Anna Biller on The Love Witch and how she crafts spell­bind­ing female fantasies

Los Ange­les-based artist Anna Biller brings an obses­sive lev­el of craft to her films. Since her 1994 debut she has made four shorts and two fea­tures: ​’70s sex­u­al rev­o­lu­tion pas­tiche, Viva, and The Love Witch. On all six films Biller has served as direc­tor, edi­tor, cos­tume and pro­duc­tion design­er. With the excep­tion of 2001’s The Hyp­no­tist, she writes all her own scripts. It comes as no real sur­prise, then, to dis­cov­er a brac­ing inten­si­ty to the hon­ey-voiced auteur, a feroc­i­ty beneath the tac­tile fem­i­nine styling of her films.

The Love Witch took sev­en-and-a-half years to cre­ate. It would have tak­en less time, says Biller, if after writ­ing the script she hadn’t suc­cumbed to a debil­i­tat­ing inner-ear infec­tion. Dizzy spells recurred for three years, forc­ing the shoot to be pushed back as she filled her time cre­at­ing cos­tumes and props. ​“It didn’t look like I would work again,” she reflects, ​“it was very bad for a while.” She is a com­mand­ing pres­ence who says the sad­dest things and then laughs. As we unpick the meaty themes of love, yearn­ing, beau­ty and unhap­pi­ness, it’s some­times hard to tell if she is refer­ring to the expe­ri­ences of a fic­tion­al char­ac­ter, wom­ankind as a whole, or her­self. Spe­cif­ic terms of ref­er­ence feel like cam­ou­flage. But then The Love Witch is already so exposing.

“It’s a dog whis­tle,” Biller says of the sto­ry of Elaine (Saman­tha Robin­son), a gor­geous witch whose desire for a man’s love has caused her to be brain­washed in terms of how she thinks, dress­es, behaves and seduces. The curve­ball is that Elaine is a witch capa­ble of killing men. How you read the inter­play of sur­face and sub­ver­sion is a per­son­al issue, but what is glo­ri­ous­ly, painful­ly sin­cere is Biller’s full-blood­ed depic­tion of yearn­ing for love. Here she dis­cuss­es The Love Witch, how beau­ty can lead to men­tal ill­ness, and that most elu­sive thing: a har­mo­nious relationship.

“Beau­ty is very seduc­tive for every­body. I want to cre­ate female fan­tasies and put them on screen to say that female beau­ty is not only a male fan­ta­sy, it’s a female fan­ta­sy as well. It’s lit­tle girls look­ing up to their pret­ty mum­my, or pret­ty girls in mag­a­zines, and say­ing, ​‘I want to look like that’. Women are the ones who look at fash­ion mag­a­zines, who con­sume images of beau­ti­ful women, much more than men do. I like cin­e­ma to be plea­sur­able and to cre­ate fan­ta­sy out of pain. The idea is that you’re cre­at­ing or expos­ing a painful sit­u­a­tion but doing it through beau­ty. In a way, it’s what Elaine is doing in the movie. She’s try­ing to seduce men in order to get them to under­stand her and love her. It’s the first step. Maybe that’s what I try to do with my films as well: seduce the audience.”

“It began as a com­bi­na­tion of pulp nov­el cov­ers from the ​’60s, which fea­tured a lot of both pow­er­ful witch­es and sexy witch­es, and also a cou­ple of noir films – espe­cial­ly Leave Her to Heav­en where there’s a woman who’s a sociopath and her prob­lem is that she loves too much. At that time I was also read­ing books about men and women that were coun­selling women to love a lit­tle bit less, because they were dri­ving their men away. All of these self-help books were telling women: ​‘Don’t call him. Don’t text him. Don’t love him because you’re push­ing him away.’ I thought it would be inter­est­ing to cre­ate a film around the idea that a woman’s love is so tox­ic it can actu­al­ly kill. It took me a real­ly long time to fig­ure out how to write the script. I want­ed the main char­ac­ter to have an edge. I thought she should be a sociopath and she should, in a way, be destroyed by the cul­tur­al val­ues that say love is tox­ic but that it’s fine to use women just for sex.”

“I wish beau­ty wasn’t so impor­tant for women. It’s because of how women are judged by men and oth­er women. If you’re beau­ti­ful you seem to have accom­plished some­thing. Some­times peo­ple are just genet­i­cal­ly beau­ti­ful and if they take care of them­selves, they remain so. It’s not real­ly that much of an accom­plish­ment, except maybe learn­ing how to dress and do your make­up. I was very close to some­body grow­ing up who became men­tal­ly ill because of being so beau­ti­ful and because of being so objec­ti­fied. She was des­per­ate to be val­ued for her brains, but she was also a bit of a con artist. She learned very ear­ly on that this was a way to get things for her­self, and she didn’t real­ly try to accom­plish any­thing because she knew she could get by on her looks. Had she been a lit­tle bit less pret­ty she would have had to devel­op oth­er tal­ents, and maybe she would have been bet­ter off. It doesn’t mat­ter how beau­ti­ful you are, you can be lone­ly and sad inside.”

“I’m not an expert in psy­chol­o­gy, but what I do know is that our desire for basic nur­tur­ing love devel­ops ear­ly. From the all-encom­pass­ing feel­ing of love that an infant feels for its moth­er, the ocean­ic feel­ing that ends up becom­ing lost. They’re try­ing to get back that feel­ing of uncon­di­tion­al love. Every­body is so busy with their lives that the only way to find that kind of love again is through a roman­tic liai­son. This is how soci­ety works, through monog­a­mous rela­tion­ships where it’s only ​‘prop­er’ to pour love into one per­son at a time. In some ways, I real­ly think women’s need for love is also a need for being pro­tect­ed, espe­cial­ly as, up until rel­a­tive­ly recent­ly, women haven’t been able to make their own living.

“The Love Witch is about how peo­ple project onto one anoth­er. Elaine is pro­ject­ing some­thing onto the men, which isn’t real­ly fair to them. She’s pro­ject­ing this idea that they’ll be her sav­iour and her hero. But they’re also pro­ject­ing things onto her that are just as tox­ic, which is that she’ll be their ide­al woman: some­one who’s always beau­ti­ful, always sub­servient, always pleas­ing them and serv­ing them. We all make these tox­ic pro­jec­tions and it is kind of trag­ic, but it’s just because peo­ple have their prob­lems and their deficits. Nobody’s per­fect. Nobody’s ful­ly emo­tion­al­ly and psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly intact.”

“I can’t speak for every­body. I think there are a lot of poten­tial­ly won­der­ful rela­tion­ships that can hap­pen, but it’s dif­fi­cult to achieve. My boyfriend [Robert Greene] is writ­ing about this very thing actu­al­ly: male and female pro­jec­tions onto one anoth­er. He’s researched hun­dreds of mar­riages in order to try to come up with exam­ples of great mar­riages in which peo­ple were sup­port­ive of one anoth­er, and hasn’t real­ly been able to find any in his­to­ry. It’s very one-sided his­tor­i­cal­ly in favour of men, so when it seems to be a per­fect rela­tion­ship, it’s com­plete­ly at the expense of the woman. Now that men and women are more equal, we’ll see some­thing dif­fer­ent hap­pen. But men and women are still not equal. We still make these pro­jec­tions onto one anoth­er large­ly because of gen­der equal­i­ty. As that evens out, we’ll see what hap­pens. I think things could get a lot better.”

The Love Witch is in cin­e­mas 10 March. Read the LWLies Rec­om­mends review.