FrightFest 2016 - The Love Witch Interview with Anna Biller

Although it's amazing because when you look at it it's like it's exquisite in all kinds of dresses, from every dress, the eyeliner, the maker is so beautiful, the production that he makes is really important to me because I imagine that when you have a level low. -budget movie, you know, this is where you put a lot of attention into what you're watching. I imagine there are two things in a movie where you are watching something and listening to something, so I like to pay a lot of attention to the music and the recording of the dialogue and the sets because what you have is a person and they are in a context or you have people and they are moving, you just have very few elements.

We're working right, you have a camera that captures people talking or moving or things happening right and then there's a background so people don't pay much attention to the background when they were watching movies from the '60s and '70s. like Mephisto's wall, so that kind of exploitation is actually. I've never seen many movies where people say this is a slavish imitation of that, but I think whoever made the altar fist ones, um, you. I know Mario Bava or some of those directors, they were watching the same movies that I'm watching, which were Technicolor movies from the '50s and '60s, and they were studying them to get what they looked like, so it's almost more like those movies that we.

They are inspired by the same movies that inspired me. I was trying to make

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that, as a contemporary film, and obviously people don't think it's imperial Italy because it's the way the film was shot and the composition of the lighting and even the dialogue and all I think is that I've seen so many of those movies that I'm really only interested in the plots, the kind of plots they would have or the kind of way people talk to each other, the more formal specifications of each other, you know, no, it's not just the movie. It's the light, it's really the lighting that is very different because there are other people who shoot with film, there are still a lot of people and you wouldn't necessarily know it because they light it in a more contemporary way, they have very, very fast speed films and they don't They need a lot of light and they don't illuminate them very much, but we were using, we were flooding the studios with my more visual reference, it was beyond the value of the dolls because I think that actually, oh you know, a template to feel like it's just the hair and the makeup, I would say the only thing similar really is in the value of the doll, so it's the hair and makeup, and that's similar because it's a similar period, light 60s hair and makeup, so the people like me just take it using the neezy option by saying it's like that's like that there's a kind of low budget movie emulation of bigger budget Hollywood movies in Technicolor, they don't have the budget to make them look like the big movies and that's exactly what my It seems like the movie you know that means Javanese Italian movies are a break.

Myer, they have aspirations of making a big Hollywood-style movie, a Technicolor movie, but they didn't really have the money, but it had the same aesthetic, so that's actually that's the similarity. What you're saying is that you're watching something that's a lower-budget version of those '60s movies. Let's talk about some elements because what I find is that she's just incredible in everything she used to be. You know, make stars. they got roses, they used to take just a pretty young girl and turn them into stars, you got dance lessons and then she had to learn to behave like a queen, so I took Samantha Robinson.

I did it there, took a beautiful young woman with a lot of talent, good diction, good speaking voice, good posture and I took her in as a matron. I kind of turned her into a star. Did you see it in the late 60s? I liked the exploitation of it for any idea. I watched some Hammer movies. I know I

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the early sixties horror movie Hotel and I love Burn Witch Burn. I mean, Bell Book and Candle are actually an even bigger influence on all those Hollywood movies, since Laura's movies really are all about women. The glamor is fascinating and the soul is about how fascinating the woman is and how that destroys the man and that's really the whole Hollywood classic.

How long did it take you to do it? It must have been a years old movie. and when they actually met you, since I filmed in eight weeks, right, it was pre-production, okay because I literally look at Renaissance costumes, you said you know those costumes have been seen, before or throughout the year, you caught your friends , they do not know. Didn't I sew every hem? Every God is just a pile of that. It's so much, it was a lot of work, you know? But this was during the time that I was sick and I couldn't really do anything else at the time.

At that time I couldn't move much and I could go, I even got nauseous going to the ironing board, so I had to plan my time, like sit down and do it. This machine didn't make food, but standing made me sick. I had to limit my time cutting and ironing, it was very difficult, but I thought, what else am I going to do in this progress in making my film, so I'll do what I can. Is there an aunt? You fight here too, did you find that while you were making this I didn't have that problem in pre-production?

I have that problem a little bit with some of that, some of it from the press and some from the audience. And I don't think it's because she's a woman but because the script was written by women and directed by women, it has a quality to it that's not necessarily what a man would do and that's this alien. a bit of a lot of men to have a female main character and then she's glamorous that's already silly to some people it's been like wet it's been like 40 50 years since we had a real femme fatale on screen that was I don't just want to say which is not a fatal attraction where she's not sure it's not a glamorous character, but we've had a glamorous character and if I say it on screen, before that it was enough in China and body heat and all that kind of stuff . sure things, oh wow how long ago was that, yes that's actually true, 25 years, yes I was actually trying to make a modern movie and this is so sad because I really can't.

I guess this isn't what it is, it's the most modern thing I can imagine. you know this is this is you