"I'M DRAWN TO CHARACTERS ON THE EDGE, I'M DRAWN TO MISFITS", Mary Harron, Dublin, 23/2/2013

A report of the Q and A session with Mary Harron and Sarah Bolger after the screening on 'The Moth Diaries' (2011), at Cineworld for the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival, 23/2/2013

Carrie. Suspiria. Let the Right One In. Influences from other previous horror genre works are almost too easy to spot. Yet, Mary Harron insists that she was not influenced by other films. "There were paintings and photographs from the 19th century," she says. Someone even suggests similarities with her previous celebrated work, American Psycho, but there she does admits that both films explore ambiguity.

Yet, as the picture on the left shows, in a scene, one of the characters is showered in blood, in a shot that recalls Carrie very closely. Still, originality is not the forte of The Moth Diaries, a film about a haunted boarding school, which was received coldly by the audience in attendance. "A producer gave me the book," Harron says. "I fell in love with it right away. It reminded me of my own adolescence. The intense, crazy friendships and the break ups. The book was set in the 1960s, but I didn't want to update the look. I wanted to leave the modern world out of it, because being in boarding school is a little like being in a prison. The friendships and love in the film come from the isolation."

Lead actress and star on the rise Sarah Bolger agrees. "It represented the adolescence I had. Needing and wanted the other person, friendships verging on sexuality. This movie symbolises love, platonic love and the love for yourself."

Irish production company Samson Film was involved in the project, and Declan Quinn was director of photography. Sarah Bolger who had already worked with him on In America. "He was a really great presence on set. He's so creative," she says.

The Moth Diaries will not go down in history as Harron's best work, with films like American Psycho and I Shot Andy Warhol under her belt, but the famous director seems to have a lot of love for it, especially the idea of a film where virtually all the main characters are female. "The lack of a male protagonist made it hard to finance. The lack of a sex story. It's just easier to sell a male horror film. But I like making movies about characters on the edge. I'm drawn to misfits." On that note, she also adds, "filmmakers are always told to tell the audience what everything is and what everything means, to make everything very clear."

- Matt Micucci