UCLA student Ana Lily Amirpour is in Park City at a film festival and just saw Paul Giamatti.
“At the screening we went to, he was just hanging out in the lobby,” Amirpour said. “He’s really cool.” However, she’s not at the Sundance Film Festival, but the Slamdance Film Festival, the other festival in town that originated as a reaction to the perceived commercialization of Sundance, and she’s having a great time. “It’s got a really warm, down-to-earth vibe. Sundance … is a totally different ballpark.”
Amirpour, a current graduate student in screenwriting, is at Park City not just for networking opportunities with famous character actors like Giamatti but to promote and represent her short film “Six and a Half,” which is an official selection of the Slamdance Film Festival.
Amirpour, like many graduate students in film, wasn’t directly funneled into graduate work in film by her undergraduate work. She received her undergraduate degree at San Francisco State as an art student and went to work as an art teacher and at galleries while later moonlighting in a band. After a while, her chosen profession began to lose some of its allure.
“Art, paintings, movies … what it comes down to is you’re trying to tell stories,” Amirpour said. “The fine art, the painting felt dried up to me. I think film is the medium of our time. It’s the most used mode of communication; it’s how we express and relate to each other.”
With this new realization, Amirpour continued in her art-related jobs, but began writing stories and scripts in her spare time. “I wrote one feature, and I wrote my second one, and I said, “˜This is awesome. I want to make movies,'” she said.
Amirpour applied to multiple graduate schools for programs in film but eventually set her sights on Westwood. “UCLA made me an offer I couldn’t refuse,” she said. “Plus, you kind of have to be in LA.”
Despite her screenwriting emphasis and lack of resources in UCLA’s screenwriting program, Amirpour struck out on her own as both a writer and director to produce “Six and a Half.” “They don’t let us have access to the directing program. I feel it’s the biggest weakness of the department. … I think that even if you don’t want to direct, making a film from page to screen is a huge experience. It will change how you write when you know what it’s going to be,” Amirpour said. “It’s a young program, and I love absolutely every professor I’ve had, so I think that the program has potential to evolve.”
“Six and a Half” is a short film that tells the story of a little girl who tries to catch a frog in a pond, with somewhat unexpected results. Amirpour had carried the idea for the film in her head for some time and was able to knock it out in two days of shooting with help from other UCLA students after finding the right girl for the lead.
“When I was little I was really into catching frogs and lizards and exploring all the potential hazards and weird things in the world,” said Amirpour. “And childhood has a really dark kind of side to it that most people don’t want to touch, so I kind of wanted to go there.”
While Amirpour eagerly awaits the crowds at Slamdance to see her film, which screens multiple times during the festival, she’s also developing her first feature film, “The Stones.”
While she grew up in the United States, the Iranian-American Amirpour made a trip back to Iran when she was 19 to visit her cousins and other family members and was inspired by their way of life. “It was this very bizarre, surreal experience. If my mom and dad hadn’t left, I would’ve had this completely different life,” Amirpour said. “There’s this huge population of young people there that learns how to be teenagers just like anywhere else in the world but they have to hide it, because there are consequences there.”
With that trip in mind, Amirpour wrote the script to “The Stones” back in her clandestine script days. She submitted it to the BlueCat Screenplay Competition, judged by writer-director Gordy Hoffman (Philip Seymour’s brother), who has since taken on a producing role for “The Stones” after Amirpour’s script won the competition.
In the meantime, Amirpour hopes to get the word out. “Really what I hope is that people will see it, and want to know what I’m doing next.”