Director's Dream -- ''Mi Vida Loca'' Was Inspired By Young Women In The 'Hood

Hot-weather months are supposed to be testosterone-loaded at the movies, but there are plenty of exceptions this summer.

Gurinder Chadha's "Bhaji on the Beach," which has just opened at the Harvard Exit, deftly explores the assimilation of Asian women in England. Michele Ohayon's outstanding documentary, "It Was a Wonderful Life," which opens Friday at the Varsity, deals with the plight of six unlucky women who find themselves living in cars or on the streets.

Now Allison Anders, director of the prize-winning 1992 movie about mother-daughter relationships, "Gas Food Lodging," is weighing in with a movie about friendships and rivalries among Hispanic women involved in gangs.

A dream project

"Mi Vida Loca," which opens Friday on another screen at the Varsity, has been a dream project for Anders for several years. When she visited the 1992 Seattle International Film Festival, she was just about to go into production.

Her script was inspired by the intense young women she'd met near her neighborhood in Los Angeles - one of whom died shortly after filming was completed. Anders, who now is raising the woman's child (the filmmaker has two teenage daughters of her own), said she wants to keep the boy's identity confidential.

"She was in jail when I first met all the girls," said Anders during her visit to this year's festival. "She was an amazing person, tough and pretty and stylish. Her boy looks exactly like her. If any of the other girls had died, there'd be . . . other family members to take care of him. That wasn't possible in this case. I at least had something to offer."

The movie concentrates on young women who usually outlive the boys and men in their lives, becoming mothers and widows by 16. It originally was written as three separate stories, but Home Box Office, which co-produced it with Cineville, persuaded Anders to combine them into one narrative. (An HBO special, "The Making of `Mi Vida Loca,' " plays at 10:45 a.m. Thursday on HBO's Cinemax.)

"I shot it and edited it as one story and it didn't work," she said. Preview audiences were confused and couldn't sort out the girls' identities.

"At first I thought it was a racist thing," said Anders. "How could they think this girl is this girl? But people couldn't keep track of the characters, so we had to pull the film apart, reorganize and do a little reshooting."

An Oscar-winning film editor, Richard Chew, was brought in to help. Ironically, after several discussions with Anders, he asked her if she'd ever thought of doing "Mi Vida Loca" as three separate stories.

"I like the idea of getting inside a bunch of people's heads," she said. "Each of these characters has her own grief and pain. I hope the audience doesn't lump them all together and lock their doors, but empathize."

Her original plan also included using non-actors, but the project kept getting bigger. She ended up using professionals in most of the leading roles ("There wasn't a Latino actor I didn't see") and less-experienced performers in supporting parts.

Anders got her start making Super 8 films to impress Wim Wenders at UCLA film school. Among those early efforts was an homage to "Alice in the Cities," her favorite of Wenders' European films. Eventually Wenders hired her as a production assistant on "Paris, Texas."

She then went on to co-direct the 1987 cult film, "Border Radio," with Dean Lent and Kurt Voss, and made her solo debut with "Gas Food Lodging." She had planned to follow up "Mi Vida Loca" with "Paul Is Dead," a script inspired by her teenage obsession with Paul McCartney. But Hugh Grant bailed out of playing McCartney, and that made financing difficult.

"The problems appear to be insurmountable," said Anders. "They want someone bankable, and they don't care whether he looks McCartney. We had an amazing cast - Hugh would have been great - and we had great cooperation from McCartney.

"I found out through rumors that Hugh wasn't going to do it; it was pretty devastating. I thought we were great friends. I'll just have to put the picture on hold until I've got enough power to do it the way I want."

Instead, she's thinking of doing a film about 1960s girl groups called "Grace of My Heart" - and considering a move away from L.A.

"L.A. is definitely getting to me," she said. "I haven't done many other festivals with this film. It's hard for me now with the little one, because I can't go two days without him. But I love this festival; coming to Seattle is my last moment of peace before the next picture. I want to get this film out and be in preproduction on something else."