Mary Harron
Mary Harron is a Canadian film director and screenwriter. She is best known for directing and co-writing American Psycho, The Notorious Bettie Page and ''I Shot Andy Warhol.''
Early life
Born in Bracebridge, Ontario, Canada, Harron grew up with a family with numerous connections to the arts. She is the daughter of Gloria Fisher and Don Harron, a Canadian actor, comedian, author and director. Her parents divorced when she was six years old. Harron spent her early life residing between Toronto and Los Angeles. Harron's first stepmother, Virginia Leith, was discovered by Stanley Kubrick and acted in his first film Fear and Desire and was also featured in the 1962 cult classic The Brain That Wouldn't Die. Leith's brief acting career partly inspired Harron's interest in making The Notorious Bettie Page. Harron's stepfather is the novelist Stephen Vizinczey. Harron's second stepmother is the Canadian singer Catherine McKinnon.Harron moved to England when she was thirteen and later attended St Anne's College, Oxford University, where she received a Bachelors in English. While in England, she dated Tony Blair, later the prime minister of the United Kingdom and Chris Huhne, another Oxford student who later became a prominent politician. She then moved to New York City and was part of its 1970s punk scene.
Influences
During her adolescence, Harron was exposed to many different forms of art and film. In a 2020 interview with The New School, Harron states: "My parents took us to whatever films they wanted to see so I saw a lot of art films that would not be considered suitable for a child." She goes on to explain that her largest influences, especially as a child around the age of ten, were Alfred Hitchcock, Bergman, and Satyajit Ray. After she had moved to London in her teen years she began attending the National Film Theatre where she was exposed to other international filmmakers like Fritz Lang, Howard Hawks, Claude Chabrol, and Roman Polanski. She was also exposed to noir films, namely Double Indemnity.As an adult she was inspired by the films Blue Velvet, Drugstore Cowboy and The Piano, directed by Jane Campion. While she said that she had plenty of exposure to Hollywood films, she was enticed by these types of films because they were, in her words, the "forerunners of independent film."
Career
Early writing work
In New York, Harron helped start and write for Punk magazine as a music journalist; she was the first journalist to interview the Sex Pistols for an American publication. She grew up in the early punk scene of America. She found the culture easy for her to fit into and was constantly evolving and spreading into new demographics. During the 1980s, she was a drama critic for The Observer in London for a time, as well as working as a music critic for The Guardian and the New Statesman. In the late 1980s, Harron participated and began her film career writing and directing BBC Documentaries.During the 1990s, Harron moved back to New York where she worked as a producer for PBS's Edge, a program dedicated to exploring American pop culture. It was at this time that Harron became interested in the life of Valerie Solanas, the woman who attempted to kill Andy Warhol. Harron suggested making a documentary about Solanas to her producers, who in turn encouraged her to develop the project into what would be her first feature film. Harron says she owes her success with her first film to Andy who helped to sell the controversial focus on the attempted murderess, Solanas.
''I Shot Andy Warhol''
Harron's feature film directorial debut, I Shot Andy Warhol, released in 1996, is the partially imagined story of Valerie Solanas' failed assassination attempt on Andy Warhol. She explains her interest in Solanas' life:In an interview Harron did for CBC’s Newsworld’s On the Arts in 1996, she told film critic Christopher Heard that "It was Valerie that really impelled to make this film, because of the mystery of her story. Not knowing who she was... the lack of information about her." Solanas's existence was "a real piece of lost history" and an "unknown story" that she sought to explore deeper.
As far as Harron's amusement with Warhol went, she stated "As I was growing up, Warhol was the most famous artist in the world, apart from Picasso My mother of him, so that made him even more interesting." Also regarding her interest in Warhol’s story, she felt that he, before and after the shooting, were two vastly different people. This is her reason for viewing Warhol’s shooting as a “turning point” in his life.”
The film opened the “Un Certain Regard” section of the Cannes Film Festival and received an Independent Spirit Award nomination for best first feature film. It also won the sole acting award at that year's Sundance Film Festival for Lili Taylor's performance as Solanas.
''American Psycho''
Harron's second film, American Psycho, released in 2000, is based on the book of the same title by Bret Easton Ellis, which is notorious for its graphic descriptions of torture and murder. The protagonist, Patrick Bateman, is an investment banker who goes on a killing spree. The New York Times Stephen Holden wrote of the film:The film was mired in controversy before production began, due in large part to the legacy of the book's release. Harron has a liking for darker and more controversial topics, such as Valerie Solanas, but it was the satirical nature of the book that "inspired her film about perfunctory violence and obsessive consumption." As Harron began production, the crew had to contend with threats of protest, as the issue of violence in the media became crystallized by the Columbine shootings. Campaigns against the film continued throughout production, the Feminist Majority Foundation condemning the film as misogynist, and the Canadians Concerned About Violence in Entertainment convincing restaurant owners to deny Harron permission to film in their establishments. When returning to work with co-writer Guinevere Turner, Harron felt they were best suited for the job of American Psycho as they needed no hesitation on feminist values, especially after Turner's successful lesbian film Go Fish.
Although some criticized American Psycho for its violence against women, Harron and Turner made conscious decisions that project the female influence on this adaption. Harron's adaptation of this film changes the focus from purely Bateman's perspective to showcase the faces of the women as "the perspective in those murder scenes wasn't through Patrick Bateman but the women."
''The Notorious Bettie Page''
The Notorious Bettie Page, released in 2005, starred Gretchen Mol as Bettie Page, the 1950s pinup model who became a sexual icon. The film shows Page as the daughter of religious and conservative parents, as well as the fetish symbol who became a target of a Senate investigation of pornography. About the film, Harron said in 2006:Clearly Bettie is a very inspiring figure to young women because she had a strong independent streak. She did what she wanted to do and she wasn't just doing it for men... But I think it's a huge mistake to think of her as a conscious feminist heroine. As far as I can see, she didn't have an agenda, ever. She just followed her own path unconsciously. I don't think she thought of herself as a rebel in any way. She was kind of in her own world of dress-up.Harron later stated that the film suffered from false expectations, in that many male critics and male viewers expected and wanted the film to be "sexy", but that the film instead portrayed "what it's like to be Bettie", and Page herself did not get a "sexual charge" out of her modelling.