‘I Shot Andy Warhol’ at 30: Mary Harron Looks Back at One of the ’90s’ Best American Indies

 This Friday, one of the great American independent films of the 1990s returns to theaters as Janus Films releases a new 4K restoration of Mary Harron‘s “I Shot Andy Warhol.” Released in the summer of 1996 after winning the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, the unconventional biopic about feminist writer and would-be Andy Warhol assassin Valerie Solanas announced Harron as a major new director and gave star Lili Taylor the best part of her career.

The film neither glamorizes nor indicts Solanas, who Taylor humanizes without softening or sentimentalizing her. “Lili Taylor lets you in, even when she’s playing a character who does bad things,” Harron told IndieWire. “She doesn’t judge her characters. Something I really don’t like when actors come in to audition is if they’re judging their character and telling me they’re a bad person. You have to love your character, even if it’s Charles Manson. You’ve got to play them completely from inside, and all the actors that I work with do that.”

Although “I Shot Andy Warhol” was Harron’s first narrative feature, she had grown up around actors and felt comfortable with them; her skill with performers is evident not only in Taylor’s performance but also in an ensemble that includes Jared Harris as Andy Warhol, Stephen Dorff as transgender actress Candy Darling, and Reg Rogers as avant-garde auteur Paul Morrissey. “I started directing at the BBC, and it was a very experimental time,” Harron said. “I did a lot of filmed essays where I would work with a writer, and they would narrate it, and they would be a character in the film. So I was used to that way of working.”

During the audition process for “I Shot Andy Warhol,” Harron realized that not only was she comfortable with actors, but talking with them was her favorite part of the filmmaking process. “Lili didn’t really want to rehearse a lot, and I don’t do a huge amount of rehearsal,” Harron said. “But we spent many days talking about the character, and spending a lot of time with the lead actor is something that I’ve done in every movie since.”

Harron offered Taylor the part after seeing her in Nancy Savoca’s “Dogfight.” “As soon as I saw the film, that was it. She’s such a great actress.”

‘I Shot Andy Warhol’Janus Films

Harron had discovered Solanas while working on a documentary about Warhol’s world, and was fascinated by her story. “She turned out to be this extraordinarily brilliant woman, for all her issues, and that she’d been completely ignored was, to me, an injustice,” Harron said. “My primary motivation was just to get the story out. And in the process of trying to get financing, people would say, ‘There are so few films about women. Why don’t you do a film about a great woman artist?’ Well, why can’t women have anti-heroes? You wouldn’t say that to Scorsese. Why can’t women have characters that are as complicated as ‘Taxi Driver?'”

Like Martin Scorsese, Harron is a director who deftly combines documentary realism with bold and elegant visuals, and aside from Lili Taylor’s performance, the most remarkable thing about “I Shot Andy Warhol” is the confidence of the filmmaking. Each composition, cut, and camera move is expressive and carefully selected, and the lighting by cinematographer Ellen Kuras is beautiful without feeling self-conscious or showy. “Ellen Kuras was hugely important to this film,” Barron said. “One of the films we looked at was ‘Kids,’ and the thing that we loved about the filmmaking was that it was naturalistic, but poetic. And it’s also kinetic.”

Like Harron, Kuras had a background in documentary filmmaking, and it allowed her to respond in the moment to the actors and adapt her style to their discoveries. “We drove the AD crazy because we would get to the set with a plan, then see it on location with the actors and say, ‘OK, we’re changing it,'” Harron said. “We’re both very comfortable with that. We didn’t have much equipment, so we were wheeling Ellen around on a wheelchair with her holding the camera, and she would get this real movement, like in the party scene where Valerie’s weaving through the crowd.”

Linking the camera to Solanas’ point of view was one way Harron gave “I Shot Andy Warhol” an intensity that avoided the distancing effect of so many period films. “Even though it’s a period film, we wanted to keep it very immediate and alive, as if it’s happening now,” Harron said. To maximize her resources, Harron took over a former factory with high ceilings, which she used for both sets and production offices. “We covered one floor with silver foil and made that the factory. We made another floor extras holding and costumes, and another floor hair and makeup, and our office space.”

‘I Shot Andy Warhol’©Samuel Goldwyn Films/Courtesy Everett Collection

Harron has tried to do something similar on subsequent films, because “I never have the money for a stage, and I love being in a real location.” Harron and her crew also spent a week shooting in real welfare hotels in New Jersey, which she said provided authenticity at minimal expense. For the exteriors, Harron found a couple of blocks in the West Village that were “period enough” for Taylor to walk around in. “It’s basically just a case of keeping your street scenes to a minimum but getting outside enough to keep the movie from feeling completely claustrophobic.”

Although “I Shot Andy Warhol” was a relatively modest indie in terms of its budget and schedule, Harron was still a bit stunned when she arrived on set the first day. “I was used to these small documentary crews, and suddenly I’m on a set with 30 people,” Harron said. “I don’t even know what they all do, and how do I remember them all? That’s where it was very helpful having such an ally in Ellen, who helped me know who to talk to — and I realized a lot of what I do is I talk to Ellen, or I talk to the AD.”

While Harron went on to make more great movies — including one flat-out classic in “American Psycho” — “I Shot Andy Warhol” remains special as one of the emblematic films of an era when there seemed to be an exciting, daring, and original new American movie every couple of weeks.

“There are just times when the industry gets shaken up, and it opens up for a brief period to a lot of different voices,” Harron said. “There was a lot of openness. People were willing to take a flyer; they weren’t worried about the algorithm. That’s when great things happen, when you just open the door to talented people.”

Janus Films’ 4K restoration of “I Shot Andy Warhol” opens in theaters on Friday, June 12.