‘It’s not about heroes and villains’: the triumphant return of long-lost indie I Shot Andy Warhol

Director Mary Harron on her audacious ‘anti-biopic’ of Scum Manifesto author Valerie Solanas, who shot Warhol in 1968

On 3 June 1968, Valerie Solanas, the sole member of Scum (the Society for Cutting Up Men), entered Andy Warhol’s Factory, pulled out a .32-caliber pistol and fired three shots. The first struck Mario Amaya, an art critic, in the hip, the second lodged in a wall and the third pierced Warhol’s chest. Two days later, Robert Kennedy was assassinated, stealing airtime from the attempted murder of America’s most famous Pop artist. After the shooting, Solanas, as Warhol might have put it, got her “15minutes of fame”.

When police asked Solanas why she shot Warhol, she replied she “had a lot of very involved reasons”. That phrase recurs throughout Mary Harron’s 1996 directorial debut, I Shot Andy Warhol, which takes its title from another line in Solanas’s police confession and walks the viewer back through her life, while leaving the question of why she did it open to interpretation. Thirty years ago, it opened Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section, and today, the film remains one of the 90s’ most formally adventurous biographical dramas and has become a queer cult classic.
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