Writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour is one of the most provocative filmmakers working today, but you might not realize it because her films also happen to be works of art worthy of a great deal of contemplation and discussion. Her previous feature, A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT, was a bold, stunning feminist vampire story, made all the more intriguing by having it set in Iran. But her latest, the grungy, ragged, nasty piece of work (in the best possible way) THE BAD BATCH, is more of an endurance test as it mines the possibilities of a society without rules, occupied by outcasts and undesirables.
Although we presume THE BAD BATCH is set somewhere in the future, it’s also very much about rounding up presumed bad elements and keeping them in a caged-off, armpit corner of America (in this case, somewhere in the Texas desert). I’m pretty sure there are people in power right now that would be fine with this type of law enforcement, and Amirpour has seen the signs and made a movie about life in such a place. I sat down with her recently in Chicago to talk about the film, her inspirations, and her love of film. She’s a raging cinephile, and she’s just as interested in the film you love as you are about what inspires her. Please enjoy my talk with Ana Lily Amirpour…
Capone: I love that there are things about this story that you don’t explain and leave open, including exactly what “bad batch” people are. To me, it seems like a genetic term for undesirables, which considering when you must have written it is pretty remarkable, especially since it’s coming out right now when that term undesirables is almost a little too in fashion. But talk about what it means to you, the bad batch designation, and how it seems relevant today.
Ana Lily Amirpour: Well, whatever it is that’s happening today was also happening then, and was also happening for the last eight years before then. I just think people choose to put their attention where they feel like putting their attention. I think we humans are really good at doing that, having blinders on, because the bad batch, as far as I can tell, has been around for as long as I can remember as people.
Capone: Well, that’s true. There are always people that get designated as either the enemy or just people we don’t want around here, in our country, in our neighborhood.
ALA: They don’t fit. There are also systems and social constructs that put people in different places for a variety of different reasons. You can go as extreme as bringing up like Hitler or you can talk about like religion. It’s not just even one thing. There are so many things that separate people and create these weird pockets.
When I wrote the script—and it’s funny to say it because it’s going to make it sound all like on-the-nose political, which it wasn’t meant to be—it came on the nose because this all happened, which is so strange, like you said. Because I observed all these people that would comprise as what we say…the idea [for the script] was that there was going to be this thing called “Take America Back Again” and the USRCS, which is this government institution that gets created, it’s on the sign, and it’s on the announcement you hear at the beginning. Everything is extremely thought out. USRCS was the United States Regulatory Correction Services.
So it’s this new, arbitrary, it’s like ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement]. It’s like something mixed between immigration and police, this new task force that does fittings to the cities, like you would do a fitting to a dress, take the space out, tighten it up. So they just start pulling out the easy ones to pull out, which are immigrants, get rid of crowded prisons by taking out the un-rehabilitatable inmates and the criminally insane people’ homeless people are some of the first things, just take them. Go down to downtown L.A., skid row, there’s thousands. Just take a bus and put them on a bus. Tag them. And in West Texas, there’s all this desert.
There was actually an observation in downtown LA, that area has been oddly empty. L.A. is such a booming, thriving, big city, but downtown has always been a ghost town until like five years ago, and downtown has started booming and getting developed, and skid row is the largest homeless community in the United States. They have a post office. It’s got this real infrastructure and history, and Tent City is down there. It’s in downtown Los Angeles. It’s still there, but now that they’re building all of these things you can see it getting affected. I spent a lot of time down there, especially when I was making the movie, and I just was like, “You just bring up a bus, load them on a bus, and take them out to another place. And where would that be?” Well, West Texas, there’s hundreds and hundreds of miles of desert. “Throw up a fence, it’s no longer the U.S., not my problem, and put them over there.”
Capone: Is that the thought that sparked this story, or did it start somewhere else?
ALA: It started somewhere else. It started with a girl in the middle of the desert missing an arm and a leg and bleeding, but alive and crawling inch by inch in who knows what direction, but was going to survive, because I had that image because I felt like that about myself and about life.
Capone: Felt like you were clawing your way out of something?
ALA: I just felt like we go through things in life. It can be a breakup, it can be someone dying, it can be losing your job, it can be moving to a new town, it can be all these things where you lose a part of yourself, your former self, who you were. We constantly define our personality, and suddenly sometimes violent changes happen, and you’re like, “Wait, now what am I?” and it feels like you’re missing something. For me, that’s how it feels.
At the time when I was starting that script, something like that was going on for me personally, and I felt like I was in the middle of nowhere in the desert, maimed, and my former self is gone, and now how am I going to go on? But I’m going to go on and I’m going to reacquaint myself with myself, and learn how to use my new form and figure out what that is, and then I was like, “So what’s the fairytale that allows this moment to happen?” because it is life that took her down. The situation, how the chips fall, what have you. It’s really arbitrary. It doesn’t matter. Weird shit happens to all of us. It comes out of nowhere. And like, fuck, you have to go on.
Capone: You’re hobbled, but you have to keep moving. I get it.
ALA: And you also need a little bit of luck. When she’s laying there, she keeps going, she’s going, and she’s on that skateboard, but someone does happen along. There are kind souls that pass through our existences, and we’re lucky for that, right?
Capone: I spent a lot of that movie trying to figure out why she was there. And I love that at the end of the film, and I don’t think I’m giving anything away, when she says to someone, “Can we hang out?” She’s so sweet. That’s all she wants. That’s really all she wants out of this existence, and it just broke my heart a little bit when she said that. But I feel like she was there because she had just hung around the wrong people in her previous life, so it really wasn’t her, it was those around her.
ALA: How can you separate yourself from your context? You know what I mean? Yeah, she had very, very specific and detailed backstory. But yes, your instinct is correct. It’s interesting too how, I can’t help it, I do love that you want to know. I feel like it’s so much more powerful to have people asking questions than just giving answers.
Capone: I do want to know, but I don’t want you to be the one to tell me. The clues are there, and I figure it out or imagine it somehow. It’s not your job to answer all the questions. The way the film opens and the way she gets her limbs hacked off so unceremoniously, it seems like a ritual—one arm, one leg, making sure to keep her alive. Where did you get the idea to have that be the way that this cannibals keep their victims?
ALA: Well, I was talking with my dad about it. My dad’s a surgeon. So when I was talking to him about how I’m going to do this, and in this world, some people are now eating people in order to survive, and how would be the best way to do that? You’re living in the desert and you don’t have refrigeration, and this [touches her leg] is a big piece of meat. How would you make it last the longest and how would that work? My dad is very typically, medically, matter-of-factly “This is how you would do it, with the most basic supplies. You burn and cauterize the blood that way, and you would be able to keep them alive for weeks.” [laughs]
Capone: I’m assuming the idea of cannibalism is meant, on a certain level to be slightly metaphoric, that we do find ways to consume each other’s vital energy, even now. I’ve seen the film described as being set in the future, but that doesn’t feel quite right. This is more like two weeks from now. Talk about did you have any sense of when these events were occurring?
ALA: Yes, yes, yes. Like I said, people chose where to look. Like, people are in La-La Land. Literally. You really think you’re living in a cozy, comforting place. And I have it too. We all do. Because I shot this movie three hours outside of L.A. in the Salton Sea. Slab City is a place in the desert where there’s a very large population—it’s like 20,000 in the winter because it’s too hot in the summer, and they migrate. The population is off the grid, people in the U.S. would just live out there in the desert. Some of them have solar panels and pretty elaborate setups. Some of them are living in vans and tents.
Capone: Were you able to hire some of those people to be extras?
ALA: That party scene is all Slab City locals. All of the background and in Comfort are 85 percent from Slab City. So when Keanu [Reeves] was giving that speech, when The Dream was giving that speech about, “All of us here, we weren’t good enough, smart enough,” it was this crazy moment when the crowd was responding to what he was saying. There was no direction. It was weird, because they were like, “Yeah, yeah!” They knew what he was saying, because it’s true.
Capone: They’re living it.
ALA: Yeah. So, yes. And I feel like you said, 20 minutes from now, or now. I just don’t think people want to look in certain directions, and it’s very easy to find distraction and not look. It’s no fun to look at that stuff.
Capone: I have seen Suki [Waterhouse, who stars as Arlen] in one other film before…
ALA: You’ve seen Suki? I never have. I didn’t know her.
Capone: How did you discover her? She’s amazing.
ALA: She is amazing. Oh my god, she’s amazing. In my first film, I wrote those parts for those actors specifically. I don’t like casting blindly. I like to have the DNA of the person in my mind, because how they talk and how they are becomes part of what it is. But I wrote Arlen, and she was like this allegorical archetype. I pictured a white-trash, Bridget Bardot type—like a Juliette Lewis-Bridget Bardot something. And like none of the young actresses give me any… Jennifer Lawrence is great, but she’s the only one, and she isn’t right. I just want to find someone new.
So my casing directors, Kim [Davis-Wagner] and Justine [Baddeley], are amazing, and they were sending me girls on tape. And they sent me the tape for Suki, and I didn’t know who she was at all; I just saw her on the tape and I was like, “Oh my god, that’s her. But I have to meet her and make sure.” She came into my house—I do callbacks in my house, I don’t like cold rooms—and was in front of me and did the scene, and I was just like… Because sometimes you do callbacks and say, “Okay, we’ll try this.” And then I was like, “What are you doing after? Let’s go get a drink.” Then I was like, “I want you to do the movie. You’re her, but you will suffer.” Talk about a hard role. Physically what she went through was unimaginable suffering, in that hot desert physically doing what she did. She’s just it. She’s like this wild, feral, beautiful…I just love her.
Capone: There has to be a point as an actor where you just give into it pretty early on, you have to stop fighting the heat and the dirt and the filth.
ALA: The first day shooting—we shot almost in order of the story, which is rare, you don’t really get to do that, but the locations were so separated—we were in the cannibal village first, then we were out in the desert, then we were in Comfort. The first day of shooting was her escaping. So the first day of shooting this movie, she’s crawling through the hot dirt with shit all over her. Fuck, it was like what Arlen goes through. It was like making this movie was a meta experience.”You’re actually going to go get pushed through the gate and suffer, but at the end you get to have a barbecue.”
Capone: Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure that Arlen and…is his name actually Miami Man [Jason Momoa’s character]? Is that what we’re calling him?
ALA: [laughs] You don’t know his name.
Capone: But the tattoo on his chest says that. They have both done something horrible to the other person, but they’re aware of it. She has killed this woman that he has some relationship with, and he is running the place where she got hacked up, but I don’t know if they’re ever aware of the other’s role in these things. That’s actually wonderful, a very Coen brothers thing where the audience knows more than anyone in the film. I kept waiting for that moment where one of them figures something out, and it never happened. Did you do that on purpose?
ALA: Yeah. I mean, ain’t that the thing, though, too? Like you don’t know what I’ve done, I don’t know what you’ve done. You know? It’s a trip. It will come out eventually, at least some things might.
Capone: I knew Jason and Keanu were in the film before I started watching it. I did not know Jim Carrey was.
ALA: I love that. See, that makes it even better.
Capone: In fact, I didn’t know it until the end credits that it was definitely him. It never even crossed my mind that it was until the credits. Were all of these people involved with this just off the strength of the last film? Do they just want to work with you?
ALA: Yeah, and the script. When Jim read the script, if you look at it on the page, it’s a small part if you just do numbers—this many scenes and no dialogue. But it’s a huge part. Like I said, every character in a film, no matter how small, in my mind when I make a film is the main star of their own movie, which is overlapping with this film. So the hermit, if he wasn’t in this place, she would be dead, and he would be dead.
Capone: I was going to say, every time that he appears, somebody’s life changes, always for the better. So yeah, it’s a huge part.
ALA: He’s a kind human soul inside of this crazy, crazy fucked-up world and he saw that, and he related to it. And I think he also related to the fact that, there’s something so parallel with being the dirty homeless man that you ignore at every street corner. He’s invisible to people, to like Jim Carrey, who everybody recognizes on every street corner, but no one really sees who he is. That was one of the things I talked to him about when we met. I feel like there’s such a connection. It’s like two sides of the same coin in a way, and he just is the hermit in a way.
Capone: It’s good to see him doing something, anything.
ALA: That’s what I’m saying. It’s a very specific thing to go through to be Jim Carrey. He is a cultural phenomenon, decades strong, and then that can also become an encasement that you can’t get out of. Actors, all of them, no matter who they are, every single one that I’ve talked to wants to disappear in a role, really disappear. So how cool is that that you literally didn’t know?
Capone: I didn’t. Even Keanu, just putting that mustache on him changes his face completely.
ALA: Yeah, I know, right?. It’s the first time he’s had a mustache in a movie.
Capone: With the two of them, they made very different movies coming up in the world, but if you’re of a certain age, they were two of your heroes, if you were watching popular films.
ALA: Yeah. Anyone in the ’90s was just like the best.
Capone: Were you attune to them in the ’90s?
ALA: Of course. POINT BREAK. I also really loved THE DEVIL’S ADVOCATE. I fell in love with Jim, really fell in love with Jim, in LIAR, LIAR and THE TRUMAN SHOW. This man, who’s a burning, raging fire of creative energy, and it found this perfect place in movies. The perfect pairing for his physicality and humor in an awesome story. I love THE MASK, too.
Capone: That’s raw energy. I also love what he did in MAN ON THE MOON.
ALA: Oh my god. That’s insane. And ETERNAL SUNSHINE.
Capone: You’re hitting all my buttons here. You made a film about a vampire and a film that includes cannibals. You’re hitting all the wonderful horror/exploitation film categories. What were the genre films that you grew up loving?
ALA: I was honestly more into fantasy and sci-fi. I wasn’t so much into like the straight horror, although I did go through a very saturated horror phase when I was very young—like from 9 years old to 13 or 14. I was watching every horror movie. I was very young, and I binge watched it. Now, I just have no interest in straight horror. THE NEVERENDING STORY was one of the first films that completely seduced me. I completely wanted to be in Fantasia. The Nothing felt like a real thing, and the Swamps of Sadness, it really took me away. I was very, very young, and it gave me the first feeling of really vanishing. BACK TO THE FUTURE 2. You can go somewhere, go on this whole adventure, journey; THE PRINCESS BRIDE to some degree. Donner’s SUPERMAN.
Capone: Really?
ALA: Yeah, I love his ice cave.
Capone: Yeah, the Fortress of Solitude. We should talk about Westerns, because this film is all about that.
ALA: Oh, yes. I watched them with my dad, and my dad loves Westerns, and also cop crime/adventure movies—DIRTY HARRY, and BULLITT. But I remember sitting next to him even at 10 years old, watching ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST.
Capone: My dad was the one who introduced me to Clint Eastwood Westerns. I was hypnotized.
ALA: It is hypnotic! It’s weird, if you’re young and you get to watch them, even if you don’t understand everything, it’s primal. It’s simplistic. It’s just survival—man against man. Watching DIRTY HARRY, there’s a lot of talking and cops and the modern, civilized world, but there’s something primal about a Western. It’s faster. You just want the loot; it’s like Animal Planet. It’s like watching Animal Planet. What’s your favorite Western?
Capone: The one I’ve probably watched the most is THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES.
ALA: Oh, that’s my dad’s favorite Western!
Capone: And I just found out that in the next few weeks, they’re re-releasing UNFORGIVEN.
ALA: That’s one of his favorites too. I love UNFORGIVEN too. You like those naturalistic Eastwood. Did you see HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER?
Capone: Oh, of course. I’ve seen them all. All of Eastwood’s, for sure. But then I also love John Wayne’s last one. THE SHOOTIST?
ALA: I did not get into John Wayne. My dad loves John Wayne. So you weren’t as much into the Sergio Leone kind of pop stuff?
Capone: No, I definitely was.
ALA: What’s your favorite Sergio Leone?
Capone: THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY. It’d have to be.
ALA: I think FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE is my favorite.
Capone: I would have said A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS, but I love YOJIMBO more.
ALA: Kurosawa, sure.
Capone: Since we’re talking about older film, I wanted to ask you if you’d ever seen a film called NADJA.
ALA: I never saw it, but David Lynch executive produced it, right? Like a black-and-white vampire film? Is it good?
Capone: It is very good. I feel like if you watched it you’d go, “Oh, wow.” And the actress, I don’t really see her around anymore—Elina Löwensohn.
ALA: Yeah, it’s been on my list a long time.
Capone: It’s not similar to your film in terms of the story, but just in terms of the approach, there’s a lovely symmetry. I know you’ve done something for the National Geographic channel?
ALA: Yeah, it aired and it’s on demand. They replay the episodes. It’s [the series] “Break Through.” It’s a series that they do about scientific and medical topics, and I did a piece about T cell immunotherapy to treat cancer. It’s crazy, amazing, mind-blowing shit. These doctors are basically taking T cells out of people’s own immune system, reprogramming them genetically, and then putting them back into your body in late-stage cancer people who basically have been through chemo, through radiation, and then it came back, did it again, but the doctors tell you there’s no more treatment, “We can’t do it again.” So they now have no option. Because this is new, and it hasn’t yet fully become like available where they can use it as a widespread treatment.
So these people who are like stage four, you have no other option, did it, and they did this to their T cells, put them back in, and in literally two weeks fixed it, kills all the cancer cells. It’s like an immunization. You know how you get a shot for certain things? This is more like that because those T cells, they reprogram and stay inside your body, so when those cancer cells start to come back, they continue killing while they’re in your body. It’s crazy, because it’s like, “cancer” is the shittiest word. I don’t know a single person who it hasn’t touched and affected them. And nobody wants to hear it, and it’s like, when do you ever hear happy news with the “C” word in it? This is the future of treating it. There’s a new thing. These doctors are like next-level heroes, and it’s a new thing. And I did animation and made cancer into this big animated monster.
Capone: See? You can’t get away from genre work. I’ve got to ask you about your choices of pop songs in this movie, because I know if I woke up with my limbs missing, in what I would consider a version of hell, it would definitely have a soundtrack by Ace of Base.
ALA: [laughs] Yeah, but that song, that particular song, is iconic as fuck, okay?
Capone: It is for me too, but not in the way you’re thinking. I’ll get behind Culture Club [which is also featured prominently in THE BAD BATCH] any day.
ALA: Culture Club is Culture Club. But we’re talking about the song, I didn’t really know any other Ace of Base song, so I couldn’t tell you what any other song by Ace of Base was, but I remember that song [“All That She Wants”]. It was such an important song and moment to setup this character, and if you’ve ever listened to the lyrics of that song, which are so bizarre, it was oddly, perfectly fitting, because it’s like, “She leads a lonely life, all she wants is another baby,” which ties into the end with the dream and all the babies. I was like “Maybe Ace of Base made this song years ago not even knowing it was going to tell the story of the BAD BATCH lead character perfectly.”
Capone: I’ll give you that. But, oh my god, I never liked that song, which makes it perfect for that moment in the film—a fever dream of hell.
ALA: [laughs] Now you like it.
Capone: Well, I understand it might have one more purpose than I thought it did before I saw this movie.
ALA: Exactly. That’s what I’m saying.
Capone: Anyway, thank you so much. It was really wonderful to talk to you.
