During her adolescence, Harron was exposed to many different forms of art and film. In a 2020 interview with The New School, Harron states: "My parents took us to whatever films they wanted to see so I saw a lot of art films that would not be considered suitable for a child." She goes on to explain that her largest influences, especially as a child around the age of ten, were Alfred Hitchcock, Bergman, and Satyajit Ray. After she had moved to London in her teen years she began attending the National Film Theatre where she was exposed to other international filmmakers like Fritz Lang, Howard Hawks, Claude Chabrol, and Roman Polanski. She was also exposed to noir films, namely Double Indemnity.
As an adult she was inspired by the films Blue Velvet, Drugstore Cowboy and The Piano, directed by Jane Campion. While she said that she had plenty of exposure to Hollywood films, she was enticed by these types of films because they were, in her words, the "forerunners of independent film."[16]
Career
Early writing work
In New York, Harron helped start and write for Punk magazine as a music journalist; she was the first journalist to interview the Sex Pistols for an American publication. She grew up in the early punk scene of America. She found the culture easy for her to fit into and was constantly evolving and spreading into new demographics.[9] During the 1980s, she was a drama critic for The Observer in London for a time, as well as working as a music critic for The Guardian and the New Statesman. In the late 1980s, Harron participated and began her film career writing and directing BBC Documentaries.[9]
During the 1990s, Harron moved back to New York where she worked as a producer for PBS'sEdge, a program dedicated to exploring American pop culture. It was at this time that Harron became interested in the life of Valerie Solanas, the woman who attempted to kill Andy Warhol. Harron suggested making a documentary about Solanas to her producers, who in turn encouraged her to develop the project into what would be her first feature film.[17] Harron says she owes her success with her first film to Andy who helped to sell the controversial focus on the attempted murderess, Solanas.[18]
For Solanas, there was this fierce, outsider quality to her unhappiness and frustration. That was a time in my life when I was frustrated myself in my work. I wanted to direct. I had the idea years before I got to direct myself. So I think there were elements of my own frustration and elements of what it was like growing up with an unfair attitude towards women ... and Valerie was an extreme example of that. There was also the intellectual interest of how someone can be so brilliant and her life goes so wrong, and also, that she was so forgotten and misunderstood. In both cases, I felt like Valerie had been consigned to history as this lunatic, almost nothing written about her.[20]
In an interview Harron did for CBC’s Newsworld’s On the Arts in 1996, she told film critic Christopher Heard that "It was Valerie that really impelled [her] to make this film, because of the mystery of her story. [...] Not knowing who she was ... the lack of information about her."[21] Solanas's existence was "a real piece of lost history" and an "unknown story" that she sought to explore deeper.[21]
As far as Harron's amusement with Warhol went, she stated "As I was growing up, Warhol was the most famous artist in the world, apart from Picasso [...] My mother [disapproved] of him, so that made him even more interesting."[21] Also regarding her interest in Warhol’s story, she felt that he, before and after the shooting, were two vastly different people. This is her reason for viewing Warhol’s shooting as a “turning point” in his life.”
The film opened the “Un Certain Regard” section of the Cannes Film Festival and received an Independent Spirit Award nomination for best first feature film.[22] It also won the sole acting award at that year's Sundance Film Festival for Lili Taylor's performance as Solanas.[23]
American Psycho
Harron's second film, American Psycho, released in 2000, is based on the book of the same title by Bret Easton Ellis, which is notorious for its graphic descriptions of torture and murder.[24][25] The protagonist, Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale), is an investment banker who goes on a killing spree. The New York Times' Stephen Holden wrote of the film:
From the opening credits, in which drops of blood are confused with red berry sauce drizzled on an exquisitely arranged plate of nouvelle cuisine, the movie establishes its insidious balance of humor and aestheticized gore.[26]
The film was mired in controversy before production began,[27][28][29] due in large part to the legacy of the book's release.[30] Harron has a liking for darker and more controversial topics, such as Valerie Solanas, but it was the satirical nature of the book that "inspired her film about perfunctory violence and obsessive consumption."[31] As Harron began production, the crew had to contend with threats of protest, as the issue of violence in the media became crystallized by the Columbine shootings. Campaigns against the film continued throughout production, the Feminist Majority Foundation condemning the film as misogynist, and the Canadians Concerned About Violence in Entertainment (C-CAVE) convincing restaurant owners to deny Harron permission to film in their establishments.[32] When returning to work with co-writer Guinevere Turner, Harron felt they were best suited for the job of American Psycho as they needed no hesitation on feminist values, especially after Turner's successful lesbian film Go Fish.[8]
Although some criticized American Psycho for its violence against women, Harron and Turner made conscious decisions that project the female influence on this adaption. Harron's adaptation of this film changes the focus from purely Bateman's perspective to showcase the faces of the women as "the perspective in those murder scenes wasn't through Patrick Bateman but the women."[33]
The Notorious Bettie Page
The Notorious Bettie Page, released in 2005, starred Gretchen Mol as Bettie Page, the 1950s pinup model who became a sexual icon. The film shows Page as the daughter of religious and conservative parents, as well as the fetish symbol who became a target of a Senate investigation of pornography. About the film, Harron said in 2006:
Clearly Bettie is a very inspiring figure to young women because she had a strong independent streak. She did what she wanted to do and she wasn't just doing it for men ... But I think it's a huge mistake to think of her as a conscious feminist heroine. As far as I can see, she didn't have an agenda, ever. She just followed her own path unconsciously. I don't think she thought of herself as a rebel in any way. She was kind of in her own world of dress-up.[34]
Harron later stated that the film suffered from false expectations, in that many male critics and male viewers expected and wanted the film to be "sexy", but that the film instead portrayed "what it's like to be Bettie", and Page herself did not get a "sexual charge" out of her modelling.[35]
The Moth Diaries
The Moth Diaries (2011), Harron's fourth feature film, is another adaption of an American novel, being based on Rachel Klein's 2002 novel of the same name. The film follows a group of girls living together at Brangwyn, a boarding school. A new student arrives, Ernessa (Lily Cole) and the girls begin to suspect that she is a vampire. Harron has described the film as a "gothic coming-of-age story"[36] that explores the nuanced friendships of teenage girls as they are repeatedly confronted with the prospect of adulthood.
Charlie Says
Harron directed the 2018 independent film Charlie Says, with a screenplay by Turner, which tells the real-life story of how three of Charles Manson's female followers (Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Leslie Van Houten) came to terms with the magnitude of their crimes while incarcerated in the 1970s. Matt Smith played Manson in flashbacks. The film had initially been intended for another director, but when that director was no longer available Harron took over. Harron stated that she was fascinated by the psychological aspects of how the women ended up committing murder as a result of both manipulation by Manson and feelings of solidarity with one another.[37]
Harron has been at times labelled a feminist filmmaker, in part due to her film on lesbian feminist Valerie Solanas, I Shot Andy Warhol, as well as a lesbian storyline within her 2011 teenage Gothic horror film The Moth Diaries (2011).[18] She has consistently denied this label, although she considers herself a feminist. In a 2006 interview, and then again during an interview in 2012,[41] she stated:
I feel that without feminism, I wouldn't be doing this. So I feel very grateful. Without it, God knows what my life would be. I don't make feminist films in the sense that I don't make anything ideological. But I do find that women get my films better. Women and gay men. Maybe because they're less threatened by it, or they see what I'm trying to say better.[42]
She is a member of Film Fatales, a women's independent filmmaker collective.
Asked about her Canadian identity in a 2014 interview, Harron stated that she mostly felt "just not American". She stated that, to her, being Canadian meant "You don't think you're at the center of things." She also felt that, unlike American directors, she was not "a moralistic filmmaker. I'm not trying to tell people what to do, and I'm not trying to lead... I'm interested in ambiguity."[35]
Although her films deal with controversial materials, like American Psycho, in the opinion of director Buffy Childerhose, she does not put emphasis on gore and violence.[31]
Personal life
Harron lives in New York with her husband, filmmaker John C. Walsh, and their two daughters.[43]
^Michaelmas Term 1974. Complete Alphabetical List of the Resident Members of the University of Oxford. Oxford University Press. 1974. p. 137.
^"FACTBOX - Tony Blair's new job". Reuters. June 27, 2007. Archived from the original on December 1, 2017. Retrieved October 29, 2018. At university, Blair played guitar and sang in a rock band called the Ugly Rumours. He also dated Canadian film director Mary Harron, who went on to make the movie 'American Psycho'.
^
Kate Bussman (March 6, 2009). "Cutting edge". The Guardian (UK). Retrieved October 29, 2018. 'Please don't ask me about Tony Blair,' she pleads with a laugh, as the subject of the man she once described as 'the only nice person I ever went out with at Oxford' is broached. 'I only ever gave one interview about it, before he became prime minister, but somehow after American Psycho came out, this one interview suddenly appeared in all the British newspapers as if I'd just given a press conference. I've learned it's best not to talk about it at all,' she says, her voice full of humour, but her demeanour firm.
^
Marie Woolf, Francis Elliott (February 19, 2006). "When Tony met Mary met Chris ..."The Independent. Retrieved October 29, 2018. But Tony Blair was not the only budding political leader Ms Harron - a flamboyant undergraduate who went on to direct American Psycho - dated as a carefree student. By remarkable coincidence, she also went out with Chris Huhne, an Oxford contemporary of Blair, who last week was tipped in the polls as the most likely contender to take over from Charles Kennedy as Liberal Democrat leader.
^
Beth Lambert (May 10, 2015). "Mary Harron: Directing The Undirectable". Oxford Student. Retrieved October 29, 2018. Incidentally, one of those men was Tony Blair, who she went out with as an undergraduate; something which once again I can't reconcile with her wild child image, but Blair must have been more into his New York Dolls than New Labour while he was at St John's.
^
Katie Rife (December 8, 2017). "Mary Harron breaks down the art of terror in an exclusive clip from Shudder's The Core". The A.V. Club. Retrieved October 29, 2018. Mary Harron didn't start her career as a film director until her 40s, after a wild and fascinating early life that included a stint as one of the first writers of Punk magazine and a brief romance with future British Prime Minister Tony Blair when the two were students at Oxford.
^ abc“Why Director Mary Harron Made a Movie about the Woman Who Shot Andy Warhol | CBC.” CBCnews, CBC/Radio Canada, 5 Aug. 2021, www.cbc.ca/archives/mary-harron-director-movie-valerie-solanas-1.6124201.
^“Mary Harron.” Film Fatales, www.filmfatales.org/directors/maryharron. Accessed Mar. 2024.
^Marcus, Lydia. "The Pent Up and the Pinup." Lesbian News. April 2006: p. 43. Print.
^ abChilderhose, Buffy (2000). "There's Something about Mary [Filmmaker Mary Harron has a Penchant for Controversial Material: American Psycho.]". Chatelaine. Vol. 73, no. 5. p. 40.
^Hornaday, Ann (April 16, 2006). "Women of Independent Miens: Nicole Holofcener and Mary Harron Prove a Woman's Place Is in the Director's Chair". Washington Post, N01.
Bussmann, Kate. "Cutting Edge."The Guardian.[1] March 5, 2009. p. 16. Print.
Heller, Dana (2008). "Shooting Solanas: Radical Feminist History and the Technology of Failure". In Hesford, Victoria; Diedrich, Lisa (eds.). Feminist Time Against Nation Time: Gender, Politics, and the Nation-State in an Age of Permanent War. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. ISBN978-0-7391-1123-9.
Harron, Mary. "The Risky Territory of 'American Psycho.'" The New York Times April 9, 2000, late ed.: section 2. Print.
Harron, Mary; "The Notorious Bettie Page" MovieNet. [2]