- Anna Biller is a writer and director who creates unique, female-focused, highly visual films. She has a BA from UCLA in art and an MFA from CalArts in art and film. Her first feature Viva played in film festivals all over the world and gained minor cult status, and her second feature The Love Witch won acclaim for its elaborate visual style and feminist themes, and has screened at numerous film festivals worldwide.
The New York Times called The Love Witch "a hothouse filled with deadly and seductive blooms;" The New Yorker called it "a metaphysical astonishment;" Film Comment said, "Biller's sharp film stands in stark contrast to the complacency and crushing safeness of the vast majority of independent films made in the US. Shot in 35mm, her film displays a technical mastery that is glorious to behold;" and The Austin Chronicle said, "Anna Biller has quickly established herself as one of the most exciting filmmakers of the past decade."
In 2017 she won the Trailblazer Award and Best Costume Design at the Chicago Independent Film Critics Circle Awards for The Love Witch, and in 2019 she was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. She is listed in a Rotten Tomatoes article as one of "The 21 Masters Of Horror Shaping The Genre Right Now." The Love Witch appeared on many 2016 best-of-year lists, and on Rotten Tomatoes it's ranked as the #40 horror film of all time.
- IMDb mini biography by: Anonymous
- Daughter of Les Biller and Sumiko.
- Retrospective at the 16th New Horizons Film Festival (2016).
- The first thing that I want is for the visuals to look great, sensual and colorful and for the sound to be great. You get more sophisticated when you learn more. You can make the artifice more and more and more subtle and combine it with a naturalistic approach. But it gets tricky. My first efforts are crudest. As I get better, it's going to seem more conventional. But conventions are fetishes for me. The more conventional I become, the stranger the films are.
- I'm less interested now in making the audience aware that they're watching a movie, but that's because I've been misunderstood a lot. I don't want it to be a joke. I'm very frustrated when people find my movies to be a joke, because of the artifice. They're real stories about real things. I'd like to take away that block. But I don't know if I can, due to my natural campiness and my personal tastes.
- Film is like sex. Film fulfills all my expectations, all my fetishes. Video doesn't satisfy anything for me. If I couldn't work on film anymore, I would just go back to painting or writing, or writing music. I'd just stop making films.
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