Anna Biller’s Pleasure Principles

Viva was shot on weekends, so I did the sets one by one. We’d shoot one weekend and then I’d spend the next month putting the next set together. I’d have everything ready to go, all of the props and furniture and draperies and carpets, and then get a building crew to put it together for a day or two. [The protagonist] Barbi’s house was built on a soundstage, with about two weeks of building.

The rest of the sets were built inside of locations, or we’d go into locations and heavily dress them. A lot of the furniture was gathered over the period of about a year when Jared Sanford [an actor and producer on the film] and I drove all over Los Angeles and its environs picking up couches and tables and dishes and vintage knickknacks and dishes and owls from Salvation Army and Goodwill, which we stored in his basement. We’d tie these giant flowered couches or bars or dressers to the roof of the car, a trick my dad taught me: two ropes and a blanket and a couple of slipknots, and you’re good to go! People would turn pale with fear when they saw us doing that, but we never had an accident.

Most of it was from vintage shops, but some of it I had to make because it was very specific, such as the red sequined dresses Barbi and Sheila wear, which were inspired by both Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and The Young Girls of Rochefort; Barbi’s outfit with the gold headdress; and a few other pieces, including a lot of the orgy costumes and some of the lingerie. I wasn’t able to find some of the vintage-style underwear I wanted, so I made some of it. Barbi’s peach negligee was made from vintage sheer nylon tricot and dyed. It had to be peach, and I couldn’t find a peach one, so I had to construct it. I also made some other negligees and some bras and panties, and I crocheted an orange bikini for Barbi. I think I wore thirty-two outfits in that movie.

We were lucky to get to shoot in a moated castle in the Hollywood Hills. The interior was very dark, all dark wood and suits of armor, and it had a white tiled floor that seemed too cold and clinical. So we carpeted it with red carpet and brightened it with Mod furniture and silver curtains. That whole scene and the scene after, including the apple shot you mention, were directly inspired by Camille 2000. I also used some of the music from that movie on the Viva soundtrack.

I chose gold for Barbi because I wanted her to look like Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra. The headdress was taken directly from one that Anna May Wong wears in Daughter of the Dragon. The rest of the orgy costumes were mostly just thrown together from what I thought people might wear to a mod orgy in a castle in the 1960s. Lots of chainmail, silver, gold, silk chiffon, fringe, partial nudity.

Yes, I sketched directly from The Harvey Girls. Also, I think I must have been inspired by Calamity Jane, because I saw it again recently and there were so many similarities. In those days you could go to all of the studio scene docks and rent scenery for really cheap. Those scene docks are all closed now, and the furniture in the prop departments is not really getting restored and replenished. The best scene dock was at Culver Studios, the old MGM lot. Most of the pieces in the salon scene came from there—the giant red-flocked walls, the bar, the saloon doors, the stairs. Most of the furniture and draperies came from the Warner Bros. and Universal property departments. I rented platforms for the stage from a place that just did platforms.

The main thing was just getting all of this stuff into the soundstage. We rented a U-Haul truck and hired two carpenters, and my coproducer Jared and the two guys and I would haul off this scenery into the soundstage. The walls were incredibly heavy, and the bar. I think the walls might have been the actual walls used in Gone with the Wind. Jared and I built plain flats in his apartment. We bought this awful fake-wood linoleum flooring, which we covered with sawdust to take off the shine. And there is this backdrop place in LA called Grosch where we got that sparkly turquoise curtain.

I had a floor plan and these two carpenters put the set together piece by piece. I’m not sure how we did it with just two carpenters and ourselves, but at the end of a month of building the carpenters were exhausted and we brought in a couple of painters to help finish. Creating the set was just a matter of studying the set of The Harvey Girls and putting all of the elements together one by one.

For the costumes, I looked at a lot of old westerns. I had a vintage sewing machine that didn’t have a working ruffle, so I had to do all of the ruffles by hand, including for the petticoats. I made the costumes from Victorian patterns that were 1/8 scale, and I blew them up on rolls of paper that I taped together to make them wide enough—yards and yards of fabric for the skirts. I also had a book on millinery that I’d had for years and made the hats in the traditional theatrical way, which was fun. The men’s costumes were easy—just 1960s and ’70s shirts, pants and vests from thrift stores, and rented cowboy hats.

I honestly can’t remember my exact inspirations for The Hypnotist. It was just an amalgamation of all of the 1930s movies I’d seen. I can see why you’re reminded of films like Blithe Spirit, because it’s one of the few movies from that period in color where you see all of that delicious green and peach and yellow of the era.

Most of the house was built on a soundstage, like Incubus. I designed the rooms for color—black, white, and grey for the living room, like a black-and-white movie; yellow for Beatrice’s room, green for the parlor, blue for William’s room. We also had a lavender set for mother’s room, but we hardly see any of that set, except in that sequence where Beatrice enters her mother’s room with a candle at night.

The entrance hall was shot in a real house in Hollywood, and the courtroom was shot on a standing set. Beatrice’s green beaded dress was inspired by a dress in the red and green Technicolor musical Follow Thru, but only loosely. I spent weeks beading that dress but only was able to finish the top part. And her white organdy dress was inspired by Joan Crawford’s dress in Letty Lynton. Some of her other costumes came from 1930s patterns I’d collected. I also love to match the colors of the costumes with the sets, the way they used to do in classic movies.

I conceived that set as a way of conceptually linking the beehive to the womb. She is the queen bee, and the hive is her womb, so I wanted it to be pink and ribbed like a womb. I made six cylindrical molds out of chicken wire that I kept in my art studio at school, and I made papier-mâché out of white tracing paper and water mixed with glue. I could only make six panels at a time, as it took a day for them to dry. I hooked them together with wire to create long panels, and hung them next to each other to create a wall, lit from behind with pink light. I made the stairs and round platform in my studio, but I was so stupid I didn’t realize that the eight-foot round platform wouldn’t go through the studio doors, so we had to pry it apart and reassemble it.

Playing the role of the queen bee, I wanted my costume to look like little eggs but also to be pink, so I found this wonderful, shimmery pink sequined fabric that looked like thousands of shimmery little pink eggs. It was the most expensive fabric I’ve ever bought, at 120 dollars a yard, but I only needed half a yard. For the male bees I just did yellow and black like regular bumblebees, but I made their wings out of black organza to make them more Busby Berkeley–like.

All on-set photography courtesy of Anna Biller.