St. Vincent calls ‘Nowhere Inn’ her ‘acid trip art film’
When it came time to make a movie, Annie Clark, who’s better known by her stage moniker St. Vincent, knew what she didn’t want.
“I wanted to make some kind of a concert film, more like a straight-ahead doc,” Clark recalled earlier this week. “But then I started thinking about the logic of a musician concert doc and I realized that it was still going to be a musician sculpting the narrative, saying what the audience could and couldn’t see. And then passing it off as ‘truth.’
“And I was like, Well, if we’re going to be playing with the truth anyway, let’s just go ahead and script it and get out these bigger themes that we want to talk about in a way that actually is more truthful.
“You sometimes need,” she decided, “to do absolute truth through artifice.
“So I asked Carrie (Brownstein of the rock trio Sleater-Kinney, a close friend) if she would help me write it. Then it just became this meta-movie within a movie.”
“The Nowhere Inn” has Clark playing versions of herself as Brownstein attempts to direct a documentary. Band members and Dakota Johnson appear.
Defiantly nonsensical, “The Nowhere Inn” is, Clark said, “an acid trip art film that talks about friendship, that talks about artifice, that talks about an audience’s expectations, that talks about the pitfalls of believing your own hype.
“It just tries to ask and answer some questions about what we want of artists.”
The most striking sequence is when Johnson suddenly appears in what looks like a 1950s fantasy boudoir with Clark. Both are in peekaboo black lingerie as they discuss their “romance.”
“I didn’t even know I was gay,” Johnson announces.
“Dakota is a friend of mine and I just asked her if she would do it. I like to think there’s also this meta thing when we really first see Dakota she’s in what could be from (the S&M movie) ‘50 Shades of Grey.’
“We’re certainly referencing my romantic past, which was covered in the press in an intense way,” Clark said of her reported affairs with Cara Delavigne and Kristen Stewart. “So we’re definitely playing with that.
“We’re all having a laugh — a laugh at ourselves. With just the cravenness for me of going from being a sweet person to someone who’s so obsessed with career that it could be, ‘I know. I’m gonna make a sex tape!’” and she laughed. “It’s just like, oh God.”