Since its debut in the NEXT section of the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, the self-proclaimed first Iranian vampire Western “A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night” has received a lot of positive buzz from genre fans. The film was shot in black-and-white, with California posing as Iran, and the actors speaking Farsi. It’s been hailed as confident and fresh—proof that vampires can still be strikingly seductive post- “Twilight” and “True Blood.”
The best thing about the film is that it heralds the arrival of a young and powerful new female director, the formidable Ana Lily Amirpour (featured on our Best Of 2014: The 20 Breakthrough Directors Of The Year list), whose magnetic personality is on display in a new Vice documentary on the making of ‘Girl,’ her feature debut. Amirpour, who is of Iranian descent, was born in England and grew up in Bakersfield, Calif. She cites influences from David Lynch to Sergio Leone to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video, excitedly boomeranging between ideas and styles that inspire her. It’s easy to see how she convinced Elijah Wood’s production company SpectreVision to sign on as the producer of ‘Girl.’
Wood, who also makes an enthusiastic appearance in the doc, founded the genre-focused SpectreVision (formerly The Woodshed) in 2010 with writer-director Daniel Noah ("Max Rose") and director Josh C. Waller ("McCanick"). Here, he describes how the black-and-white and Farsi elements put this movie in the “too weird” category for most producers, yet placed it in the “catnip” category for him and his company.
If you haven’t seen ‘Girl,’ we promise that just hearing Amirpour gush will tempt you to check it out. Watch below.