Take Your Fill of Love — 10 Questions with Anna Biller
“I’m the Love Witch, I’m your ultimate fantasy!”
— Elaine (played by Samantha Robinson)
I Put a Spell on You
With two resolute and original features to her name (2007’s Viva, 2016’s The Love Witch), a third in the early stages, not to mention a wealth of wonderful art-film 16mm shorts, Los Angeles-based firebrand filmmaker Anna Biller may just be the savior that American indie cinema didn’t even know it had — let alone needed — meddling in its midst. Stunning to look at, thrilling to think about, and awash with strange, vintage sensations, Biller’s films feel simultaneously sent from another era and yet are braced with whip-smart modernistic designs.
Viva is a vividly colorful comedy of social mores and something of an homage to the sexploitation films of the late 60s and 70s but with a serrated feminist edge. Biller plays Barbi, a bored housewife who soon finds herself absorbed into the sexual revolution. Soon her life will dogpile with hippies, nudists, orgies, sadists, swingers, free spirits and highly saturated colors. Viva is a playful pastiche that pulls off both campy and chic with playful aplomb.
The Love Witch, like Viva, takes many cues from the swinging 60s and Technicolor melodramas, but it also diverges into thriller territory, with Gothic horror predilections, Kenneth Anger occult comparison, and a little Lady Sheba brand of love magic.
Samantha Robinson is smashing as Elaine, the eponymous witch. She’s a bloodthirsty narcissist, a femme fatale beauty who dabbles in murder in her quest for the ideal man.
Biller’s inspired and kaleidoscopic set design — and we’re talking Goddess-level artistry here — sumptuous costumes, and deliberately superannuated aesthetic is amazing in all her films, but particularly in The Love Witch. To any and all who might be keeping track, Biller wrote, directed, edited, production designed, made the costumes, and contributed music to the film. We’re talking some next level shit that effectively authenticates and sustains auteur theory.
Delightfully subversive, legitimately unnerving, hilariously quotable, and visually opulent, The Love Witch is a slyly feminist revenge saga that seems custom-fit for midnight screenings, and cult adulation. If you like cinema that’s ravishing, provocative, exciting, and more than a little strange, then you best get acquainted with Anna Biller and her daring body of work.
Magnificent Obsession
The Cinegogue ©: How are you doing today? Anything exciting happening? Pour me a piping hot cup of Anna!
Anna Biller: Oh I’m fine I guess. I’ve been staring at photos of locations for the past two days. I like to see what spaces are available for filming when I’m writing a script, because it helps me to visualize my scenes better. All these photos of castles and mansions are starting to make me a bit dizzy though!
C: To someone who has never seen The Love Witch, how would you describe it?
Anna Biller: It’s a fairy tale about a woman trying to find true love in a world that no longer believes in women or in love.
C: The first time I saw The Love Witch I described it to a friend as “something of a musical but without any singing”. I think this was my own response to the film’s use of color, costumes, art direction, production design, and the stylized performances — almost like a Jacques Demy musical melodrama. What do you think of this reaction and would you consider making a musical in the future?
Anna Biller: I think this is a very accurate way of looking at what I do. I take the rhythms of my films from musicals, except instead of musical numbers I’ll break the action with a sex scene, a dance scene, or a scene of someone crafting something or going somewhere. So those sequences become “numbers.” And when I score the film it becomes almost non-stop music, like an opera without words. Each of my films has less and less music in it, as I am trying to make narrative films that are more strictly narrative. I have written musicals in the past, and I might write more, but right now my challenge is to try not to write a musical. My next film has only one musical interlude, and it is the tightest narrative I’ve ever written.
C: Samantha Robinson’s performance is particularly memorable in this film. She’s perfectly cast as Elaine. Did you always intend her to be in this role?
Anna Biller: Well no, since I didn’t know her yet when I wrote it! And I didn’t even know she was my Elaine after I saw her audition. It wasn’t until after two auditions and a private meeting that I realized how perfect she was. No one knew she was Elaine at first, least of all Samantha. She had to grow into the part. It’s a testament to her skill as an actress that she ended up doing such a good job that it seems that she was made for the part. She worked very hard on this role. But I think it’s a role that a lot of young women could get into. It’s so much about the problems that young women face in the world.
C: For better or worse The Love Witch is described as a “comedy horror”. How do you feel about that particular genre classification?
Anna Biller: I think of it more as a drama or a melodrama, but I can see why people call it that. It’s absurd enough to be called a comedy, and it has just enough gothic and macabre elements to be horror.
C: The Love Witch was your follow-up film to Viva. How are the two films connected, if at all?
Anna Biller: They are both about women striving earnestly to get love and pleasure in a world where the cards are stacked against them. And they are both heavily coded movies that transform the realistic pain of experience into cinematic and aesthetic form and fantasy.
C: With The Love Witch completed, what will your next project be? Can you share any specifics?
Anna Biller: I’m working on a thriller about a sadistic husband. I am quite excited about it. It will be more of a straight narrative than I’ve ever done. The story will be more like many other stories that have been done by other people, but the way I’m doing it is very different. I’m quite excited about it.
C: Who are some of the filmmakers that have inspired you?
Anna Biller: Hitchcock, Bergman, Fassbinder, Hawks, Losey, Dreyer, Kurosawa, Powell and Pressburger, Buñuel, Busby Berkeley, pre-code and noir directors (in other words, all great cinema).
C: If you weren’t making movies what would you be doing?
Anna Biller: Painting, designing, writing music, making costumes, singing, cooking — all things I already do! Plus I might try to perform and stage plays the way I used to.
C: What work of art do you think best reflects who you are as a person?
Anna Biller: If you mean my own work of art, I’d say my short film A Visit From The Incubus (2001). It’s the only film I’ve made where I made whatever the hell I pleased without caring what anyone else thought, and it has a level of proficiency that my earlier works didn’t have yet. The next most “me” work of art would be The Love Witch.
The Love Witch is currently playing in select cities and will be released on Blu-ray and DVD on March 14th. Visit the Anna Biller Productions website where you can track down her previous works and keep on top of this prolific and promising artist. Bright Blessings!
