My Fantasies as a Filmmaker

When I first started making narrative films, I came up with the goal of trying to create a cinema of visual pleasure for women. I had to go deeply into my fantasies, and explore what was sensual and exciting for me on the screen. What were my most primal film fantasies, and where did they come from? Were the images I adored from films degrading to women, or was that notion a cultural stereotype?

I gave myself carte blanche to explore my fantasies as they really were, and to see if I could create a new kind of cinema that wasn't based on older, entrenched models. I didn't worry about what the fantasies were too much. I decided just to use them and see where it led.

I found myself watching movies avidly, and picking up common threads in the ones that excited me. Certain perfomers--Mae West, Marlene Dietrich, Jennifer Jones, Joan Crawford, Catherine Deneuve, Liz Taylor--were especially thrilling. Backstage stories with musical numbers played to my deepest fantasies, especially if the musical numbers were surreal and works of art in themselves (Busby Berkeley, Von Sternberg).

I loved costume dramas, anything gay nineties, Belle Epoque, or Egyptian. Movies about people of color were really exciting, like Carmen Jones, Green Pastures, or the films of Oscar Michaux, or Japanese, Indian and Mexican cinema. And I loved fairy tale movies.

Putting all of this together, I started to realize that to fully enjoy a movie I needed first of all a strong and beautiful woman to identify with, secondly great art direction and costumes to satisfy a general aesthetic sense and also to support the character's glamor, and thirdly a story that was a satisfying framework for the character and her psychology. This could be a fairy tale, a pre-code movie, a rags to riches, royalty, or stage-life story. And I liked seeing different races, different kinds of faces on the screen.

I set out to literally enact these fantasies on the screen, and did it with several shorts. While most people loved the shorts, some people found them to be opaque. As it's never my intention to be opaque or inaccessible, I listened to some of the comments I got, and tried to accomodate the audience in terms of what they said they needed.

For instance, I had made this incubus movie without any sex or nudity in it, and this lead to people asking for something more racy, some nudity, something more extreme, something sharper, more violent. I had never considered putting any of this in the movie, as it was styled after The Harvey Girls, Horror of Dracula, Johnny Guitar, movies that would never contain those elements. But I realized that a lot of the people watching it didn't know those old movies.

So I set out ot make a more "modern" movie, from a time people know and can relate to, and I hit upon the sexploitation movies from the 60's and 70's. This clicked into place because I discovered a "woman's" director from this genre, Radley Metzger, who made "classy" movies where the women were strong, beautiful, glamorous, the sets and costumes were fabulous, the stories were taken from literature and were women's stories. Thus, VIVA was conceived.

But although VIVA comes from a woman's fantasy life, some men really love to be let into that world, where they get to learn about how a woman thinks, what she wants. It's sexy for them. If you read sex books from the 60's, for example, you will see that half of them go deeply into female psychology: will she strip or won't she? What are her fears and fantasies? Because at that time, it was sexy for the male to get into a woman's mind as well as her body, especially if she was "that kind of girl." This was in contrast to their wives, who used sex as a bargaining tool for marriage. They wanted a girl to be in love with sex, to think about it as much as they did. So, in order to to create the fantasy for the male, you had to have it there in the female as well. How times have changed! So in a weird way, having VIVA be about my fantasies makes it also about a male fantasy from another time.

I've had some new ideas lately though that don't come so specifically from cinema as from Japanese comic books. (All from a woman's perspective, and containing all the necessary elements of fantasy and glamour). That's a new source of inspiration for me, and makes me realize that the fantasies don't have to come from movies, they just have to be spectacle-oriented and "girly."