The Letterboxd Show 3.27: Ana Lily Amirpour
[clip of Death Becomes Her plays]
Bottoms up... Now a warning...
NOW a warning?!
Take care of yourself... You and your body are going to be together a long time... Be good to it... Siempre viva. Live forever.
[The Letterboxd Show theme music Vampiros Dancoteque by Moniker fades in, plays alone, fades down]
GEMMA Hello and welcome to The Letterboxd Show, the podcast about movies people love watching from Letterboxd: the social network for people who love watching movies. Our spooky season continues this episode, we are raving to the grave with a filmmaker who has dabbled in darkness and make believe ever since her dad gave her a camcorder when she was little...
SLIM We are fighting against the sadness, we are living forever, we are walking home alone at night with Ana Lily Amirpour whose latest film is Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon. It’s about a young woman who can do psycho-telekinesis, plunge deep into the nightlife of New Orleans. And her four favorites are American Psycho, Death Becomes Her...
GEMMA Yes!
SLIM Gremlins, and for those feeling a little horror-weary, the 1980s kid-ult fantasy The NeverEnding Story as a little treat for yourself. Lily, your friends call you Lily, so we’ll call you Lily because we’re all friends here on The Letterboxd Show. Welcome, it’s a pleasure to chat.
ANA Thank you for having me. That was the best intro I’ve ever gotten my life. [Slim laughs]
GEMMA Yes! Yes! Five stars for our intro, Slim—we’re already winning.
SLIM Mission accomplished. [Slim & Gemma laugh]
GEMMA Okay, all of those films we’ve already mentioned aside, the first most important question, can we talk about Keanu Reeves’s hair in The Bad Batch?
ANA Mmm... yes. [Slim & Gemma laugh] I mean, I never have an issue talking about Keanu, that’s one of my favorite subjects. You know, he was playing a pretty extreme and bombastic, charismatic, bizarre kind of cult-leader-type character, a psychedelic cult-leader. And I mean, there is a lot—I’m pretty, I get pretty into the visuals of character design. I think it already tells you a lot about who they are. And the thing with the dream, was yeah, I pictured this kind of long, side-part, kind of hair. There’s something a little retro about it. It’s funny—and the mustache, which Keanu who had never had a mustache in a film before, he told me that. He was like, “This is the first time I’ve sported a ’stache.”
GEMMA Wow!
ANA I was honored, honored to be the first ’stache. The hair was a wig. I mean, his hair wasn’t like that, you know?
GEMMA Of course.
ANA So a really good wig.
GEMMA Who made that wig? Was that was that a Robert Pickens? Or was that a—
ANA It’s funny because he’s so amazing that when it came time to the wig and the production was kind of trying to be tight with—because wigs when they’re made with real hair, and they’re handmade can be quite expensive, and production was being tight about things and he was just like, “I’ll pay for the wig.” [Gemma gasps]
SLIM Amazing.
ANA And he just bought—but that’s just, that’s par for the course, that’s really Keanu
GEMMA I’m so glad I asked. [Gemma & Slim laugh] Oh my god. On every level, I’m glad I asked. The lineup of your four faves, when you look at the posters together, American Psycho, [The] NeverEnding Story, Gremlins, Death Becomes Her, these films look absolutely beautiful together. It’s all like, deep blues and vampiric violets. I would love to know what your bedroom aesthetic was—maybe still is?
ANA I mean, I didn’t see American Psycho when I was a child...
GEMMA Thank god! [Gemma laughs]
ANA And I think Death Becomes Her was a little later. [The] NeverEnding Story was definitely—is still probably, when I think of the most important movie that probably affected me the most of any movie I’ve ever seen, it’s The NeverEnding Story, it’s like there’s something supreme and untoppable about it. It’s like, just a kid being able to control what all of reality could be with the power of his imagination. It’s just like, deeply profound for me and just all of the things that you face in that movie, to face it as a kid, it’s so useful. They don’t make movies like that. Like losing your horse in the Swamp of Sadness, I still think it’s the saddest scene in all of cinema history—Sophie’s Choice is maybe somewhere up there, but it’s a different kind of sadness because it’s like—you know what it is? It’s like, we will all lose someone, something that we have a relationship with that we love so much. It is a universal truth, we all will lose something and we’re helpless to it and we have to stand there and just watch it go and that’s just part of life and like, it’s so scary. And the Gmork in the cave, facing the thing that you’re the most scared of, that scene where they’re in the cave—I don’t know if we were supposed to talk about The NeverEnding Story—
SLIM We have to now, we have to!
GEMMA We have to. [Gemma laughs]
SLIM We have to call an order and get right into it. 1984...
ANA It’s hard to not like... You know what I mean? If you were really young, that was scary. It was scary to me on a crazy level to see that wolf in that cave and be that close to it, and they’re having a conversation. It’s like a Tarantino moment. You know what I mean? It’s not, it’s a different, it’s a deeper kind of tension where you’re just there with your biggest fear, your biggest enemy, and there’s some kind of weird respect between them because they’re having a conversation about the order of things and that it’s inevitable. I that, you know? I think Gremlins is deep, too.
SLIM Yeah.
GEMMA We’ll get to that. But, I mean, speaking of ‘we will all lose somebody’ this year, the world lost Wolfgang Petersen, who co-wrote and directed The NeverEnding Story. This film, I’ve written in my notes, “It is absolutely not okay to have to watch the Swamp of Sadness scene ever again in your life. I am ugly crying every time I have to watch that scene.”
ANA And Morla! The turtle, the ancient turtle, he goes to all this length to find this turtle. It’s like, he’s going to try to get help, to find answers, he’s going to the farthest corner of the world, he loses his horse walking through this depressing swamp to get to this turtle. And the turtle is just like, laughing at him. You can’t do anything about it. You know what I mean? It’s just like, there’s something—
SLIM I watched, I rewatched this with my wife this week in anticipation of this. And one of the rare occurrences—I’m usually the goofball quoting a movie and her telling me to shut up because I’m ruining the experience, she was the one quoting this movie. So she is in the same boat as you, where she had seen this at a young age and this one was extremely formative for her. And I was looking up some Letterboxd reviews. One of my friends Danny left a Letterboxd review for this: “No fantasy film dares to be this bold anymore. Cowards.”
ANA Yeah.
SLIM And I see that trend in—I think we see this trend in most of your four faves, as we’ll get into in this discussion, but what do you think? When you rewatch this, do you get that vibe where like, where is the modern version of this for kids like I was?
ANA I don’t think there’s anything like this for younger kids. I think it’s become so anesthetized, and you can’t say anything and do anything and even be remotely uncomfortable. So it’s just—
GEMMA It’s like the closest we get is Bing Bong in Inside Out and that’s sad, he’s a lovely character, but it’s—
ANA Those are great, I love animated—it’s not the same. It’s not. Gremlins—I mean, it’s like, I would say Everything Everywhere All at Once is for teenagers of this right now, social-media era, I think it’s a really smart, well-done, like the best Marvel movie Marvel never made. You know what I mean?
GEMMA Oh yeah.
ANA It’s deep and psychedelic and it has something in it. But I don’t see this—
SLIM Have you seen the new Dark Crystal that was on Netflix like a couple years ago?
ANA Oh, there’s a new one?
SLIM Yeah, they made like a modern version of The Dark Crystal with still all puppets, puppetry.
ANA Was it good?
SLIM It was very good! I was kind of blown away.
ANA It was very good?
SLIM Yeah, it was very good. It left me wanting more and I was like, that was the vibe that I got.
ANA It’s a movie?
SLIM Yeah—or it was either movie or a miniseries on Netflix. But it left me with the same kind of feeling that like, ‘whoa, this is kind of dark and has meaning,’ where I can see this being scary-ish for a younger group, similar to movies like Gremlins or [The] NeverEnding Story was back then.
ANA I mean, I guess some people would say Stranger Things, but Stranger Things, I don’t watch it. I don’t really like it. But it’s not deep. [The] NeverEnding Story is sooo cosmic, it’s about the meaning of existence, the power of the imagination, that you can create and manifest your reality. It’s about this kid and his personal problems, it’s not about like monsters and the ‘nothing’, yeah the ‘nothing’ is like this beautiful metaphor for like, don’t be defeated by sadness or, you know, powerlessness, like to fight through everything, how hard life is. Never give up and good luck will find you! It’s just like everything about that movie, you will go through hard things. It’s just, I rewatch that movie so much. I love it so much. So much.
GEMMA It’s just magical, isn’t it?
ANA If they remake it, if they remake it, it’s gonna be like...
SLIM A nightmare? [Slim & Gemma laugh]
ANA A tragedy. A tragedy!
GEMMA You know what else it’s gonna be? It’s gonna be not—okay, this is gonna sound like a really... inappropriate thing to say...
ANA It’s gonna be CG...
GEMMA Yeah, about a film that’s about two young boys and puppets. But it’s not gonna be as thirsty either. There’s something about the aesthetic of Atreyu and Artax, his horse, you know, this long-haired boy—
ANA Oh my god, I loved Artax.
GEMMA Oh my god. Willow, Labyrinth, all those films, they’re just, they’re super horny for young women coming into their own sexuality. I don’t know about you, but like, these were extremely formative for me.
ANA I loved Atreyu, yeah. [Gemma & Slim laugh] I was definitely, had a crush on Atreyu.
SLIM I’ll point out some Letterboxd lists that this appears on: “Movies I wanna show my kids”, Rachel has this on a Letterboxd list, I feel like that’s very true with everyone that loves this movie. And also Yazz has: “When you’re feeling a little lost” Letterboxd list.
ANA The NeverEnding Story. ‘When you’re feeling a little lost’, I think that’s like, beautiful. That’s really... I love that. I think maybe I’m always feeling a little lost, you know?
SLIM Right.
ANA We all are. I mean, The Bad Batch should probably be on that ‘when you’re feeling lost’ one... [Gemma laughs]
GEMMA The Bad Batch needs to be on a ‘best wigs paid for by the actors’...
ANA I think it’s probably better for me to not look at what people are saying on there. [Gemma & Slim laugh]
GEMMA Have you? Have you ever? Have you ever been tempted to scroll Letterboxd reviews of your films?
ANA I think I have—I have to be very careful for my, you know, psychic health. Like it’s hard, when you’re putting a movie out or if you’re at Venice [Film Festival] or whatever, there’s—I was very—with my third movie when I was at Venice last year, I really just prepared myself well. And I was at Venice, I turned off, I didn’t really look at anything. I told the press people not to send me anything—good or bad. And then I just did the press, like interviews. I could tell from talking to people that they enjoyed it. And then I went to Greece for ten days. So I did not have cell … thing, you know, cell phone abilities. So I wasn’t even able to go and look on Twitter and do anything. And it was really, really healthy for me. It’s hard... because it’s like—I do though, it’s like then I came back, enough time had gone by, people had told me it was well received, and then I’ll just like, stick my toe in the pool, just really quick. I’ll just go, I’ll look at a couple. Sometimes it’s Letterboxd things. So I’ll click, you know, and just get a few, get an idea of what’s being said and then go out. I wasn’t that smart about it with The Bad Batch. And it’s a very provocative, divisive, the reactions were strong, which is like a good thing. Now it’s like, I love that, you know, but it’s hard to—
SLIM It’s hard for me to even put this podcast out, I won’t even listen to reactions to this episode for like a month after, I would probably be too damaged if people didn’t appreciate our conversation.
GEMMA It’s just very hard to be in the world, isn’t it, in any kind of public way.
SLIM And make something.
GEMMA And make something and then put it out there. But I—
ANA That part is easy. I think it’s the part where people, when they don’t have a physical presence in front of you, are able to just be so ugly and rude on the internet. So it’s like, you know what I mean—I do not ever go to Reddit. I don’t think that’s a good place. [Gemma laughs] I went there once in like 2017 and I was like, ‘I’m outta here.’ [Slim laughs]
GEMMA Amazing mental-health approach to this stuff. But if you do go on Letterboxd to read reviews of your films, there—people write poetry, people write poetry about your films!
ANA Yeah, yeah.
GEMMA They get really, really, really deep. It’s wild.
ANA I’ve seen some good ones on Letterboxd from tweets, like they’d have a tweet to the Letterboxd and I’ve clicked on it and seen some. And see, the thing for the artist or whatever, it’s like, if you read one good thing and one bad thing, neither thing is—like there is no reason for me to absorb this stuff. I just have to like what I’m making myself and hope that there’s people that like that too and then just continue on, because—you know what I’m saying? They cancel each other out. But like, five years, when I started reading stuff about The Bad Batch just recently.
SLIM So we’ll check back in five years about Mona Lisa [and the Blood Moon] to see what everyone thought. [Slim laughs]
ANA No, Mona Lisa [and the Blood Moon] is a little bit of a good-time movie, and I knew it was that. I mean, you can get deep if you want to. It really depends on the person.
SLIM I was having a great time. There’s one review that I do want to spotlight. Someone left you a haiku film review for Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon.
ANA Okay...
SLIM Jon left a haiku review. “I am a whore for, Ana Lily Amirpour, Please give me some more.” [Gemma laughs] And that was a positive review of Mona Lisa [and the Blood Moon] that just dropped.
ANA Oh my god, that’s amazing. Is that a guy?
GEMMA Yeah, Jon Williams, yep, yep.
SLIM Yeah, that was Jon Williams left that Letterboxd review for you.
GEMMA We can get his email address for you if you want to hook up with Jon. [Slim laughs] I mean, it’s unorthodox, we don’t don’t offer it to anyone, but... [Gemma laughs]
SLIM One of your other four faves, before we go harder into your films, real quick, let’s talk about American Psycho, because I’m so excited to talk about American Psycho. I consider this to be like the Letterboxd movie, and when I say ‘the Letterboxd movie’ I mean, this is one of the most popular movies we have. Everyone loves to talk about American Psycho, but we haven’t covered it yet on this podcast. And not only that, I don’t—I’ve never seen it before this week, believe it or not. This is a first-time viewing for me.
ANA Lucky for you, that’s a great gift.
SLIM First time—yeah, thank you very much, 2022. Gemma, what about you? Have you ever seen American Psycho before this week?
GEMMA Confession time—and this is the thing I love about The Letterboxd Show—there are so many iconic films, that for one reason or another I haven’t seen, but I get to watch for the first time because a filmmaker like Ana Lily Amirpour has put it in their four faves. So it is a first-time watch for me as well—confession...
SLIM Wooow.
ANA You guys are like, really got some Patrick Bateman—
GEMMA This is great. At this point, Lily’s like, ‘Wait, is this a specialist film podcast or what? What is going on with these guys?’ [Slim laughs]
ANA No...
GEMMA I also have another confession related to this film, Huey Lewis and the News’s album Fore! was the first album I ever bought with my own money and hearing Patrick Bateman reviewing that album through this film... Had me feeling funny feelings.
ANA It’s a Bret Easton Ellis, you know, book.
GEMMA Yeah, yes.
ANA But I think what was so cool about it, was like, Mary Harron gave it this like, it’s like romantic. Because I feel like Bret Easton Ellis can—it’s a cold, it’s a harsh, edgy thing. But then Mary put this, there’s the humor and there’s a romance to how every moment is, how everyone appears, how it looks, like it’s romantic. It’s romantic as twisted as it is, you know? Agh, my god, I love that movie. It’s funny because I thought of it, it just happens that that was—every time I’m making something, I will have a few, one or two movies that I use as references or that are starting, jumping-off points, whatever, on the fumes that I’m huffing. So I just did a movie, it’ll be coming out in... two weeks for Guillermo del Toro has a new anthology series at Netflix.
SLIM Oh, yeah.
ANA And it’s eight movies, eight different directors, eight different—nothing about them was different. They look different. It was he really treated it like, ‘This is a movie, do whatever you want,’ you know? So American Psycho was one of the references and so was Death Becomes Her.
GEMMA Hmm!
ANA I literally told Kate Micucci, who’s the lead, I was like, “It’s like American Psycho meets Death Becomes Her with a touch of Muriel’s Wedding.”
GEMMA Oh my god, I’m obsessed with Kate Micucci. I’m obsessed with her musical-comedy duo. She is amazing. How did you—
ANA She gets weird in this.
GEMMA Agh, cannot wait.
ANA This isn’t like—
GEMMA Anything she’s done before? This is so exciting. She’s one of the best. I love her.
SLIM I had known that you had done one of the pieces of this special, but I was looking at the overall assembled team that he had gotten—what an incredible group of creators, including yourself to, you know, put it out there, have that kind of like ability to make something fresh and new and so many people are gonna be able to see that. I think this is hitting Netflix, right? The Guillermo del Toro anthology series?
ANA Yeah, it’s on Netflix.
SLIM Holy moly, a couple of weeks away—another thing for folks to add to their watchlist.
ANA I mean, that’s because Guillermo’s such as G and he’s so cool and then he’s like, all about you doing, going all the way, there’s no anesthetizing it. I think my—I don’t want to spoil or anything but—
SLIM Yours is the best, that’s what you’re about to say? It’s the best of all of them?
ANA No, I was gonna say, it’s unexpected and bananas, it’s not going to be what you what you think, I think. I can’t even really say anything. I told you American Psycho and Death Becomes Her, so that’s already kind of bananas.
GEMMA And that is all I need to hear. I have to say, so American Psycho, the space it occupies in cinephile-land and on Letterboxd is so weird, because you look through lists that people have this film in, and on the one hand, it’s in: “The filmbro watchlist” [Gemma laughs], which may be a tongue in cheek list made by Josiah, he calls it “AKA the gaslighter’s bible”. It seems to be the kind of film that, you know, so-called film-bro cinephiles love. But on the other hand, it’s also on a list called “red flag for men, white flag for women” and Etsy, who created the list, writes: “run if a man likes these movies, better if a woman likes them, I surrender my life to you. I love you.” And so this is—[Gemma laughs]
ANA Oh wait, so the list is implying that more men like it than women?
GEMMA Well no, these two lists are sort of two sides of the same coin, which is that there are cinephiles out there who don’t get the beautifully ironic treatment that Mary and Guinevere have given it.
ANA Really?
GEMMA And the sort of the gaze, the gaze they’ve put upon Patrick Bateman. I mean, it seems so obvious, right? But I think maybe it’s about the age and stage you’re at in your cinephile journey when you first come to this film. But it’s so weird to me that anyone would take it seriously...
ANA Offence?
GEMMA Or, yeah, take offence... Yeah.
SLIM I can see that, like if I had watched this, if I had the DVD, and I watched this, I probably would have been, you know, like, ‘what a weird movie,’ like, ‘what a funny, weird movie.’ But then as you consume more writing and you’re older, maybe you’ve consumed more things and then you watch it, then you can kind of see another level of brilliance in the work that maybe you probably wouldn’t have realized at a younger age or sooner in your kind of film-watching life.
ANA Yeah, because she’s so good at like, it’s so good at just making you—it’s like Tony Soprano, you’re just on the side of the bad guy. It’s so fun to be bad. It’s so fun to watch what horrible, depraved thing he’s going to do next and you’re like so with him, that then when you get into the really dark stuff you’re like, ‘I’m kind of uncomfortable right now...’ [Gemma & Slim laugh] like, ‘This is really bad right now...’ And then it just goes back and it’s also playing with like... it’s playing with that, with like, how far can you, you know, how far can you tread into those things? And then he pulls you back—and the cast!
GEMMA Oh my god.
ANA I mean, I’m sorry, but like, it’s like an astonishing—you got Reese Witherspoon, Chloë Sevigny, Willem Dafoe, Jared Leto...
SLIM I was reading too about how Mary had fought for Christian Bale in the role, there was like second-guessing—looking back it’s nutty to even think it, but they were second-guessing that decision, she left the project, Bale also left. They were going to make it with, was it DiCaprio and—
ANA Oh...
GEMMA What!
SLIM Another name—Oliver Stone and DiCaprio were then attached.
ANA Really?
SLIM Which is bonkers! Yeah, so that was the team and then Bale knew—and this is Wikipedia, I could be just making shit up—but Wikipedia says Bale knew that that would fall through, so he did not sign on to any other projects for almost a year. And then they gave up, they brought Mary back in and Bale was back and they were able to make the project. It’s just crazy looking back about how hard she had to work.
ANA It’s crazy how they did the same thing to Katherine Bigelow about Keanu in Point Break.
GEMMA And she was right.
ANA They were like, “I don’t see this guy as a cop, he’s too soft spoken, he’s not a cop. Like how’s this guy gonna be—” And she’s like, you know, “Trust me.”
GEMMA And then it ends up—Jack who helps provide, he provides the facts for The Letterboxd Show—writes here that American Psycho is the most popular film of the year 2000 and the second most popular on Letterboxd of all of the 2000s behind only The Dark Knight. So... Christian Bale supremacy, you know, Mary Harron was absolutely 1,000% right to fight for him in this role.
ANA I love how its shot and how it looks too. It’s got this really hard lighting that I love and I actually like, couldn’t do it in my last movie because the lenses are so wide, so there’s nowhere to put lights because you could see, you can see everywhere on a 50mm lens, but on my other two movies, I like hard light. I mean, I wasn’t inside inside-spaces too much, but American Psycho, also Pulp Fiction—this really hard lighting, it’s almost like a throwback noir kind of feeling/ I love the way it looks. I love the way American Psycho looks.
GEMMA Oh my god. That pink, that pastel-pink restaurant in the opening scene just sets—if you don’t know that it’s got its tongue in its cheek throughout the entire film from that one opening scene, then what are you even doing watching movies like this?
ANA I feel like a lot of young fifteen-year-olds or sixteen-year-olds, if they saw it, might get offended.
SLIM They’d probably shit their pants if they saw this movie. [Gemma laughs]
ANA They would get offended and go on Twitter.
GEMMA It’s quite funny because Jack, of Jack’s Facts, did talk to Guinevere Turner a couple of years ago about her and Mary Harron’s film that they did about Charles Manson. And, you know, he was saying that American Psycho holds up really well for the Trump era. And she’s like, “Well, one could argue that it works better now than when it came out.” And you know, it just gets more relevant with every ing year. One thing I realized about myself watching American Psycho is...
SLIM What a sentence.
GEMMA What a sentence. [Gemma laughs] …is, so every week Slim and I have to watch at least four films for this podcast on top of everything else, and consequently, other things, you know, have to get sacrificed—for example, exercise—but when I saw Patrick Bateman doing his 100 crunches to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre... [Slim laughs] I was like, ‘I’m watching movies all wrong! I could have abs of steel right now!’ And that is it, from this day forward, I’m just gonna be crunching while I’m watching movies.
ANA He definitely was a whiff of that—that moment, there’s a whiff of that vibe in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night in my pimp in that movie. [Slim laughs] The attitude, like when he gets home and it’s just like, “I’m gonna just—”
GEMMA I want to ask you about these amazing characters you have, because in Mona Lisa and the [Blood] Moon, I was like, I love all of them, but Fuzz has a very special place in my heart. Let’s talk about this DJ with the car that’s gonna just got a disco light and a plasma ball and is the only person that your lead character, Mona Lisa, doesn’t manipulate with her psycho-telekinesis.
ANA She doesn’t mess with Charlie either.
GEMMA Oh, true, true, true. Okay, so let’s talk about it. Shall we move into Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon? What we’ve got is young woman, Mona Lisa, wakes up in a psych ward. She can do telekinesis, psycho-telekinesis, which is what, Slim? How would you describe it?
SLIM I mean, if you’ve read a comic book as I have since the age of eight, you’re very well versed in these abilities, people can make people do what they want with their minds. Make them move, make them say things. That’s the gist of it. So she’s almost like a loose X-men, a loose X-man, X-woman.
ANA Yes, that’s what some people said, but it’s like, but if you didn’t—you know, you’re not like, part of the—I mean, they’re basically CIA or something. It’s like, no, you’re just trying to live in the world. You’re not trying to save the world. That’s ridiculous. She just wants some Cheetos, and she wants to have—
SLIM There’s no Professor X in this universe to help her, to take her to a nice fancy school. She’s on her own.
GEMMA She just wants a bag of Cheese-O-Puffs. [Gemma laughs]
SLIM It’s what we all want!
GEMMA So she manipulates the staff of the Louisiana psych ward, she gets out, she is befriended by Kate Hudson, who then uses her to manipulate people to give Kate Hudson money. Kate Hudson takes her into her house where she meets Charlie, Kate Hudson’s character’s child. And more things happen that you should watch...
ANA It’s there’s girl busting out—you know what it is? You know how I would describe it? I would say it’s like this girl is like a hungry, dangerous newborn. She’s going out to have a—and it’s one long night, it’s kind of like one of those nights where you go out and you think you’re just gonna, nothing’s gonna happen and you wake up two days later in someone else’s clothes and like, meet a bunch of different people and just—you never would have thought you would have ended up where you ended up. And Kate Hudson plays a stripper that’s fun, little kid. Craig Robinson is dope. He’s such a funny, amazing man. And Fuzz!
GEMMA Yeah, so let’s talk about Fuzz, cooking eggs in his Dayglow tee—the vibes...
ANA I mean, he’s a psychedelic Buddha. He’s like a techno Buddha. He’s like, I think... I think I just basically invented my dream guy... [Gemma & Slim laugh] in that character. He just doesn’t do—anything he does, he doesn’t do it for something in return. It’s the rarest, most Buddha-like—and, you know, I think many people would overlook him and write him off.
SLIM I overlooked him when I was watching the movie! Because when the characters first meet, I’m like, ‘Oh, here we go. What’s this guy—what’s his frickin’ angle?’
ANA ‘He’s gonna do something shady...’
SLIM Yeah, ‘Mona, be careful, Mona. Please be careful!’ And then that like—
ANA And now we spoilered it and no one’s gonna know that. [Slim laughs]
SLIM That’s only the first few minutes. When you first see this character, you do have bad vibes. And maybe that’s true, maybe it’s not—who knows?
GEMMA But I love how you play with all of those assumptions in all of your films. And especially in this one, it’s like, ‘Oh, here we go, here’s the guy outside the bodega who’s, you know... and here comes this young woman in a straitjacket who’s hungry. What’s going to happen here?’ And I just, I guess there’s so many other characters to talk about in Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon, but he just really stood out for me for the way that you upend our expectations.
ANA Yeah, I mean, you fall in love with him.
GEMMA We fall in love with him, but we also fell in love with Charlie when he says to Fuzz, “Don’t call me ‘baby boy’.” [Gemma laughs]
ANA Yeah, he’s like, “Yeah, don’t mess with me, man.”
SLIM Well, you can say the same thing to about, we were talking about all these characters, but Kate Hudson’s character, also, right at the onset, you’re like, ‘Oh, hell yeah. Let’s have these two be BFFs.’ And then things drift from there, for better or worse for Mona Lisa. I love that dynamic between all these characters, really.
ANA Oh, Kate is amazing in this. It’s just so fun to see. I mean, she’s taking a beating from the first time you meet her to the last time you meet her. [Slim laughs] It’s like, I don’t judge Bonnie, I love Bonnie. She’s like a shark, she just doesn’t stop moving. If she gets knocked down, she gets back up—she’s not waiting for someone. I feel like in movies whenever you have—not always but in general, it’s fair to say that if you have a female-stripper, exotic dancer or prostitute character, the movie is gonna teach you a moral lesson by the end: ‘feel bad for her, that she has to change her life, she’s gonna hit rock bottom.’ It’s always that sad story about these types of characters. And I like, you know what? I’ve met plenty of girls at dance and they just like pay for their frickin’ junior college and get braces and go on to their lives. It’s an honest job, it’s a hard job, but it’s an honest job, and she’s—
GEMMA Absolutely, absolutely loved that character for that reason. And I also love when filmmakers like you take someone like a rom-com queen like Kate Hudson and allow her to show some different muscles. It’s so exciting.
ANA She has though! It’s funny like to me, people always comment on that. It’s like, I felt the same with Jim Carrey, even Keanu, I think it’s like, it’s not their fault they become, they just become the center of a business model that works for the studio. So if the studio knows they’re gonna make $100 million off a Jim Carrey comedy, they’re gonna do that every movie for 30 movies in a row. It’s just a multi—same with Kate and I think Keanu has that with a certain action thing and Momoa certainly has it—they all kind of have that. But I always look at this like, with Kate Hudson, for me, there’s something about her. I’m such a fan, since 200 Cigarettes, I love all of her movies, and even watching a movie that’s not a great movie. I will watch all of her movies because I want to spend time with her—her vibe, her energy is so real. She’s so grounded in her personality and her sense of humor. And I also do think that comedic actors, when they get it right, when they make you, they take you there, they’re the real true geniuses. It’s not celebrated in the way like drama, for drama is, but I think true comedy takes a certain level of genius. It takes intelligence to know the nuance of how to find humor in something in any given moment. It’s like, you know what I mean? You might be in the middle of, you know, a tsunami and you might also have to take a dump, like that’s the way life works sometimes. [Gemma laughs] That’s true reality. It’s like, sometimes when I watch an action movie, it’s all wet and cold and drippy, I’m like, everyone’s so serious all the time—you know what I mean? It’s fun, I like that too, but—
GEMMA When do people eat in action movies? You know, they’ve got to stay strong—
ANA They eat a lot in my movies. They eat a lot in my movies. [Gemma laughs] I’m like, “Guys, it’s time for a snack in the story. A lot has happened...”
SLIM Well, you’re talking about how you wanted to spend time with Kate in her movies, whether they be good or not. But what seems like these actors that are so large to the audience want to spend time with you in these movies. So what is it—
ANA Oh yeah.
SLIM Do they see that kind of like appeal in the way you make movies, the way you love movies, where they’re like “Hell yeah, let’s get weird. Let’s make something fun and exciting.”
ANA Yeah, I certainly would say the ones that I have worked with, there is that connection. You know, three movies they’ve seen some stuff. I mean, even with The Bad Batch, it felt just like—Jason was the first person, I wrote that part for him, and I just, I couldn’t—there’s other big guys that maybe could have done it but it was for him and so... Yeah, I don’t know, I just feel like—yeah, I’m so in this very aggressive, stylized, amplified vision-quest kind of space that it becomes very clear. I think it makes it an easy thing to know. I don’t think you’re like, ‘Well, maybe should I...’ You know, it’s like, ‘Okay, let’s go.’ Like you said, ‘Let’s go get weird.’ And it’s kind of an all-in thing. I don’t have—unfortunately, and hopefully it will happen where I have the bigger, a little bit more... I don’t want a lot, I just want a little bit more time in my shooting schedule. [Slim & Gemma laugh]
GEMMA Just a bit more time to work with these—
ANA Every time I hang out with other directors, I’m like, “How many days did you get to shoot?” Like, “35...” “35, for that?! It’s like two people sitting in a coffee shop.” You know what I’m saying? [Gemma laughs] I’ve got bananas stuff happening, I need more days. But, yeah.
SLIM A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night—can we just talk about this poster, please? Is this not maybe the most iconic poster released in the last, like, twenty years?
ANA Oh wow.
SLIM I mean, right? Is there a fun backstory behind that poster? I mean, congratulations, obviously to you for the poster. But it’s so good!
ANA Thank you. Yeah, I mean, I love the poster. The funny thing about the poster is, well, I made a comic when I was—after shooting the film, and then we were in post-production, we made a comic. I had all these other stories about this girl. So we made a comic, we made the first issue to be ready in time for when the film came out that we could give to people. And that poster, that image was one of the alternate comic-book cover things, images, for the comic. And I was like, ‘That would be a great movie poster. Like, that’s it. What else could you—’ Because it was like, there’s a lot of characters, what are you gonna put on there? It’s hard, you know, how do you convey it? And that image—and that’s Michael DeWeese, the artist who made the comics we have two issues of and he’s such an incredible artist. So that was an image he came up with but it was an alternate—it was an option for the cover of the comic. Ad then it was like, no, that has to be the—what I love about it is that it hasn’t become degraded by—sometimes when you make a movie poster then Netflix gets your movie and they make like twenty Netflix versions of it. [Gemma & Slim laugh]
SLIM The AI grabs it.
ANA It’s kind of brutal, because it’s like, you know that’s not... a movie poster is a part of the whole personality of the film...
GEMMA Yeah, and so often it’s a marketing-department decision that you sometimes get a look in on but you don’t often get final say over and that’s what I love about your story about this poster is that it’s steeped in the art of the film itself.
ANA But if you make smaller films, independent films, and no one’s losing like, hundreds of millions of dollars, they do tend to give control to the person making it. So I was a little, with The Bad Batch, I was a little like, “What is this shit on Netflix?” [Slim & Gemma laugh] “What is this? Why is this? Why is this there?” It’s fine, I look at them now and I’m not as—but at the beginning, I was like, “We made these amazing posters, just use the amazing poster.” You know? It’s okay...
SLIM Trust the director.
GEMMA We should talk about Death Becomes Her which stars Goldie Hawn, Kate’s mum, Meryl Streep.
SLIM Hell yeah.
GEMMA Bruce Willis, Isabella Rossellini. I mean...
ANA Isabella Rossellini... I mean, it’s like, “And now a warning...” [Slim & Gemma laugh] “NOW a warning?!” Oh my god, Meryl Streep is at her—they’re all at their best. Goldie Hawn in the beginning when she goes through her post-getting-dumped fat phase on the couch. Oh my god, I love that movie. It’s a masterful also how it’s shot. Again, it’s got this like pulpy-noir, really, really fun wide-angle lenses and things. It’s hyper-pulpy and noiry. Zemeckis is a, he’s such a master. For me, I revisit his films, he’s always ahead of the—if we’re all magicians, basically pulling off some kind of magic trick, he’s the one doing a certain trick first. He made the DeLorean fly first. Forrest Gump, he put him with Kennedy, nobody was doing stuff like he was doing. And in this movie, the gunshot hand through the—that stuff was—he’s figuring out in camera with CG first. And he does it better than—in that phase anyway too. Oh my god, and that scene in the doctor! Where it’s Sydney Pollack! Oh my god!
SLIM Is that one of the greatest scenes in the history of film? [Gemma laughs]
ANA One of the greatest scenes!
SLIM And then he runs to find the other doctors and then Bruce Willis looks for him and then he’s off—he’s having a heart attack in the next room. He’s like dying because of what he just saw. [Gemma laughs]
ANA So good.
GEMMA Okay, so for the listeners out there who haven’t yet seen Death Becomes Her—
ANA Go see it.
GEMMA Which I believe is just sitting on Netflix right now for, it’s just right there. Let’s just—quickly, very quickly explain what the hell we’re talking about, which is that basically Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn both get a chance at looking beautiful and young forever, whilst fighting over Bruce Willis. And in this film Bruce Willis plays the dweeby-ist dweeb of all dweebs.
SLIM All of us dweebs, we have hope in the future. [Slim laughs]
GEMMA Oh my god, hope for dweebs. And Isabella Rossellini is the person who has the key to eternal youth.
ANA The eternal-youth serum!
GEMMA Yes and also the most amazing beaded necklace that only just covered her nipples. I mean, this has some peak Rossellini fashion going on in this film.
ANA Cleopatra, it’s like she’s Cleopatra or something.
SLIM Yeah, yeah, I was about to say I think growing up I’d only seen the clips of the CGI things on like, Entertainment Tonight, like “Death Becomes Her, look at the technology!” So as a kid, that’s all I ever knew of this movie were those scenes, like the whole between, in her stomach, the head twisting around.
ANA And the head twisting around, when you look at the behind-the-scenes, it’s so dope how they did it.
SLIM It’s incredible!
ANA It is incredible. And it looks better than than so much of the stuff they do with pure CG. I’m a little exhausted by, you know, dragons. [Gemma & Slim laugh] I really am, I’m just like...
SLIM Less dragons, more Death Becomes Her! That’s what we need!
GEMMA More walking forwards in heels! [Gemma laughs]
ANA God, and it’s so funny. It’s so dark and funny, but like, funny. Again, like American Psycho—actually, when I think about it, except for [The] NeverEnding Story, the other three are all like deep, social, cultural satires about the absurdity of certain obsessions. Obsession with power and money, the obsession with beauty and perfection and the obsession with like, having something cute and then letting it get out of control. I don’t know, consumerism. Gremlins is deep too.
GEMMA So obviously we’re going there right now. Joe Dante’s incredible—I mean, I’ve just written in my notes, “Merry Christmas, we get to talk about Gremlins.” Christmas has come early to The Letterboxd Show and I couldn’t be happier. We love this film. We had Joe Dante on the show last Christmas, which was such a pleasure. We got to talk to him about the kitchen scene.
ANA Ah, so good.
GEMMA When the gremlins are in the kitchen and s Lee McCain is just—ah, she’s just like, “Not in my kitchen, no fucking way.” And she just goes for it.
SLIM This covers the movies that we talked about that they don’t make anymore and Gremlins I feel like is the keystone of those types of movies.
ANA Yeah, it’s pretty dark.
SLIM Where it’s a horror, all-ages comedy Christmas movie..?
ANA Very dark.
SLIM They feel impossible now but looking back it’s such a treat to rewatch these movies.
ANA It’s about—I feel like the reason it works with everything of where it goes, it’s about that—which I definitely could relate to as a kid, even now, definitely is a kid. It’s that like, wanting the Gizmo. The Gizmo, this little cutest thing ever, just I wanted Gizmo. [Slim & Gemma laugh] And I actually have a dog now that’s pretty Gizmo like.
GEMMA Aw...
ANA If you Google, you might find pictures of him online because he’s kind of famous. But you want Gizmo! So it’s like you’ll do anything to have Gizmo but Gizmo has rules. If you want Gizmo, there’s responsibility, and then if you fuck up...
SLIM Game over.
ANA All of society becomes—yeah.
SLIM You have the gremlins having the time of their lives in that bar and the movie theater.
GEMMA The funny thing is, Gizmo for me represents what happens to your child after you give them the cute toy that they’ve been wanting for months and months and months and months. They finally get it, they rip the box open, they play with it for about two seconds and then they could turn into a complete asshole. [Slim & Gemma laugh] Like just a complete—it’s the kind of, be-careful-what-you-wish-for element of consumerism, I think.
ANA I feel like I would even go further and say it’s like all of American immediate gratification. It’s like Labradoodles, Okay, well, I want that. And so I’m gonna take these two dogs and we’re gonna make them and everyone’s gonna have a Labradoodle now. And things like instant-gratification.
GEMMA I just Googled your dog by the way—you take your dog to the red carpet? This is outrageously cute.
ANA He helps, yeah, he helps a lot. It’s a little bit of a stressful, weird, surreal thing to be on those. So he knows how to do it. If you look at the pictures, you can see how he knows. He’s way better, like he knows what he’s doing. [Gemma & Slim laugh]
GEMMA I want to say that it’s stressful being on the other side of the rope at the red carpet as well. I was just covering the New York Film Festival and it’s really—first of all, there’s all the photographers and they’re just yelling your name, right, because they want your eyeline in their shot. And then you finally get down to the reporters and it’s stressful for us as well, because it’s like, ‘What do you mean I’ve got one question?’ One question and I’m going to try my best not to make it a stupid question and hope that you can also hear it above the noise. Why do we do this to ourselves?
ANA I think ‘how are you feeling tonight?’ is a good question.
GEMMA Oooh...
ANA I appreciate it when that’s what I get asked on those things. Because it’s a fast one and then I can just say, “Yeah, great, happy to be here with my cast, excited about—” You know what I mean? Like, “So, what did you make this movie for?” I’m like, “Uh... to come here...” [Slim & Gemma laugh]
SLIM It’s like someone asking you a deep question on your way to the bathroom.
ANA Yeah, exactly!
SLIM “I’m not ready for this kind of question, I have stuff to do.”
ANA “I’m... not sure.”
GEMMA God, give us some more tips. This is amazing. We’re gonna be, Letterboxd is just gonna be the best red-carpet reporters.
ANA No, you guys don’t need to, you’re good. [Gemma laughs]
SLIM Next time you see Gemma on the red carpet, Gemma will have a dog under her arm, you’ll have your dog and it’ll be at a beautiful, serendipitous moment.
GEMMA I’m just gonna be like, “How are you feeling tonight?” every single person I ever get a microphone in front of—this is gonna be amazing. [Slim laughs] But here’s here’s another take on what Gizmo represents, from Letterboxd member Willow McClay: “All Gizmo ever wanted to do was chill out and watch movies. Gizmo spends basically all of his time in Gremlins being so captured in what was on screen during the various movies he decided to watch. So in a way everyone on this site (on Letterboxd) is Gizmo. I’d wager a good deal of us react the same way to sunlight as well, and that makes Gizmo the most relatable movie character of all time for cinephiles.” [Gemma & Slim laugh]
ANA Oh my god, I love that. He is like Mona Lisa, he wants to just watch movies!
GEMMA He’s just hungry for movies!
ANA [sings]
[The Letterboxd Show theme music Vampiros Dancoteque by Moniker fades in, plays alone, fades down]
SLIM Our guest today was Ana Lily Amirpour. Be sure to add her newest film Cabinet of Curiosities anthology series, which drops on Netflix very soon. One more thing, keep an eye out for Lily’s first book Sent from my Slimy Brains—it’s available for pre-order soon from her Instagram and her publisher Hatton Beard.
GEMMA I can’t decide whether I want you saying ‘Blood Moon’ or you saying ‘slimy brains’ as my Hallowe’en ringtone... [Slim laughs] Either way, they’re both amazing an I think we should make them both available for Letterboxd . [Gemma laughs] Letterboxd who have #horror in their bios so that they also have the blood dripping.
SLIM Yes, the dripping blood that comes down.
GEMMA Oh my god. We also, we do have another podcast here at Letterboxd: Weekend Watchlist. It’s our weekly show where Mitchell, Slim and Mia explore the latest releases in cinemas and on streaming, that drops every Thursday—sometimes very famous voices turn up on Weekend Watchlist, and I love that for you, Slim.
SLIM You talking about yourself? [Gemma laughs] Your own voice? Or are you talking about filmmakers and actors...
GEMMA I was talking about TÁR director Todd Field, but sure.
SLIM Sure, sure.
GEMMA Also me. Thanks to our crew, Jack for the facts, Brian Formo for booking and looking after our guests, Sophie Shin for the episode transcript, Samm for the art and to Moniker for the theme music, which appropriately for spooky season is called ‘Vampiros Dancoteque’. It’s an outtake, an unused outtake—I love this fact, in case you haven’t heard me say this before, from their soundtrack for What We Do in the Shadows, the original film, pre-the FX series. You can always drop us a line at , we love getting your mail. The Letterboxd Show is a Tapdeck production. And Slim, you should learn not to compete with me, I always win...
[clip of American Psycho plays]
What about the massacres in Sri Lanka, honey? Wouldn’t that affect us too? I mean, do you know anything about Sri Lanka, how the Sikhs are killing like tons of Israelis over there?
Come on Bryce, there are a lot more important problems than Sri Lanka to worry about.
Like what?
We have to end Apartheid for one and slow down the nuclear arms race, stop terrorism and world hunger. We have to provide food and shelter for the homeless and oppose racial discrimination and promote civil rights while also promoting equal rights for women. We have to encourage a return to traditional, moral values. Most importantly, we have to promote general social concern and less materialism in young people.
Patrick. How thought-provoking.
[Tapedeck bumper plays] This is a Tapedeck podcast.