1945)
GH: The plot of The Love Witch is a subversive take on a kind of narrative formula of a B-horror movie. It’s almost like a spoof—by following that formula, you are able to emphasize its absurdity.
AB: I love to work with formulas. Not just to subvert them, but because formulas are comforting. This is why I love some of the classic B movies. They tell a story in a simple, satisfying way. That said, it’s only when you create a formula that you can clearly see where it deviates from other movies. Because of this, my feminist content stands out like a sore thumb, even though it’s subtle. For instance, the fact that in a film with full nudity, the lead actress spends most of her screen time wearing long, high-necked dresses with long sleeves that don’t reveal her body. That goes against all the rules of exploitation. It’s something everyone notices, and I’ve found that women love it, and that men are disappointed. This is how you know the subversion is working.
GH: Beyond making a film from a woman’s point of view, how else do you see your films as a subversion of the male gaze?
AB: I’m trying to be brutally honest about what it’s like to be a woman. That means there will be lots of things that don’t seem feminist at all, especially where male and female desire intersects. For instance, it’s part of femininity to like to be looked at by men. That doesn’t mean you want men to objectify you or molest you. These are things we need to see in cinema. Real female desire, even when it’s messy or flawed. I’m sick of the only female characters in books and movies being “cool girls.” I want to create female characters that resonate with my experience.
I like actors to look and feel timeless—mythic, even. My work is all about the mythic.
GH: Your films put a remarkable emphasis on art direction. Is that what you start with, more than with a script or story, or does it come afterwards?
AB: I always start with images. For instance, with The Love Witch, I started with vintage 1960s pulp covers featuring sexy witches. So, my story became about how what’s implied on those covers—that women are evil seductresses who you hate, but you also desire. That’s such a fraught and interesting subject to try to subvert. So, I take that sexy witch on the cover, and I make it from her point of view, so that she’s a subject and not an object.
GH: Does this emphasis on images translate into the casting, too? Do you want your actors to have a certain look that matches the aesthetic of the film?
AB: Yes, I gravitate towards actors with certain types of faces and voices. I like actors to look and feel timeless—mythic, even. My work is all about the mythic.
Gracie Hadland is a writer and art critic living in Los Angeles.
The Love Witch (2016)
