At Odds in the World with Mary Harron

Writer and director Mary Harron is the master of the obsessed. Before Harron captured the humour and horror of yuppie derangement in American Psycho at the turn of the century, her debut feature, I Shot Andy Warhol depicted radical feminist Valerie Solanas and her attempted assasination of Andy Warhol. 

A few years ago, Andrea Long Chu’s provocative book Females, centred Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto in the context of current gender politics, using the text as a structure through which to compose an incisively contrarian hypothesis on what it means to be Female. With I Shot Andy Warhol set for re-release this year, the abrasive radical is resurfacing. 

I ventured up Manhattan island on the express train to talk with Mary about her relationship with Valerie, the SCUM Manifesto, and writing villains. New York has just broken from a sunny spell. Rain mutes the heat. When I arrive I am offered coffee, fruit salad and jasmine tea. Mary eats cherries from a metal bowl. 

Meredith Davis: When did Valerie first emerge to you?

Mary Harron: I was a researcher at the South Bank Show on London Weekend Television in the mid-eighties. We were interviewing a lot of people, and I was doing a lot of background reading. I was kind of a Warhol Factory obsessive. I'd written a lot about Warhol and had interviewed tons of people who were part of The Factory. I had also done the history of the Velvet Underground for NME and knew John Cale. So I knew people from that world, but all I knew about Valerie was that she was this crazy person who shot Warhol, some sort of crazy writer and that this SCUM Manifesto was just ravings. But of course, when you read the SCUM Manifesto, you're struck by the ironic tone and the control, it’s full of this really lethal analysis. It turned my world around. 

She started getting these ideas when she was in college, I think in the late fifties early sixties. Her analysis was so far ahead of its time - it’s a terrible thing to be ahead of your time. When I first read it on the subway on the way to work, I felt like no one has ever said this. I've never seen this said. Even when I read it in ‘87. 

I thought, okay, the world is full of brilliant people who've just been discarded and I wanted to make a film about this brilliant pariah who I thought was a visionary and almost like a prophet.

But there was really nothing written about her. There were only a couple of lines in Warhol biographies, so all the research had to be independent research from scratch. 

when you read the Scum Manifesto, you're struck by the ironic tone and the control, it’s full of this really lethal analysis. It turned my world around.

What was the dynamic between SCUM Manifesto as a text and your own research? Where did your sense of her character come from? 

The character was formed by research. I believe strongly that an artist's personality is different from their real life persona. There are people who are wonderfully wise and controlled in their writing, who are very difficult to deal with in personal terms. They might be sympathetic to women in their writings and misogynistic in their behavior, like Tolstoy for example. 

So in the film, I wanted Valerie’s readings of the manifesto to be completely separate, shot on black and white, in either super 16 or 16 reversal. They're lit in a particular way, a bit like the Warhol screen tests. I wanted them to be as if Valerie was in heaven. She’s controlled, she’s rational. She’s in the afterlife and these are her ideas from her writing. Which of course is very different from the more messy Valerie that we meet in the drama of her life.            .

Similar to how you show the humour of these extreme worldviews in American Psycho, there's an absurdity to her character in her film, did you feel that came naturally from her?

I could see the comedy in someone who's so at odds in the world, the humour in obsessive people who aren't reading the room. They're so fixed on their ideas and there's this intensity to them, and that's something I have sympathy for, but there's also something comic about someone who is lacking that awareness. 

But also Valerie herself has a lot of humor. The scenes of her panhandling are based on an article she wrote—A Young Girl's Primer On How to Attain to the Leisure Class—about how to survive on the streets by begging for money. It's very consciously witty and the manifesto itself is very humorous. One of the great qualities of hers was her sense of humor.

You seem to have a lot of sympathy towards her.

Oh yeah. I love Valerie. I love people who do not conform to regular, received opinions. I'm a little wary of trying to fit her into current ideologies, because I'm not sure she really fits.

I wonder if she would be as radical if she were of this time?

It's hard to say, because she was radical beyond radical feminism. 

She knew some very interesting people in late sixties feminism. We interviewed Ti-Grace Atkinson and Vivian Gornick, and these radical feminists, The Red Stockings. She knew these people in the late sixties who were very important in creating second-wave feminism but she had a complicated relationship with them because she wasn't an easy person to deal with, and she felt very strongly about her ideas versus theirs. 

I'd like to think that if she'd been born 10 years later, after the women's movement, or if the women's movement had been going when she was at college, she would've found more support. 10 years later, it was a time of revolution, she would've found things that were more of a base and her life might've ended up differently.   

Would you consider Valerie an anti-hero?

In some ways, but I don't really like to classify people so strictly. She's not an anti-hero as much as Patrick Bateman is. But I think in some ways all of my main characters are anti-heroes.

Why are you drawn to those characters?

I have no idea, but I think it's more interesting if the stories are complicated over a simple heroic story. When I started writing this, and we were trying to get financing, I had people come and say to me, there's so few films made about women, why can't you make a film about a great woman artist, like Georgia O'Keefe? Why would you make a film about this woman who shot somebody? It’s just what interests me. Did somebody say the same to Martin Scorsese when he made Taxi Driver? My feeling was, well, why can't a woman's film be about something like that?   

it’s a terrible thing to be ahead of your time

It's not like you're making films about heroic men either.

No, not at all. I don't need to be entirely on their side to want to make a film about them.

Do you prefer to not be on their side?

I'm always on their side a little bit. Even with Patrick Bateman, there's some point where the audience has to be kind of with them. 

Valerie is fascinating because she seems quite insecure in the world, but then is so strong-willed in not bending to others. 

She had this vulnerability. She was an artist and she had a vision and she couldn't change that vision. She saw what she saw, she couldn't adapt and she wouldn't adapt. Which is heroic but also doomed her.

Was there a difference in your relationship to Valerie in terms of the process of writing her to then directing the film whilst you were shooting? 

You can write a script, but it's really then who you've cast. It's a cliché, but there’s the film you write, there's the film you make, and there's the film you edit. And they're three different films which have transformed. But casting Lili Taylor as Valerie, the character popped to life, you know? I met Valerie's niece when the film came out in Seattle where she was living. And she said she and her mother felt it was very accurate.

And then I met this guy I'm friends with now, the revolutionary who was the head of Up Against the Wall Motherfucker! Ben Morea. He loved Valerie and said he felt it was a very accurate portrait of her. So Lili really captured it. But with very little to go on. 

Have you had a chance to read Andrea Long Chu's Females?

I should read the book! I wondered if it was somewhat an attempt to make Valerie's rough edges conform to something that a 2025 feminist would feel comfortable with, and in some ways, I don't think you can entirely do that. But it's great that she's focusing in such intense detail on the manifesto. I think people get what they need out of something, in every era. I can't control what people get from my film, they'll get what they need. Valerie would probably be upset with my interpretation. I got what I had to get from being a person who discovered her in the mid-eighties.

Did you try to craft her in a way that would resonate in the mid-eighties, the same way Females is relevant to this political moment? 

I don't think I was trying to make her fit into any theory. I was telling a story, simply, a woman in history.

The eighties was not a big time for feminism. In fact, the book Backlash came out just before I was starting to work with Lili Taylor on the script, which was a big deal. The book is about the backlash that there'd been to sixties and seventies feminism in the eighties. It was the Reagan and George Bush era. 

When I made this film, I remember somebody saying nobody is interested in angry women. People did not call themselves feminists. When people asked me if I was a feminist filmmaker I would reject the title 'cause I knew they were trying to put me in a box. I remember some notes from some studio saying the script was very shrill, which is a classic word they used in the seventies, shrill. In fact, the script is not at all shrill. I think it's complicated and ambiguous but the idea that it would have these extracts from the manifesto made people say that. Feminism was uncool. It wasn't something that people wanted to make films about particularly. I was very fortunate to get it made. 

why can't you make a film about a great woman artist, like Georgia O'Keefe? Why would you make a film about this woman who shot somebody?

Did they think you were trying to make this film as a mouthpiece for -

For my own crazy feminist ideas? I'm sure people did. I'm sure that it affected my career in some ways adversely.

That’s funny because my sense of the film—which I enjoy about your films generally—is that there's an evident distance, there's no moralistic instruction to the watcher.

No, I'm really against that. It's just not what I want to do. I'm not trying to instruct in that way. I want to find their way through it and experience it and get there. I did want to publicize it and bring her out from obscurity. That's a kind of feminist intent, because it's a recovered history, so that's part of feminist practice, but I wasn't trying to tell people what to think. That's antithetical to telling an interesting story.

Did you see the shooting as politically poetic? Given what the two of them represented? 

It's funny 'cause Ben Morea the Revolutionary would say absolutely yes to that. I think, 'cause he was saying how he hated Warhol and thought Warhol was kinda bad - I mean, I also love Warhol. I don't celebrate the shooting, although it did make her famous. I think Warhol was not necessarily a great person, but he was a great artist.

People wanted to make it a dichotomy of one or the other, but Valerie being a great prophet and the manifesto being great, doesn't make Warhol a bad artist. People don't like to reconcile contradictions, but they are real.

I could see the comedy in someone who's so at odds in the world, the humour in obsessive people who aren't reading the room

Do you think that the film is a good form to hold those kinds of contradictions?

Any imagined exercise is. And if you don't put your thumb on the scale too much and just let people let the story play out, then it will last better. Because if you're putting the thumb on the scale, what you're doing is imposing. I would've been imposing my prejudices on it, trying to make Valerie conform to a more conventional heroine for 1996.       

When I was finishing the edit of the film, I had wanted the graphic at the end to say, Valerie Solanas died in a welfare hotel in San Francisco in 1988. That simple. But, the people in the office of Killer Films where I was making it felt that was too down - they wanted to have a more upbeat ending. So they persuaded me, well,  I don't even know if they persuaded me, but they said this is how we want to end it, ‘The SCUM Manifesto is now considered a feminist classic.’ 

That’s a little ideological 'cause how do you define a feminist classic? I remember a critic, a male critic, who I wouldn't consider much of a feminist, saying, I liked everything about the film, except the last note which seemed wrong. And I do feel it is a bit wrong for the tone of the film. I wish that I had stuck to my guns, because it doesn't have to have become a classic for Valerie's story to be worth telling. I don't need to make claims about where [SCUM Manifesto] sits because she's always gonna be outside the canon.

In a sense she is inherently fringe. Her politics, her lifestyle. 

She’s a revolutionary, you know, she's a radical, an outsider, she's a pariah and that's how she should exist. She should not be co-opted into the mainstream. That's not her. So I sort of regret having given into that pressure.

In a way, what is upbeat about the film is the fact that the film got made. That her story is being told.

When you say she shouldn't be co-opted by the mainstream, do you think what the mainstream can take from Valerie is limited?

I think the mainstream can take a lot more from her now. Now people will be embracing a lot of what she says because people are very angry. Women are angry. I'm angry. Society has gone in reverse in a big way which I hope is temporary. We have outrageous sexism in the White House in the administration and in who seems to be in the driver's seat in America. We had a screening of American Psycho last night, and in  the Q and A afterwards, I said, when we made this film, I thought we were making a film about dinosaurs, that we would not see their like again. I thought, these guys are over, nobody will ever be as blatantly sexist or racist or classist or whatever else. They may behave badly, but they'll at least be hypocritical and try to hide these outlooks more. Now they're more emboldened than they were in the Reagan eighties. 

So we'll see! We'll see how the film is received now.

Meredith Davis is a programmer, producer and writer based in London. She is the founder and co-editor of the publication and event, Lesbian Art Circle.