When a filmmaker has no money, geography is usually destiny. If you are shooting in California, your film looks like California. But in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Ana Lily Amirpour executes a masterful act of geographic illusion. She shot the “first Iranian vampire Western” not in the Middle East, but entirely within the bleak, industrial oil towns of Taft, California.
The Anamorphic Disguise
Amirpour bypassed the ruinous cost of international shooting by weaponizing her camera. Working with cinematographer Lyle Vincent, she utilized anamorphic lenses and aggressive, high-contrast black-and-white photography. By stripping the color from the California desert, she removed its recognizable identity.
The mundane oil derricks and empty streets are filtered through the visual language of German Expressionism and Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns. The cinematography does not document the real world; it forces the real world to conform to the fictional, desolate geometry of “Bad City.”
Linguistic Authenticity
To complete the illusion, Amirpour committed to absolute linguistic authenticity. Despite being shot in the United States with an American production crew, the dialogue is spoken entirely in Farsi. This cultural dissonance—American industrial landscapes combined with Iranian New Wave sensibilities and pulp horror tropes—creates an atmosphere that is completely untethered from reality. Amirpour proves that you do not need millions of dollars to build a new world; you just need to know how to creatively distort the one you are standing in.
Insights regarding the use of Taft, California as a stand-in for Iran and the anamorphic black-and-white cinematography were synthesized from various production breakdowns.