Despite the somewhat lackluster response to Ana Lily Amirpour’s latest film “The Bad Batch,” it’s hard still to shake the excitement that her first feature, the 2014 feminist, vampire, western film “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night” inspired in us. The film demonstrated her ability to build a vast and detailed world while also creating characters that we could root for and engage with, all the while creating some iconic imagery. “The Bad Batch” seems to have lost some of that initial spark, with our critic calling it a film “that frustratingly contains a good, or at least a fun movie, without actually being a good, or a particularly fun, movie.” Nonetheless, her’s is a cinematic voice worth watching.
Recently, she spoke to Rian Johnson, a director who, in his beginning stages, also worked with more bizarre conceits in films such as “Brick” and “Looper” and has a little thing called “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” coming out later this year. They sat down for the Talkhouse Podcast to discuss their careers, experiences thus far, and more. Some of the highlights include the two talking about their mutual love of director Terry Gilliam and his film “The Fischer King,” a film Johnson said was one of the first he went back to revisit in theaters, Amirpour talking about shooting “The Bad Batch” in 28 days, much to Johnson’s shock and her shock that Johnson was the sole writer for ‘The Last Jedi.’ Amirpour also mentions how her relationship with Twitter has “changed over the past few weeks” and how impressed they are with celebrities who are able to engage with push back or politics. Intriguingly there’s also a mention in the podcast about how Amirpour already has a draft of her next project.
The mutual appreciation is clear in the conversation and makes for a very interesting and enlightening discussion between the two filmmakers.