When Mary Harron made I Shot Andy Warhol in 1996, she was looking back at New York in the late 1960s. Thirty years later, the film feels surprisingly current.
Revisiting the movie on It Happened in Hollywood, Harron discusses a story that touches on many of the issues dominating the culture today: fame, identity, grievance and violence.
Part of that comes from her subject. Long before social media, Andy Warhol understood the value of attention. His Factory was full of aspiring actors, artists and personalities competing to be seen.
“He took his own desire for fame and he saw it in others,” Harron says. “People want attention.”
The film’s main character, however, is not Warhol. It’s Valerie Solanas, the radical feminist writer who shot him in 1968. Harron became fascinated by Solanas after reading the SCUM Manifesto and realizing there was much more to her than the headlines suggested.
“I thought, this is a brilliant person. She’s really incredibly funny. No one has ever said she was brilliant or funny. She’s just discarded as a lunatic,” she says, adding that Solanas felt ignored and shut out of the world she wanted to be part of.
“She felt like she was silenced,” Harron says. “She felt people were controlling her life and she got very paranoid.”
The movie — currently out in a new 4K restoration via Janus Films — also explores questions of gender and identity that feel strikingly familiar today. One of its most memorable relationships is between Solanas and Warhol superstar Candy Darling. Looking back, Harron says there was “a sort of ideological conflict” between their views of identity and biology, a debate that remains very much alive.
The conversation also looks back at the making of the film itself. Harron recalls spending years researching Warhol’s world and then suddenly finding herself inside it.
“I wanted to uncover the story of Valerie Solanas and bring it to the world. And I wanted to be at the Factory in the mid-’60s,” she says.
After rebuilding the Factory for the film, she remembers sitting alone on the famous silver couch and taking it all in.
“‘I’m actually at the Factory. We created it,’” she recalls thinking. “It rose from nothing around me.”
Harron also discusses casting Jared Harris as Warhol, working with Lili Taylor on her acclaimed performance as Solanas and why Stephen Dorff turned out to be the perfect choice to play Candy Darling (her original wish had been Leonardo DiCaprio).
Thirty years after its release, I Shot Andy Warhol remains one of the most creatively successful films ever made about Warhol and his circle. What stands out today is how many of the questions it raises about fame, identity and belonging still feel relevant.
Listen to the full conversation with Mary Harron on It Happened in Hollywood.
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