Nearly 30 years after Valerie Solanas shot pop-art icon Andy Warhol, Mary Harron's new film explores the radical feminist's motives and background. Nick Roddick discusses the film's origins with the director I've had this one before and it's usually a showstopper. "First you see my film," it goes. "Then we talk about it. If you haven't seen it, we don't talk."
I can certainly sympathise. There's enough crap talked about movies by people who have seen them - or, at any rate, been present when they were projected - without it being added to by the simply curious, the dilettante, the stay-at-home. Or, in my case, those on the wrong side of the Atlantic. "I made my mind up I'd do no more interviews with people who hadn't seen the film," insists Mary Harron quietly, when I, who, of necessity, have become a master of fudging this particular point, carelessly let slip that I have not yet seen I Shot Andy Warhol.
Her point - an indisputable one - is that there has possibly been more crap talked about one of the two subjects of her feature debut than about anyone else in the cultural history of the 20th century. Remember Crispin Glover in The Doors? Wearing a blonde wig and saying "Oh my!" a lot doesn't quite constitute a portrait of one of the most significant artists of the postwar years. On this point, Harron is, perhaps a little surprisingly but reassuringly, uncompromising. "I think Warhol's a great artist," she says. "He's very important, probably one of the most influential of the late 20th century. He understood that mechanical reproduction had changed the nature of art." Her Warhol, memorably played by Jared Harris, is a long way from Glover's Stone-ground faggot from hell of The Doors.
But Harron's film is not about Warhol. It's about Valerie Solanas, one of those people who actually experienced the 15 minutes of fame Andy prophesied for everyone - albeit by trying to kill him - before dying unknown, a half-crazy outcast, on the street. Solanas (Lili Taylor, in a career-making performance) is known to the world, if at all, for two reasons. First, she founded, wrote the manifesto for and was the sole member of SCUM, the Society for Cutting Up Men.
Second, after being first taken into then cast out of the Andy Warhol circle, she shot him. He survived - for a while, anyway. So did she, but not for much longer. Harron, a Canadian-born, Oxford-educated journalist who used to write about rock for The Guardian and moved to New York about four years ago, first became interested in Solanas when she was researching a documentary on Warhol for the posh bits of British television. "On The South Bank Show," she recalls, "we used to do nothing but famous people. When I started to try and put together a film about Valerie Solanas" - which, at that stage, was going to be a TV documentary - "I had a lot of resistance to the project. It was a different time. It was still the 80s, and there was enormous resistance to making a film about someone who was a total failure and a radical feminist."
Resistance or no resistance, the documentary idea turned out to be a non-starter anyway because there was next to no surviving footage of Solanas. In a way, it's lucky there wasn't, because Harron decided to make a feature - a long and difficult process, which finally resulted in an enormously well-received premiere at Sundance in January.
Along the way, Harron discovered a true original. "You should read the SCUM manifesto," she says. "Solanas was obviously quite a brilliant woman, but completely out of her time. The manifesto is an extraordinary mixture of brilliance and craziness. Her analysis of male and female power relations is like a black satire. It can be compared to what Malcolm X wrote about black and white relationships. It's not a feminist classic, but it is a classic of radical feminism. And if she could write like that, why did she end up on the street?" The process of answering that question has led to a film which is funny and moving, and which was very warmly received when it opened properly in the States last week. The only sour notes came from Lou Reed, who refused to allow any Velvet Underground songs to be used (possibly, reckons Harron, because he and John Cale - the most radical of the Velvets, who did the music for the movie - are no longer friends).
And then, says Harron, "Paul Morrissey just wrote a piece in Vogue in which it was pretty obvious he hadn't seen the film."
Which is what brought our conversation to the sticking point - this one thing I have in common with Paul Morrissey. The last time something like this happened, the last time it really came to the crunch, it was a total freeze-out. It happened in the late 80s, when I Shot Andy Warhol was still an idea for a documentary. "If you have not seen film," said the director in question - once the Great White Hope of the Soviet Cinema, subsequently a rather muddled proponent of soft-focus international pseudo-art movies - "then there is no point we speak. If you see film, film speak for self." Subsequently, I did see film, and film was about as dumb as director.
Harron is a lot more gracious. Casual conversation reveals that we once worked on the same TV series. And somehow, I'm pretty sure I'm not going to have the same sort of problem with I Shot Andy Warhol.
