Film

INTERVIEW

WHIPLASH GLAMOUR Director Mary Harron talks about her non-exploitative Bettie Page biopic.

‘There was a fanzine called The Bettie Pages, and the guys who ran it had interviewed everyone who ever knew her. We talked to a lot of those people again. We never did meet Bettie, because her lawyer was negotiating for her to be involved in a different project. But we met her brother, her first husband, a lot of photographers and photographic studio owner Paula Klaw who was at that point still alive.

‘We watched lots of films from that period: Sam Fuller, Orson Welles in his B-picture period, early Stanley Kubrick. But we made the film in the spirit of the photographs themselves. There’s a lot of joy in them that reflects her joy of being photographed, though I see it as a melancholy story. She had a very sad life. But her experience of being photographed wasn’t. There were no men in the photographs, and they were shot in a playful atmosphere. They didn’t involve her committing sexual acts before customers. I don’t think she thought they were that provocative, or that they were that big a deal.

‘Bettie saw the film after it was finished. She really liked Gretchen. She saw it at the Playboy Mansion - she’s friends with Hugh Hefner, who’s been very good to her, helped her to get money for her pictures. But it was very upsetting for her to see the Senate hearings. That’s still a sore point for her.

‘Bettie was out of step with what was a fairly conservative era, and she was also somewhat naive. But she was also a rebel. She walked outside of the traditional line. She thought bodies were beautiful and there was nothing wrong with being naked.’

(Interview by Miles Fielder)

I The Notorious Bettie Page is at Fi/mhouse, Edinburgh and selected cinemas from Fri 4 Aug. See interview page 17 and review, page 20.

22 THE LIST 3—10 Aug 2006

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