there's something about watching a film without its sound that feels almost confessional. like you're being let in on a secret the movie didn't mean to tell you.
this is how mary harron first saw the new 4k restoration of her 1996 film *i shot andy warhol*. she watched the playback after cinematographer ellen kuras had finished supervising it — no dialogue, no score, just light and color moving across the frame. "it looked amazing," she said, in a new interview with elissa suh published june 15, 2026. "you're just able to see ellen's beautiful lighting and the colors."
the film is coming back to screens now, thirty years later, and something about that feels right. not triumphant, exactly. more like a letter you wrote a long time ago that someone finally found.
harron first encountered the scum manifesto — valerie solanas's 1967 text — while working as a researcher on a warhol documentary. she found a copy in a left-wing bookstore. she described learning about it initially as "a kind of joke," something that floated at the edges of her obsession with warhol and the velvet underground. "this crazy woman had this manifesto. it felt darkly comic." but then she read the opening line — *"life in this society being, at best, an utter bore…"* — and something shifted. "i thought, oh my god, this is so elegant, like evelyn waugh."
nobody was saying that about solanas then. "nobody ever said she was a great writer," harron told suh. "nobody said she was funny." at the time, it was really only a small circle of radical feminists who even knew the manifesto existed. shulamith firestone's work was more widely circulated. solanas was a footnote, or a punchline.
harron met warhol twice. once at a friend's birthday party in the 1970s. once when she interviewed him at the factory. that second meeting is the one that stays with you when she describes it — warhol passing the interview off to brigid berlin about twenty minutes in, quietly receding, leaving harron with the impression of someone almost unbearably present in his absence. "what struck me most," she said, "was his incredible fragility and elusiveness."
jared harris plays warhol in the film. lili taylor plays solanas. stephen dorff plays candy darling. martha plimpton and michael imperioli are there too, in that particular mid-nineties way where the cast feels like a small miracle of timing.
the soundtrack has its own quiet history. lou reed denied harron permission to use velvet underground songs. so she turned to john cale, who composed the score instead. yo la tengo and pavement are also on the soundtrack — which, if you close your eyes and think about 1996, makes a kind of perfect, aching sense.
what kuras did with the restoration, harron says, was preserve something delicate. "the factory is this kind of dream world, but it's all realistic," she explained. "it looks both gritty and beautiful — but not too beautiful, which is important." that tension — between the magical and the grimy, between elegance and rawness — is maybe what the film has always been about. solanas herself lived inside that tension. her writing was sophisticated. her life was not given the same grace.
the publication that ran this new interview with harron also ran a spring 1996 cover interview with her, conducted by rose troche, right around the film's original release. thirty years between those two conversations. the spring 2026 issue features david lowery and chloé zhao in conversation on *mother mary*, radu jude on *kontinental '25*, and boots riley on *i love boosters*.
harron also directed *american psycho* in 2000. she has always been drawn to figures who exist at the edge of legibility — patrick bateman, valerie solanas — people the culture couldn't quite hold without flinching.
maybe that's why watching *i shot andy warhol* without sound first makes a strange kind of sense. you see what's really there, before the words arrive to explain it away.
[Original Source](https://filmmakermagazine.com/133852-interview-mary-harron-i-shot-andy-warhol-4k-restoration/)