If you’re like us, you’ve probably wondered what famous people add to their carts. Not the JAR brooch and Louis XV chair but the hair spray and the electric toothbrush. We asked filmmaker Anna Biller — who just published her first book, Bluebeard’s Castle — about the anti-anxiety bed for her cat, the music software that lets her moonlight as a composer, and the costume book she uses as a reference for her films.
It’s a classic red. They keep changing the formula, but this is my favorite so far because it’s a little bit matte but also a little bit glossy. It’s kind of just perfect. It’s like a ’40s classic red, movie-star lipstick. It moisturizes my lips, so I don’t have to wear any lip balm. When my lips get dry, I just use more lipstick, so I go through it pretty fast. I have it on all day, and it stays on really well. I don’t even really need a lip liner, except when I’m trying to look more professional. It’s amazing. It’s almost like it’s part of my body or something.
House of Foxy makes reproductions of vintage dresses. It makes patterns by taking apart vintage dresses, and they’re really good at fit. They’re expert tailors, and the dresses are not really that expensive. They are lined and fit beautifully. They also use the most beautiful fabrics. This dress is a really nice rayon crepe, kind of like the rayon crepe they used in the ’40s. I think this style in particular is flattering on me. It’s a perfect length. It’s a little past the knee, and it’s gathered under the bust and low-cut, so it’s good if you’ve got a little bit of a chest. This wine deco dot pattern can go day or night, and you can dress it up or down. I have five of them in different prints.
I’m not normally a scent person, but I was in New York once and running through Bloomingdale’s, and they were shoving the sample at me. I tried it, and I was like, This is great. It’s not too strong. It doesn’t seem fake at all. It’s really a great fragrance. I’ve had women come up to me and say, Oh my God, that’s the best scent I’ve ever smelled. What is it? It’s really good, kind of subtle, and doesn’t overpower. It just smells like good, expensive perfume. It’s lovely.
There’s just so many great classic foreign movies that I want to watch on there, especially all the Japanese movies: all the Kurosawa, the Ozu, the Naruse, and the Mizoguchi. Before this channel existed, I would buy a box set of Mizoguchi, but then $60 later it became really expensive to watch these movies. To have them all there to screen anytime is quite incredible.
He’s one of my favorite directors. I especially love Peau D’âne (Donkey Skin). I used to have it on VHS. The films are incredible. They’re so beautiful and so colorful, and they did such a great job in putting together the set. I love having it. I love The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, I love The Young Girls of Rochefort. I love a lot of his films, but I think Donkey Skin is my favorite because it’s a fairy tale and I just really love fairy-tale adaptations. Donkey Skin is very dark. It’s like Bluebeard. Her father wants to marry her. His wife has died, and now he’s looking for the fairest maiden in the land. In the meantime, his daughter grows up, and she looks just like his wife. She’s the only person he wants, so she has to flee with the aid of a fairy, and she has to wear a donkey skin to disguise herself. It’s really crazy because it’s about incest, and the film really doesn’t shy away from the weirdness of it. There’s all these songs. Her fairy godmother sings to her about why girls don’t marry their papas, because she’s like, “Well, he’s my father and I love him. Maybe I should marry him.” And the fairy godmother has to sing the song, scolding her and saying that’s not right. Very bizarre movie.
I’ve been doing costumes for years. My mom’s a costume designer, and my grandmother made period costumes too. I grew up watching them and taught myself. My grandmother went to fashion school, but my mom didn’t. She was self-taught as well. I do a lot of period stuff, even for my short films. I’ve done 19th-century Victorian and also the ’30s. This is just a really great reference, especially for the medieval period for The Love Witch. I have a bunch of costume books, and this is my favorite. I’m doing a medieval movie now, one based on a Japanese ghost story set in medieval England, so I’m sketching from this book again.
We have this very nervous cat, Jacques, and the reason he’s nervous is because we got another kitten that grew up and became a giant 18.5-pound bully. Jacques spends a lot of his time burrowing under the covers and being really stressed out. This is called an anti-anxiety bed, and we didn’t believe it would work, but it really works. It’s the only thing that got him out from hiding under the covers. Now he’s out, he’s confident. He’ll knead it and purr for the longest time. He’ll plop down in it and sink really far down so just his eyes are peeking up. It’s so cute. He’s a tuxedo. And he just absolutely adores it. It’s actually been like therapy. It’s interesting. It’s like if a child has their comfort blanket. We got one for the other cat, and he loves it too. They each sleep in their little bed at night.
It’s just great to not have to carry around a whole stack of books, especially when I’m traveling. It’s amazing because you can be standing in line somewhere and also reading a book. When I was a kid, I used to read a book walking down the street with my family — I just wanted to shut out the world. I was always reading. I’m still kind of like that. I still prefer reading the real book, but when you’re out of the house or traveling, it’s like having a library with you. I like the Kindle Oasis because it’s bigger and more like the size of a book. It’s not so tiny. It has a nice big screen and everything, so it’s good for my eyes. What I really love is being able to make the text bigger or smaller. If you’re in low light or your eyes are feeling strained, you can make the text really big, and that feels so relaxing.
I’ve been writing songs for years, and I used to try to write them out on staff paper, but the problem is you can’t hear anything back unless you’re really, really talented. If you’re doing a counterpoint, you can’t play it. I took an orchestration class in college, and my pieces were really strange, because you have to have years of theory to be able to write well. But on Finale, I can write a line and then I can write another line. I can hear them together. You can hear 10, 20 lines together, and you can hear the way the instrument will sound as well. It also goes red when you go out of the instrument’s pitch range, so you don’t have to learn all the pitch ranges of all the instruments. Basically you can completely cheat. You don’t have to be a trained arranger or orchestrator, and you can actually write full orchestral pieces, which I’ve done on Finale. I did some of them for The Love Witch. I was then able to bring them to an orchestra. I’m doing that again for this new movie. It would be better to learn the old way, but I don’t have time. Music isn’t my first discipline at all. Again, I’m self-taught the way I am with costumes. I’ve only taken a few music classes. It gives the amateur a way to be a real composer, so I just love it.
I was going to make it as a movie, but I had problems getting it going for several years. Then the pandemic hit, and my partner suggested that I just write it as a novel. So the next day, I sat down and started writing, and I just wrote a thousand words per day and got it done. I’ve always loved the story of Bluebeard because it’s like a horror fairy tale, and I’ve always been interested in dark fairy tales. I used to read a lot of Poe when I was a kid, and I liked scary stories. As a filmmaker, I started getting interested in how the woman-in-peril movie from the classic Hollywood period morphed into the slasher film and how, for me, all the fun went out of it at that point because so much of it is from the killer’s point of view, and it’s about sadistic, male voyeurism. I was feeling nostalgic for the old women’s pictures like Gaslight and Rosemary’s Baby and Rebecca, these movies where you’re in the woman’s point of view. The reason I never made my Bluebeard movie and why it was so hard to get made is because it is based on female fantasy, on a feminine form of filmmaking that hasn’t been made in our modern era.
It was my goal to try to bring back female fantasy in movies. What’s interesting is that there is nothing like that in movies right now, but there’s a lot of it in books. So writing it as a book felt like I was joining a community of lots and lots of women who are writing gothic novels. When I was writing the screenplay, I was doing some reading, but I was mainly watching movies. And then when I started writing the book, I read every gothic novel in sight and some romance, too. I looked at lists of the best, most famous gothic novels ever written. I read every one of them and more. I was reading books that are about people having psychological breakdowns, like Diary of a Madman, or women’s plights being hard and harrowing as in Tess of the d’Urbervilles and House of Mirth. I also read Dragonwyck and enjoyed that. My book is still scary. It’s still gothic, it’s still dark, but it’s about female fantasy. My idea was to go into why women are afraid of violent men, and to make the Bluebeard character really scary psychologically, like a real gaslighter, a real demon.
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