Mary Harron Quotes (14 Quotes)

She was always this country girl, with an almost impenetrable naivete.

I'm very interested in women in the '50s, and sex is more interesting in that time than any other period of the 20th century. It was so sexual and yet so repressed, so naive and yet so obsessed with sex. So there's a lot that was latent.

She was very much of the period, ... A lot of people played it too sexy, in a very modern way. And I think Gretchen had a very instinctive understanding of the sexiness of a very different time. You have to go back before Playboy, before the outright, blatant sexiness to something more hidden, teasing, more of the nice girl. Naughty but nice.

At first we thought there wasn't enough material to make a feature film.

We have all these movies from the '50s, but they're told from such a male perspective and such a '50s ideology. You wouldn't see Bettie's story from her point of view. People wouldn't be interested in what it was really like or take her story at face value, ... Films from that time are hilarious because of their complete condemnation of any kind of female initiative or ambition. It was such a contradictory world that even the law itself didn't have a clear handle on it.... I really wanted to get across that moment in time of naivet, fear and panic.

We haven't faced that yet, ... I don't know what's going to happen. The scene when she takes all of her clothes off the movie is so much about what is the fear of sex, and Bettie's whole career is about showing her body. She is famous for posing naked in the Garden of Eden, and she is famous for the bondage, the clothes, the gear. You have to have that contrast. You had to show what everyone is afraid of. That's the heart of the movie. To lose that would be very hard.

Certainly, I've always been attracted to that. Punk rock, when I was a part of it, was called 'the underground.' There was something very attractive in all the hidden places. The hidden histories,

All women's history is hidden to some degree.

When we couldn't find the right person, we decided to abandon preconceptions and look at people we hadn't thought of. She came in and her very first audition was so wonderful, so magical. She had this sweetness and innocence, but also something sexy and a little dark.

I'll be very interested to see how the film does when it reaches that audience. You can see it as a redemptive tale if you want to, as a right-minded Christian.

We decided the world itself was so interesting. So it became not only a story about a pinup model, but it became about sex in the 1950s and those attitudes. And that became a much more interesting and dynamic story.

If I was telling that story in a '50s style, it would have been a melodrama, ... a story of 'An innocent girl falls into the seedy, sordid world of bondage and then sees the light and is born again.' If I were telling it now in an urban, sophisticated way, you would have a story about a girl who is a free spirit, who does these lighthearted bondage photos, then she crashes and she turns to religion which would be the tragedy in the modern view, because it's so polarized now that people see any religion as representing the horrible forces of puritanism. I was trying to comment on the sad confusion surrounding sex at that time, present it in a complex way, and give her religion a fair hearing too.

I'm quite optimistic, but I feel we do need more female producers, more female cinematographers and such, just to make a better working environment among predominantly male crews,

I like subjects that are enigmatic and contradictory, ... And Bettie expressed these interesting contradictions between something we associate with shame and sexual oppression, something sinister, something hidden, powerful, decadent the bondage imagery and then her own spirit, which was wholesome and happy and joyful. And by expressing that joyfulness she made the photos seem fun and playful.