If you ran into Ana Lily Amirpour at Sundance, chances are she was a little woozy.
After working on her film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night for a year, no sooner did the writer/director arrive in Park City than she slipped on some ice and cracked open her forehead. It was bad. Thirty-five stitches bad. Later that week, speaking from the stage at the festival's famed Egyptian Theater, she described it as "a giant red mouth with, like, blood pouring out of it." She also called it "some next level fucking shit."
Sir John Gielgud, it ain't, but these are the kinds of things the directors behind noir-ish black-and-white Iranian vampire Westerns are supposed to say. Especially directors with films as smartly and beautifully crafted as Amirpour's. They're supposed to wear T-shirts that evoke Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (hers says "Vincent & Jules & Marcellus & Mia") and David Lynch's Wild at Heart. She'll rotate both throughout the festival, but right now she's wearing one with Wild's Bobby Peru, who she'll later describe as "one of the coolest characters of all time."
And Lynch's influence is just the beginning. Amirpour's feature debut is, if nothing else, a genre film lover's blood-wet dream. It's a little bit Lynch, a little bit Tarantino, with a smidgen of Robert Rodriguez's Sin City (her movie has an accompanying comic that she wrote and will be releasing over the next few months), some Sergio Leone, and features a small-town obsession straight out of Harmony Korine's Gummo. It also has a vampire anti-heroine who's as ruthless as she is romantic—the kind of fully drawn character who's been woefully absent from the young-adult bloodsucker movies of the past few years. (And probably the first one to ever ride a skateboard and wear a chador instead of a cape.) So the question must be asked: What most inspired her creature of the night?
"Anne Rice was my first thing. I loved—addicted loved—all of that," Amirpour says over coffee the day after her screening at Sundance, adding that she also just really loves vampires as characters. "A vampire is so many things: serial killer, a romantic, a historian, a drug addict—they're sort of all these things in one."
Yet, for the bouillabaisse of influences, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night isn't devoid of original vision. It's the opposite—a fully realized world from someone who knows how to take inspiration and run with it, who can pay homage to her heroes without ripping them off. And the result, as familiar as it might feel, is unlike anything you've ever seen before.
"The director combines elements of film noir and the restraint of Iranian New Wave cinema with the subdued depictions of a bored youth culture found in early Jim Jarmusch … the comparisons go on and on, but the result is wholly original," IndieWire's Eric Kohn wrote, following its premiere. And writing about the film's leading roles of the undead Girl (*Argo'*s Sheila Vand) the James Dean-esque Arash (Arash Marandi) *The Hollywood Reporter'*s Boyd van Hoeij said "when he later passes a ditch full of corpses, it’s clear this isn’t happening in some idealized version of either the U.S. or Iran but somewhere out of the dark imagination of Amirpour."
Critics aren't the only ones fascinated with Amirpour's work. Elijah Wood is also a fan. She initially crowdfunded for her flick – raising nearly $57,000 on Indiegogo – but when word of it got to the folks at Wood's new genre-film outfit SpectreVision (then called The Woodshed), the company signed on as one of the producers of the film. "It was immediately evident that she is destined to be a profoundly powerful voice in cinema," SpectreVision's Daniel Noah told HitFix, "and we wanted to be involved with anything she did."
Born in England, Amirpour's family moved to the U.S. when she was kid and she grew up in Miami and California. She made her first film—a horror flick she made during a slumber party at her house when she was 12—with her family's home camcorder. When it was time for college, she went to UC Santa Barbara to study biology, a major that was meant to appease her parents more than her; she lasted about a year before she dropped out and moved to Colorado to live in the woods. Eventually, her family realized that if they wanted her in school they'd have to let her study what she wanted. She ended up at in art school in San Francisco and ultimately pursued scriptwriting at UCLA before setting out to become a filmmaker.
"Iranian parents are very, they're like, 'You'll either be a doctor or a lawyer,'" she says. "I was very arty in high school and my mom was like, 'Yeah, so you can be a plastic surgeon.'"
Iran is, of course, a big influence on her film. Its fictional Bad City is meant to be far out in the desert, miles from Tehran (despite being shot in Taft, California), a place full of loners: gangsters, junkies, the lovelorn, and a vampire known only as Girl. The thing tying them all together is that they're all on the margins of their respective societies. This is particularly true of the character Rockabilly, who never speaks but serves as a silent watcher—in drag. "If there's one political thing [in the movie], it's not the chador," Amirpour says. "It's Rockabilly, because it's not OK to be gay in Iran."
That leaves another possible influence on her work: Amirpour is a female director. There are still so few of her gender making films—only 16 percent of directors, writers, producers, editors and cinematographers working on the top-grossing films of 2013 were female—and even fewer delve into the murky waters of genre filmmaking. If her movie is about a Girl who dares to walk (or skateboard) the streets by herself at night, the easy read is that's analogous to Amirpour daring to write and direct while also being female. She leaves it open to interpretation, though.
"I think [the film] can be feminist if that's what people think," she says. "People also say, 'Is it political? Are you making a political statement?' I just know what I am; I don't know what everyone else is."
It would be nice if more audiences could weigh in on the merits of Amirpour's film, but that may take a while. A company called Cinetic Media is handling the rights for A Girl Walks, but coming out of Sundance it hadn't decided if it would distribute the movie itself or find another U.S. distributor. It seems like a tough sell—black-and-white vampire noirs in Farsi historically don't pack multiplexes—but the movie's potential for cult classic status is undeniable.
Also, getting more eyeballs on A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night could give Amirpour the juice she needs to make her next feature. She already knows what it's going to be. She teasingly refers to it as "a cannibal love story" between a cannibal and his food, and already knows who she wants to play the food: Jennifer Lawrence. ("She's so fucking dope," Amirpour says, "she's so gangster.") It may sound crazy, but it also sounds like just the kind of thing Amirpour—and only Amirpour—could pull off.
