Mary Harron’s films hinge on the idea that people are the products of their era, generally in the worst way. In American Psycho, Patrick Bateman crawled out from the fetid pool of Reaganomics, his murderous impulses an extension of ’80s exceptionalism. The eponymous pinup at the center of The Notorious Bettie Page rose to prominence as an equal and opposite response to postwar repression. The self-obsession and superficiality of the ’60s created Valerie Solanas, misandrist revolutionary and subject of I Shot Andy Warhol.
Harron traveled back to the ’60s for her latest feature, Charlie Says, migrating from the East Coast to the West and trading the preening poseurs of Warhol’s Factory for the psychedelia and psychosis of Charles Manson’s California. The film focuses on three followers of Manson (played by a lithe, volatile Matt Smith) — Leslie Van Houten (Hannah Murray), Patricia Krenwinkel (Sosie Bacon), and Susan Atkins (Marianne Rendón) — crosscutting between their time under the monster’s sway and their rehabilitation in prison after the fact. It’s another opportunity for Harron to capture a complicated persona and wonder what makes it tick, though this will be her first film to really delve into the subtle intricacies of cunnilingus. (See below.)
Harron sat down with Vulture prior to the world premiere of Charlie Says at the Tribeca Film Festival to discuss the telling sameness of cult leaders, going up against Quentin Tarantino’s Manson picture, and how Patrick Bateman might have fared in Trump’s America.
Your films take on highly controversial figures, but always through the remove of a period piece. Is there an advantage to having a bit of historical distance between you and and your subject matter?
I think so. I’ve always been interested by people in history, particularly women. Because women’s lives in the 20th century changed so extraordinarily, even just in my lifetime. I was a little younger than the Manson girls, but not that much younger. I was at college in the early ’70s, and at that point, the hippie era seemed like a generation away. Another world, in some ways. I’m interested in how the variable of the year she was born affects a woman. It’s not like people don’t join cults now, but there are particulars in the nature of cults that have changed.
There’s a very ’60s energy to the Manson Family, flower-child peace-and-love stuff.
Each of my films is a different world, but the late ’60s were a fantastic time, and these years of 1968 and 1969 saw unbelievably rapid psychic change in the youth culture. I’ve been thinking about how times of instability make young people so prone to strongmen. When you’re young and unformed, as we all are, you’re uncertain of your own beliefs and direction. Having a confident older person who’s going to say exactly what the truth is, who has the confidence and charisma to make you believe they have the key to life, they make you want to share in that. For people suffering from unsureness, that’s so seductive. The more uncertain the time, the more apocalyptic it is. We’re in a slightly more apocalyptic time now.
I read the most insane story just this morning about a guy starting a cult among his daughter’s friends at Sarah Lawrence.
Let me guess: middle-aged white guy, younger girls, deviant sex stuff?
Three for three.
There’s nothing original or revolutionary about these groups, and that’s always how they sell themselves. They sell this more evolved way of living, and then at the end of the day, it is always about getting laid.
The wildest scene in your new movie is the orgy, when Charlie stops everything to deliver the monologue on the importance of oral sex. What was shooting that scene like, both for you and for Matt Smith?
The hardest part about that scene was finding enough extras willing to get naked! Matt was perfect, though. He understood that spontaneity had to be a big part of the performance, and so he’d do something different every time. Kept all the other actors in the scene off-balance in the best way, just like how someone would’ve been around Charlie. We’d try not to do too many takes of any single scene, because he didn’t want everyone else to get settled in the performance.
The camera’s moving, so [director of photography] Crille Forsberg was great about capturing things as they happened. He’s done a lot of music videos, so he knows how to get a live performance. We approached it like shooting a live performance. There was no, “Okay, so the camera’s tracking like this, be sure to do it exactly the same way again, move like this, we’ll do it 15 times until it’s perfect.†I trusted Crille to be in the right place at the right moment, and he always was.
Watching I Shot Andy Warhol to prepare for this interview, I noticed that it employs a similar device to Charlie Says, using these people on the periphery to get insight on a more famous figure. Is that a way to avoid biopic cliché, by coming at it from an angle?
Yeah, it’s so hard to do a good biopic. Biopics are deadly. But I do love historical re-creation, I love the 20th century, so the question becomes how you make a world real. How do you make the audience experience this as if they’re there, instead of looking at it from however many decades away? In both instances, it’s through assuming the viewpoint of a newcomer. Leslie is a fairly normal person entering an intimidating, unfamiliar world, same as anyone in the audience would be if they entered this scene.
I saw that they made American Psycho into a musical.
Matt Smith was in it! He played Bateman!
Is that how you got him on Charlie Says?
Yes, in a weird way. A friend of mine took me to the Emmys as his guest, and Matt Smith was there at a party. I went up and introduced myself — “Oh, I’m Mary Harron, you did the musical of my movie, hello†— in a nice little conversation. A few weeks later, I was in London to cast for the role of Manson, looking at a few actors, and my casting director said, “Matt Smith’s in town, he’d love to meet about this.†I was immediately interested. They sent me some clips from the film Ryan Gosling did, Lost River, and I thought that this was a man who could be frightening.
The other key scene, though, is when the music executive comes to hear Charlie play. He’s humiliated, and we see that he’s a pretty pitiful person when he’s not in charge.
His power vanishes the second you go outside of that ranch where they’d gotten set up. You see, researching, that he constantly gave people work to do just to keep their brains occupied, so they wouldn’t want to go out into the world and see the limits of his authority. He had people digging holes and filling them up again, just to “strengthen their minds.â€
You recently went to TV to do Alias Grace. Some filmmakers talk about doing small-screen work to put together some money or traction for getting a feature made. Was Charlie Says any more difficult to get off the ground than your features in the past?
They’re all hard to get off the ground. Honestly? They’re all hard. I wouldn’t say this was any harder, but I’m actually grateful to Quentin [Tarantino]. Because when I found out he was doing a Manson film, I could call the producer and say, “Look, we gotta get this thing in motion now.â€
I wanted to ask about Once Upon a Time in … Hollywood — do you see it as competition, or is it more of a “rising tide lifts all boats†situation?
Definitely the second one. I never worried about that. I love Quentin! I know him, love his movies, I’m sure his is great. But the thing is, I’m sure it’s a great movie about Hollywood in the ’60s. And that’s cool, my dad was an actor in Hollywood around that time, it’s a fascinating world. But it shows that there are so many approaches to this material you can take with little overlap. Tarantino’s going to run with his aspect of it, and I’m running with mine. It’s a huge story with so many points of entry.
You’ve made all these movies about radical figures. Do you have any radical beliefs yourself?
I think I’m much more like the doubting version of Leslie. I’m attracted to revolution and radical things, but as a person, I’m just not a joiner. The voice of doubt is strong in me. It’s my own chronic questioning — which is what my films are about, asking these questions — that means I’m fascinated by people who do make these commitments. At the same time, though, I’m very sympathetic to this. I sympathize with religious people, I fully get it, but I’m not religious. I can’t imagine being able to say, “I believe this and no competing theories.†I’ve enjoyed going to church, but I can’t believe one thing and no others. I’m sympathetic to radical politics, but I couldn’t join any ideology that says it’s the only way.
That ambivalence comes through in your movies, which never really condone or condemn their central figures. Until now, with Charlie Says, which is pretty straightforward about how malevolent Charlie is.
You’re not wrong. What we did try to do was make him as human and pathetic as we could. The thing about Charles Manson is that he was in prison from the age of 12, raped in prison, a monster made by society. That’s his origin story, horrible early life full of abuse and neglect, loveless childhood. There’s no great mystery. You can see exactly why Charlie Manson became who he was.
What do you think Patrick Bateman would be doing now, in his 50s, in Trump’s America?
Oh, he voted for Trump, for sure. He’s be doing great, even better than he was in the ’80s! He’s prospering: big hedge fund, deregulation, no taxes to worry about. Patrick Bateman’s life would be fabulous.
He and Charlie have so much in common that it sometimes feels like this sort of evil is cyclical.
I don’t want to say there’s been no progress made. As a woman, I’m living a life a hundred times richer and more productive and more interesting than I would’ve in my mother’s generation or her mother’s. But the battle is constant. Wonderful periods of revolution always eat their children. You’ve even seen this in feminism, women turning on each other.
That jumped out at me from I Shot Andy Warhol, that Valerie Solanas was a hardcore TERF. Someone so committed to progress and reform was still prejudiced against trans women.
Exactly, she was old school in that way. That generation of ’60s feminists, though — Germaine Greer got in trouble when she was in England for what she said about trans women. It was so focused on gender equality, and the definition of gender, that trans issues confused them. But that’s what I loved about the relationship between Valerie and her trans friend Candy. Candy didn’t believe in women’s lib, and Valerie didn’t think Candy was a real woman, but that never stopped them from being close friends. That’s the kind of confusing human nature stuff that interests me.