Mary Harron Bettie Page Interview

She might have only made three films in 11 years but that’s okay by former rock journalist turned filmmaker Mary Harron. In between shooting I shot Andy Warhol, American Psycho and her latest film, The Notorious Bettie Page, Harron has been making documentaries and directing the odd episode of hit TV shows like Six Feet Under. But feature films are where her real passions lie and it shows in Bettie Page. Gretchen Mol (Sweet and Lowdown) stars as the famous pin up girl, who came from a conservative religious family in Tennessee but ended up a photo model sensation in 1950’s New York. Bettie’s legendary fetish poses made her the target of a Senate investigation into pornography, and transformed her into an erotic icon who continues to fascinate to this day. Gaynor Flynn caught up with the director at the Toronto International Film Festival.

This is a dramatic change of pace after American Psycho.

Mary Harron: (laughs). Yes it is.


Gaynor Flynn: What was it about this story that interested you?

Mary Harron: I think there were a lot of different aspects to it. I was very interested in the 50’s. I use to work in documentaries and I researched a documentary about Jackson Pollock and I started getting very interested in that era, the 50’s, 50’s beauty, 50’s glamour and then the hidden sexuality of the 50’s which is what this film is about, the things that are kept under wraps. If you look at the movies at the time everyone’s just seething with sexuality, but its all so repressed it kind of makes it very interesting to play with (laughs) and I wanted to kind of look at what was being suppressed, what’s in the closet, the secrets and all that stuff.


Gaynor Flynn: Would you say this is an accurate reflection of Bettie’s life?

Mary Harron: Yeah. I mean I tried to avoid the typical bio-pic path because so many of them reduce everything to a childhood trauma. And this is my interpretation of Bettie’s life because like any bio-pic or true life story there’s a lot of selection involved, subjective selection. It can’t be avoided because you choose to highlight certain events and not others. But I never wanted to provide a definitive answer as to who Bettie was or why she did what she did. I think the truth of Bettie’s life lies in the contradictions.


Gaynor Flynn: Did she or her family co-operate on the film?

Mary Harron: I met with her brother who was very helpful, but not Bettie because her lawyer at the time persuaded her to sign her life rights to another project which actually never happened so we were never able to talk to her directly but we talked to enough people around her and there were a lot of sources and interviews she’d given that we were able to use. I think her family was okay with it. We were just back in touch with her family and Pam the producer called up to talk to her younger sister who said, ‘the films going to be called Bettie Page? And it’s going to be in theatres and its going to say Bettie Page on the marquee?’ They seemed very excited about it even though they’re very Christian.


Gaynor Flynn: Gretchen Mol is amazing in the role, how did you come to cast her?

Mary Harron: Well I guess at any given time there’s only like 4 or 5 people on the short list of who they want you to make a movie with. There’s the star of the day and she wasn’t on the short list at that point so there was a lot of resistance but she came in, and her first audition was amazing and then she came in two more times and the last time she came in she did a full Bettie you know wig and all and she just nailed it. What Gretchen did, or didn’t do rather is that she didn’t act sexy, she intuitively understood Bettie who didn’t act sexy either, she just was sexy. Bettie’s joy in life was posing and she just loved showing herself off but it was done in a sweet, innocent way, it was a childlike joy and no one else really got that except Gretchen.


Gaynor Flynn: Gretchen interestingly looks very 50’s pin up girl herself. Did that play a part in the casting?

Mary Harron: Yes, because she really seemed to suit the 50’s. Her demeanour and body language fit as well, she’s kind of very lady like which is perfect for Bettie and she has a sort of innocent quality like Bettie but at the end of the day it was her acting ability that won her the role because she just made it seem so effortless especially doing the poses, which a lot of people found difficult. It’s not easy doing that posing because so many came in and they couldn’t get it. It’s almost like dancing, you have to be able to hold your body a particular way and she just nailed it.


Gaynor Flynn: You’ve developed a reputation for really supporting the actors you choose, for instance you stuck with Christian Bale in American Psycho when the studios wanted Leonardo Dicaprio and you stuck with Gretchen Mol here. Why is that?

Mary Harron: Well I don’t like to be dictated to. (laughs). But I feel that very strongly about casting the right person for the job and not just who is hot at the moment. I mean someone like Gretchen is a fantastic actress and has never had a really great role I don’t think. She’d never had a defining role but this was her film, no question about it.


Gaynor Flynn: But is there pressure on you to hire certain people?

Mary Harron: Oh they always put pressure on you to hire certain people but you just have to stick to your guns particularly with a movie like this where the lead actor is the movie. If you don’t have the right Bettie you have no movie, and it was the same with American Psycho.


Gaynor Flynn: If you look at American Psycho and this film, it’s hard to imagine it’s the same director the styles are so different.

Mary Harron: Well I think the subject defines the style. I mean with American Psycho it was all within the parameters of the book and you had to find a shooting style and a production design style, and an acting style that fit. So American psycho was very stylised because you wanted that very enclosed tight feeling because so much of it was in his mind, well not his mind but it was his world so it was a very stylised heightened slightly unreal world. Whereas this was more like my first film which was based on real life sources so this was more of a recreation. And of course the problem is that there’s not a lot of 50’s New York left, like Times Square is totally gone so that’s why I used the archive to illustrate it. And with this one I wanted you to feel from the opening images that you’re going back somewhere in time. And there’s certain film directors I love like Sam Fuller who did these very gritty black and white films and he did some films set in New York, Pickup on South Street and Underworld USA and they’re very harsh, black and white, high contrast gritty but very beautiful so I like that look.


Gaynor Flynn: Gretchen Mol said she felt more comfortable with a female director given the subject matter. Do you think a woman needed to direct this?

Mary Harron: I think the emphasis was a little different with me being female because the emphasis is less on how sexy Bettie is than what is Bettie’s experience. What is she going through? What’s happening to her that was the focus rather than making her an object. What’s it like when people condemn her and how great is it for her when she first walks in to that camera club. I think you’re very aware of what she’s feeling and like how she’s reading the room and how she’s responding to the camera and I wanted to chart it from there rather than just go va va voom and looking at her as just an a icon.


Gaynor Flynn: Has the real Bettie Page seen the film and did she like it?

Mary Harron: I think she did like it yeah. I think she enjoyed it but not the Senate hearing scenes. I think that kind of dredged up some very painful times in her past. It was upsetting then and its upsetting now but I think she really enjoyed Gretchen in the movie and I hope they get to meet eventually.


Gaynor Flynn: Why didn’t you go into her later life, the nervous breakdown, finding Jesus etc?

Mary Harron: That would have been a different movie. In the beginning we did spend quite a lot of time trying to incorporate her breakdown which happened later in life. But the problem we encountered is how do you go from this young beautiful pin up to a woman who has a breakdown, has several failed marriages, finds Jesus? It was like, how did she go from this to this? The leap was too big and it was a very slow descent over a period of some 15 or 20 years. She’s such a different person later on in life, than the person we concentrate on here. So that was the reasoning. Maybe someone else will do a Bettie Page movie about her later years. For me, I was interested in making a movie that concentrated on the 50’s. What interested me was the era and the attitude towards sex and the repression and how Bettie fitted into all of that.


Gaynor Flynn: Why do you think she suddenly stopped modelling?

Mary Harron: Well she started modelling late, like in her late 20’s, and she was in her 30’s when she stopped. I think she’d had enough because nothing had worked out as she had hoped. An acting career hadn’t materialised, marriage, none of it had sort of happened and I think the Senate hearings had a major impact on her. They made her feel like she had done something wrong and shameful and that was a very traumatic experience for her. So after that she sort of turned to something that had given her a lot of comfort as a small child and that was religion.


Gaynor Flynn: But when we look at her photo’s now they seem so tame.

Mary Harron: (laughs) I know, and if the Senate committee thought Bettie was a risk to American morality, what did they make of the 60’s sexual revolution, which was just around the corner waiting to happen?


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