Annie Clark is aware of the perils of dilettantism. Her cracked art rock is anything but—even at its most uncaged, the music she makes as St. Vincent is in-control, adroit, world-class. When we speak over the phone on a recent afternoon, though, she mostly doesn’t talk about her music. She talks about directing and co-writing a short film, The Birthday Party, which is part of a new female-driven horror anthology feature called XX.
“I know what you mean,” Clark says after I express some trepidation about artists working outside of their best-known medium. “It’s like when your friend shows you a picture and says, ‘I’m drawing now!’ and it’s something that might look really good if a 10-year-old drew it—but they’re 30.” But in Clark’s case, there’s no need to worry. The Birthday Party is not only competent, but funny, strange, and visually rich. It stays true to the unique mix of black humor and heart that marks some of her best songs.
The short stars the effortlessly relatable Melanie Lynskey (Heavenly Creatures, “Togetherness”) as a disheveled housewife named Mary who simply wants to give her anxious 8-year-old daughter a fun birthday to remember. Which happens. But not exactly as Mary planned. Because as she’s preparing for her guests to arrive, she finds her husband slumped over in his office chair, dead. Even so, the show must go on. What follows involves a rapping panda bear, a kid in a toilet costume, and a fair amount of Weekend at Bernie’s-style, lugging-a-corpse-around shenanigans. Based on actual events that happened to one of Clark’s friends, she says The Birthday Party is about “the idea of waking up with a body in the house and having to make—in a second—a big decision to protect your children.”
XX debuted at Sundance last night (January 22) and will open in theaters and on-demand February 17.
Pitchfork: This film depicts an 8-year-old’s birthday party that goes very wrong. Do you remember how you celebrated your own eighth birthday?
St. Vincent: Oh my god, yes. When I turned 8, we had the party at a putt-putt golf course that also had an arcade. So me, my mom, my sister, my step-dad, and my best friend Doug were on the highway to the party and we were behind a truck that had a bright pink sofa on it. All of a sudden, the sofa fell out of the back of the truck. My mom put on the brakes, swerved to miss it, jackknifed, and hit the guardrail on the left side of the street—we spun around across three lanes of Texas traffic to the shoulder of the road.
Luckily, no one was hurt, and we weren’t hit. But we were all in a state of shock. My mother is a very obsessive picture taker, so in her state of shock, she got out and started taking pictures of the car—I don’t know if it was to document the experience or for insurance purposes. But as she was taking the pictures, she stepped into an ant pile and was stung by a thousand fire ants and went into anaphylactic shock. She fainted and almost died on the shoulder of the road in Mesquite, Texas.
She went to the hospital and was OK. No one was hurt. So, I guess we proceeded to go play putt-putt.
Did that experience have an influence on this film?
Well, I have therapy tomorrow so I could have unpacked that then, but you helped me unpack it just now!
I read that you are afraid of horror films to the point of avoidance. Were there any scary movies that made a strong impression on you as a kid?
I remember seeing Full Metal Jacket when I was 6, and I will always have the image of Vincent D’Onofrio getting beaten with bars of soap and then subsequently blowing up his brains in the bathroom. But I can’t deal with violence of any kind. I don’t like to watch it. My mind will go obsessive and I won’t be able to stop think about these horrible things. But I do like dark absurdity—give me “Louie” any day. The Birthday Party is meant to be a black comedy.
Melanie Lynskey as Mary in ‘The Birthday Party’
What were some of your artistic inspirations going into this film?
When I was working with Emily Batson, the costume designer, on the robe that Mary wears, we found this one that was torn at the shoulder. Emily said, “Oh, we can get that sewn up before we shoot.” But I was like, “No, no, no. That’s Leonard Cohen. That’s perfect. That’s going in there.” And the neighbor’s hair is an homage to Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas—it’s almost perfect but not quite. And I took a lot of visual inspiration from a magazine of beautiful but absurdist photographs called Toilet Paper, including a shot that is the the absolute Magna Carta of the whole movie, which is someone’s feet sticking out from under a rug in an otherwise perfectly stylized room. You just go: Yep, that’s what life feels like a lot of the time.
Speaking of toilets, where did you get the toilet costume one of the kids wears at the end of the film?
They were all custom made.
You also wore a toilet costume during a performance last summer, was it the same one?
Yeah.
And during that performance, you played a gorgeous new ballad with the memorable line, “You’re the only motherfucker in the city who can stand me.” Will that song be on your upcoming album?
Yeah. I think that song will definitely be released.
You recently worked on a Rolling Stones cover with Kendrick Lamar collaborators Sounwave and Terrace Martin. Have you done anything with them for your new album too?
Um... I... OK, I’m trying to figure out the things I can say without getting angry emails from management, like, “What are you doing?!” Yeah, there are… um… I don’t think I can say anything. I’m sorry! I’m so excited about it, though. I’ve never been more excited about anything.
Now you’re just teasing.
No, I know, I’m sorry! I don’t mean it like that.
One more non-music question: Do you feel like you’ll direct again?
I would love to.