Mary Harron

Who She Is

Mary Harron was born in Bracebridge, Ontario, on January 12, 1953. Her father was Don Harron, the Canadian actor, comedian and author best known as Charlie Farquharson, and her mother was Gloria Fisher. Her parents divorced when she was six, and she grew up between Toronto and Los Angeles. Her first stepmother was the actress Virginia Leith, who appeared in Kubrick’s first film, Fear and Desire, and in The Brain That Wouldn’t Die. Leith’s brief, strange career partly inspired Harron’s later interest in Bettie Page. Her stepfather was the novelist Stephen Vizinczey.

She grew up on art films. From about age ten her biggest influences were Hitchcock, Bergman and Satyajit Ray, and after she moved to England at 13, London’s National Film Theatre added Lang, Hawks, Chabrol, Polanski and film noir. She read English at St Anne’s College, Oxford.

In New York she helped start and wrote for Punk magazine, and she was the first journalist to interview the Sex Pistols for an American publication. Through the 1980s she was drama critic for The Observer and a music critic for The Guardian and the New Statesman. She made BBC documentaries in the late 1980s, and in the 1990s she produced for PBS’s The Edge, where her Valerie Solanas project began as a documentary idea before producers pushed it toward a feature. She lives in New York with her husband, filmmaker John C. Walsh, and they have two daughters.

The Work, and What She Did in It

I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), which she directed and co-wrote, told the Valerie Solanas story with Lili Taylor as Solanas. It opened the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes, Harron was nominated for the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature, and Taylor won Sundance’s Special Jury Prize for acting. Harron called Solanas “a real piece of lost history.”

American Psycho (2000) is the centerpiece. Edward R. Pressman bought Bret Easton Ellis’s novel in 1992, and Stuart Gordon, David Cronenberg and Rob Weiss were all considered before Harron and Guinevere Turner started writing in 1996. They aimed for a satirical 1980s period film, not a gore film.

Harron cast Christian Bale. Lionsgate wanted Leonardo DiCaprio, reportedly offering him $20 million, and Harron wouldn’t even meet him. “He’s not credible as one of these tough Wall Street guys,” she said. “I did not want to deal with someone who had a 13-year-old fan base.” She was fired, and Oliver Stone replaced her. DiCaprio and Stone then clashed over the script and both left. Harron was rehired, got to cast Bale, and had her budget capped at $10 million. The film was made for $7 million and grossed $34 million. It premiered at Sundance on January 21, 2000.

Her defining choice was to shoot the murders from the women’s perspective rather than Bateman’s, which keeps the film a satire and not an exploitation film. It was made under pressure: protest threats in the post-Columbine climate and condemnation from the Feminist Majority Foundation. In Toronto, the group C-CAVE persuaded restaurants to refuse the production filming access. Willem Dafoe plays Detective Kimball.

The Notorious Bettie Page (2005), which she directed, co-wrote with Turner and executive produced, starred Gretchen Mol. Harron resisted making Page a symbol: “It’s a huge mistake to think of her as a conscious feminist heroine… She just followed her own path unconsciously.”

The Moth Diaries (2011), from Rachel Klein’s novel, is a boarding-school gothic with Lily Cole as Ernessa, which Harron calls a “gothic coming-of-age story.”

Charlie Says (2018), from Turner’s screenplay, came to Harron when the original director became unavailable. Matt Smith plays Charles Manson, but the film belongs to Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten in prison, reckoning with what they did. It premiered at the 75th Venice Film Festival.

Dalíland (2022), written by her husband, John C. Walsh, stars Ben Kingsley as Salvador Dalí and Barbara Sukowa as Gala. It was shot in Liverpool and premiered at TIFF.

Alongside the films she has a long television career: episodes of Homicide: Life on the Street, Oz, The L Word, Six Feet Under, Big Love, Fear Itself, Constantine and The Following, the TV movie The Anna Nicole Story, and every episode of Alias Grace (2017). She was also an executive producer of the documentary The Weather Underground.

Cool Verified Facts

• Her father wasn’t a minister, as some pages claim. He was Don Harron, the actor, comedian and author best known as Charlie Farquharson.
• She was the first journalist to interview the Sex Pistols for an American publication.
• Lili Taylor won Sundance’s Special Jury Prize for acting in her debut, and Taylor later turned up in Harron’s Six Feet Under episodes.

Signatures, Habits and Behind the Scenes

• The women in the story. Solanas beside Warhol, Page in the pin-up trade, the Manson women in Charlie’s story, and Bateman’s victims behind the camera.
• Research first. Her journalism and documentary training show in every film, all built from real people or close reading.
• A feminist who rejects the label for her films. “Without feminism, I wouldn’t be doing this,” she has said, but she doesn’t make anything ideological.
• Ambiguity over morals. “I’m not a moralistic filmmaker… I’m interested in ambiguity.”

Why She Matters

American Psycho is the rare adaptation that out-argued its book. Ellis’s novel was called unfilmable; Harron and Turner’s satirical reading, with Bale’s empty yuppie and the murders seen from the women’s side, is the version that lasted. She also paid for her casting instinct and was proved right: fired rather than direct DiCaprio, rehired when the star version collapsed, and vindicated when Bale’s performance made his career. Her path from punk writer to critic to documentary maker to director runs through every film. She takes the unfashionable person in the story seriously and makes films about real American monsters without making the monster the hero.

Related on Think Horror

• Christian Bale
• Willem Dafoe