Meet the Woman Behind the Year’s Best Iranian Vampire Western
Writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour has just arrived for her interview wearing puffy knickers, a flag-printed cravat and an Andy Warhol wig. It’s Halloween, but that may be just a coincidence. “I’m from the future,” she explains in regards to appearance, before cackling loudly and tearing into a wedge of red velvet cake. You would not necessarily expect an Iranian-blooded, British-born, Miami-and-Bakersfield-raised skater kid to show up wearing, say, a plain white tee and or a power suit. You might, however, expect such a singular, cross-culturally influenced filmmaker like Amirpour to come up with the character at the center of first full-length feature, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night: a jeans-wearing, Goth-like Persian vampire who skateboards down suburban streets, her black chador flapping like bat wings in her wake.
“Vampires have the weight of eternity,” Amirpour claims. “They’re much bigger than zombies or [Friday the 13th‘s] Jason or serial killers. They encompass the time and the history of humanity.” And according to her, a vampire who looks like a vulnerable hipster but feasts on drug dealers and alpha brutes…well, that’s just badass.
A minor sensation at this year’s Sundance, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night drops its creature of the night — simply called “The Girl” — into a dreamy, black-and-white world of pretty-boy greasers, muscle cars, punks, junkies and your run-of-the-mill male predators. She appears to be a damsel in distress, cruising the dark streets of a spaghetti-Western like town named “Bad City” (a fictional stand-in for Tehran via Southern California). But once The Girl is threatened, she quickly goes into bloodsucker mode. Complications arise when a handsome local stirs something in her undead heart besides primal hunger.
Amirpour claims she found her inspiration for Girl thanks to two of the childhood past times she’d adopted after her family migrated from London to Florida in the early Eighties. The more the kids at school teased the youngster about her accent, the more she searched for a way to define herself outside of being “the other.” (A fan club for Superman II‘s General Zod was a start, but she and the other members weren’t sure what to do beyond writing out a Kryptonian manifesto and burying it in the backyard.) So filmmaking became an early outlet, with Amirpour shooting her first short — a slumber-party slasher flick — on a giant orange handycam that was so big the then-middle schooler could barely carry it. “The movie did have a kill scene that was pretty scary,” she recalls. “I showed it to my friends and their parents, and everyone jumped. I was like, ‘Ahhh!'” The youngster had found her calling.