Many great artists are idiosyncratic. Their work and personality are so brilliant and distinctive that it’s hard to imagine other people like them. They may work with a large set of influences, but they work with them in their own particular way.
Director Ana Lily Amirpour is such an artist. She takes a diverse set of influences and filters them through her own consciousness. She melds together classic genres to deal with the overriding theme of her work: loneliness.
Amirpour was born in England but grew up in Bakersfield, California. Her debut film “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night” was a hit at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival. Her new film, “The Bad Batch,” was described early in production as a Texas cannibal love story.
Amirpour took part in four events during her Thursday and Friday visit to the IU Cinema. The first was a screening of “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night” on Thursday. That marvelous movie was billed as the first Iranian vampire spaghetti Western love story. That night, the cinema screened her entire catalog of short films, which had never been shown together on a big screen. The next day, IU Cinema director Jon Vickers interviewed Amirpour for the Jorgensen Guest Filmmaker lecture series. After the interview, the cinema had a preview screening of “The Bad Batch” before its release June 23.
“The Bad Batch” is about a solitary woman trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic desert, where everyone considered unfit for society is banished. After a revenge attempt gone wrong, she helps the mysterious “Miami Man” find a young child, even when threatened by cannibalism, drug-fueled decadence and a charismatic cult leader, played by Keanu Reeves.
Amirpour has many talents as a filmmaker. The worlds she creates are both familiar and unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. There have been a lot of movies set in post-apocalyptic deserts, but few of them have the scrappy humanity of “The Bad Batch.”
In every question-and-answer session, Amirpour was frank and delightful. When asked if she considered herself anti-Hollywood, she paused, then said, “I consider myself anti things that suck.”
Amirpour compared editing to crawling through the tunnel of waste in “The Shawshank Redemption” and coming out on the other side, and the entire process of filmmaking as getting to “create a universe of problems that only I know how to solve.”
Amirpour has a diverse set of influences and teachers. She credits David Lynch with showing her to “not be afraid to look into the darkest crevices of your brain caves.”
She referred to Robert Zemeckis as her “Orson Welles,” and said that more filmmakers should be like Doc Brown from “Back to the Future.” She talks as enthusiastically about action icon Bruce Lee as she does about the famously slow films of French director Robert Bresson.
“Isn’t it great that there are so many things to love?” she said.
She imagines her characters down to the smallest detail. The character of Saeed in “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night” is memorable as a tough villain. But Amirpour revealed that she gave him a sweet side by making his favorite TV show “Friends.”
Amirpour’s films are superb from a technical point of view. They have fascinating shot compositions and excellent editing rhythms. But what elevates her movies to their high status isn’t their stylistic ingenuity. Rather, it’s their examination of how people deal with loneliness.
In her first question-and-answer on Thursday, Amirpour said she felt a lot of loneliness in her own life. She noted that she particularly relates to the vampiric, unnamed girl in her first film.
One of the shots of the Girl skateboarding at night perfectly conveys how it feels to be lonely.
That shot is particularly personal for Amirpour not just because she is a lifelong skateboarder. She actually performed the skateboarding because her actress, Sheila Vand, could not do it.
Amirpour is great at showing how people can escape their loneliness. She told the audience at her Jorgensen lecture that “you’re going to be friends with just those weirdos who get you.”
Two ‘weirdos’ in her life seem to be Alex O’Flinn and Lyle Vincent, the editor and cinematographer of both her feature films.
Everything I love about Amirpour’s directing is found in one shot of “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.” It is when The Girl and her love interest Arash listen to “Death” by the band White Lies.
The shot features several simple actions. Arash enters the shot after The Girl puts on the song. She turns toward him and slowly slumps against his chest.
This shot is not conventionally exciting. It is nearly three minutes. The pacing is rather slow. There is not a single line of dialogue from either character.
But each of those qualities makes it all the more thrilling. The slow pacing makes every minor action seem meaningful. The second The Girl starts turning toward Arash and away from her solitude is as exciting as anything in a “Fast and Furious” movie.
Even this simple shot has several influences. Vickers attributed the pacing to Amirpour’s love for Bresson. The black and white visuals owe a debt to Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumble Fish.”
But the emotional beauty of this moment of connection comes entirely from Amirpour. She mentioned that she generates “a lot of energy and power in my loneliness.”
Let’s hope she continues to use that power to make films about the moments of connection that make life worth living.
