Interview

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I Shot Andy Warhol rockets Lili Taylor, Jared Harris and director Mary Harron into their 15 minutes.

By a.d. amorosi

To say a film could claim "knowledge" of silent media-monger Andy Warhol and gun-toting prophet Valerie Solanas is absurd. It can only guess, dip. The docu-cine-slammer I Shot Andy Warhol is a concentric-circling toe-dabbing into the waters of pop art's ace flyer/manipulator and his doppelganging fierce feminist warrior/assassin -- or, in the words of Jared Harris (the actor playing Andy), the story of "two sexual misfits who didn't like what they saw in the mirror."

What ISAW sees -- obsession with fame, art, sex, guerrilla psychology, mental illness, attitude, '60s hairdos -- isn't very nice. The Factory wasn't nice, nor was 1968, the year of violence that gave us the deaths of MLK, RFK and Andy. ISAW's emotional bleakness is in constant battle with the bright tones of the pop era. As Solanas said in her groundbreaking SCUM Manifesto, the absolute basis for this film, "a degenerate can only produce degenerate 'art.'"

Sitting with the triumvirate most responsible for the film -- director/writer Mary Harron, the ubiquitous Lili Taylor (Solanas) and Jared Harris -- I hear commitment to the notion that fame is a killer, that art must be made at all costs but that freedom of expression isn't always free.

Jared Harris seems as uncomfortable talking about himself as Andy was, his wispy brownish hair made dramatic by silver rim glasses and a mischievous smirk.

"I honestly thought Warhol was a bit of a fraud. [But] once you get into it, you understand why he was revolutionary. He is the modern idea of what fame is. He did to himself what the old studio system did to its stars -- package it, make it accessible."

From the mountains of preconceived notions available on Warhol, Harris got his first taste from his director.

"I watched this documentary Mary did on him. He was so uncomfortable with himself. I didn't look like him but when I put the wig on I suddenly got tears in my eyes. Tears of regret, not just because he wasn't very good-looking but because I realized that's what he faced every morning when he looked in the mirror. He had such an appreciation of beauty, but when he looked in the mirror he didn't see what he wanted to see. Bob Colacello told me that after Andy died they found 120 different brands of beauty products in his bathroom: eye makeup, lots of skin stuff. He tried to look better, but it was impossible. I had a great deal of sympathy for him along those lines."

The emotional core of Warhol --"quite flat on the page save for monosyllabic grunting" -- was harder to plumb. Harris' nonverbal abilities (something he's acquainted with from noncommunicative roles in Wayne Wang's Smoke and Blue in the Face) allowed him access to twitches, bad posture and simple answers.

"I went to the Warhol Institute in New York to find footage on how he moved or reacted. I found one unlogged tape where Warhol is sitting in a chair posing for a guy in T-shirt and jeans with a pencil and pad in hand. The guy takes off his clothes and sticks the pencil up his ass and starts to draw Warhol's portrait. Now I'm looking at Andy, thinking if he doesn't smile, he's a robot. Nothing -- until the guy turned away and Andy sneaks a look at his friend and starts giggling like a kid. As soon as the guy with the pencil turned back, Andy was emotionless."

Harris is overjoyed at this, sniggering the same way Warhol must've. "It was an act. Once I knew that, it gave me license to put a mask on and take it off."

To create the master/servant scenario that made the Factory hierarchy unique, Harris and Taylor created a gully to work in that separated Andy from his minion while keeping the pumped-up spirit intact. "Lili and I sat apart from each other during lunch and other rehearsal settings. Before shooting began, we acted out a Factory situation at the actual space to get an atmosphere going. Everybody was talking sex, but it did nothing for me. I had to encourage them to get wild because Andy was a watcher, not a doer. "

"Everybody acted the exhibitionist. Ran around without clothes, spanked each other. To get Andy's attention you had to display yourself. He encouraged the outrageous: shooting up, etc. Ondine [played lispishly by Michael Imperioli] wasn't as interesting to Andy unless he was strung out on speed. It must've been an exhausting lifestyle, those long binges. But that was what inspired Warhol. The Outrage... As prince of the underground, he had to be in it as well as pinching as much as possible from them. That's what pissed Valerie off, the nicking of dialogue she spotted in his films."

VLAD TIDINGS

Jared Harris Lights Up Happiness

BY DENNIS LIM

Jared Harris is on-screen for no more than 20 minutes in Todd Solondz's new film, Happiness, but each one of his scenes is a model of pitch-perfect comedy. As Vlad, a rumpled, mustachioed Russian-йmigrй cab driver, Harris pulls off an alarmingly convincing feat of greaseball seduction, culminating in a showstopping rendition of "You Light Up My Life." It's all ultimately in service of Solondz's particularly merciless brand of satire, an approach that the London-born actor says he understands. "English comedy's cruel," he says. "I'm used to that. But I think there's a humanity to the characters here." Having previously worked with Happiness producer Christine Vachon on I Shot Andy Warhol, in which he played the artist himself, Harris says he felt compelled to sign on to Solondz's film partly because "Vlad is about as far as you can get from Andy Warhol."

After a childhood spent mostly in boarding schools, Harris-the son of actor Richard Harris-left England to study drama and literature at Duke University; following a brief stint at home with the RSC, he moved to New York. A few high-profile roles at the Public were followed by some colorful supporting turns in indie films (Nadja, Smoke, Dead Man). He's still mostly known for his uncanny Warhol facsimile in Mary Harron's Valerie Solanas biopic, though he concedes it was an odd kind of breakthrough performance. "Really, how many artists in white wigs can you play?"

The quirky character parts have earned him notice in Hollywood, but he says he's most commonly offered "a snarling villain of some kind. I remember one week a couple of years ago, I was called in to audition for three roles: a serial killer, the ghost of a serial killer, and a computer-generated serial killer." Still, Harris has since snagged his first lead performances-in Michael Radford's offbeat romance B. Monkey and Michael Almereyda's mummy movie Trance, both due out next year.

Not bad for someone who says he fell into acting because he was "crap at everything else. It's the last thing in the world my parents expected of me. I was really shy as a child. My father tried to dissuade me at first; he thought I didn't have the personality." On the subject of his father, Harris says, "It's not like being a Richardson or an Olivier, where that seems to help you get in the door. [My father] never hung around in London, so he didn't develop relationships within that world and he also didn't hang around in L.A.-he's a tax exile in the Bahamas."

Harris is forthcoming about his own reasons for not living and working in Britain. "If you don't look like Rupert Graves or Hugh Grant, they'll have you playing the gardener," he says. "I get the sense when I go back that if I wanted to work there again, I'd have to get to the back of the line, and I don't want to. Fuck it. I'm happy here. I'm staying if they let me."

The 36-year-old actor, who's not embarrassed to admit that he enjoyed working on Lost in Space, seems eager to get in on more big-budget action. "I think you can say snooty things about Hollywood if you don't go to Hollywood films, but I do. I love 'em. I'd love to be in a Jackie Chan movie, or in the new Austin Powers movie, or in a James Bond movie, just that one scene when all the double-0 agents are being given their missions...." He laughs and points at the tape recorder. "Put it in the piece...'Willing to sell out, no reasonable offer refused.'"