Andy Warhol may be one of the most oft represented celebrities on film. The latest to portray him is Guy Pearce in Factory Girl. While the film centers around one of his "muses," Edie Sedgwick, Pearce fully embraced the role of Warhol.
Interview: Guy Pearce on Factory Girl
"All the research that I did, certainly in my mind superceded my perception of the other performances that I’d seen," said Pearce. "I felt like they were kind of different perspectives on Andy anyway. Bowie’s is the ‘80s and it’s after he’s been shot, Jared’s is during that period with Valerie Solanas, and the interesting thing about Harris’ Andy Warhol I think, which is great for the film, is that you don’t kind of really get inside Andy too much, which I think helps us as an audience feel Valerie’s frustration with him. I guess that justifies shooting him [laughs] to a certain point. And Crispin, his moment in The Doors, it’s such a trippy kind of thing anyway, so I felt like they were all different."
Like Miller, Pearce relied on recordings made by Warhol of his conversations and other research materials. "I knew about the film in April I think, so I started reading and looking at documentaries and doing all the research, and then we shot in November, so I kind of had a good six months to really play around with stuff. There’s so much material to use, there’s so much footage, and there are many, many more hours of footage out there that I didn’t even get to see. So, I think using these audio tapes were a great help."
Factory Girl
The magic of Hollywood took care of Pearce's look. "He had a condition when he was a kid, a nervous condition but it affected the pigment in his skin, so he kind of became this weird translucent looking ghost in a way. And he would also apply make up. I think in the film you see me pop some make up on. So there were a number of things that we did to try and get us closer to Warhol’s look."
All of his research gave Pearce a unique perspective on the artist he portrayed. "I think he probably worked a lot harder than people realize. You go to the warehouse, Vincent Fremont/Warhol Enterprises, and you go to the warehouse and you go, ‘Okay, so he did a lot of work.’ And even though you see him on film, a lot of the time if they came to interview him and he was just sitting back on a couch kind of doing nothing, when the cameras went away, he got all the screen prints back out and he worked, he was a workaholic. But I do think he had a particular perspective on the world, I think he was so insecure about his own look and his own background, his own sort of history, that really he had such a fantasy about the life that he wanted to live, and the glamorous life that everybody else seemed to be living. On one end of the scale you had movie stars, and on the other end of the scale you had either drug addicts or politicians or just anybody walking down the street."
Factory Girl has a wide release this Friday, February 2nd.
For the poster, trailer and more movie info, go to the Factory Girl Movie Page.
Stay tuned for updates.
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