Bijou Phillips in 'Dark Streets'

Bijou Phillips, who is just recovering from being “vegan”, is slightly sick the morning of the premiere of her new film, a fantasy-noir musical directed by Rachel Samuels called Dark Streets. She’s the biggest star in this indie production. Bijou is a smaller, more animated and higher-pitched version of Elizabeth Banks, or maybe a blond Parker Posey. But Tinkerbelle-sized. Bijou has recently appeared in the horror films Venom, Hostel II and the Wizard of Gore remake, and will be in the upcoming Its Alive remake. She plays the lovelorn femme fatale Crystal in Dark Streets, who desperately tries to win back the attentions of her lover in a seedy noir nightclub where no one can trust anyone else. Bijou shares her thoughts on the jazz and blues of the 1930’s and whether or not Hostel II and other horror films like it are actually degrading to women in this exclusive interview with us…

Fire Walk with Me is her favorite movie, and there are definitely some Lynchian elements to Dark Streets in the colors, shady characters, and noir sentimentalities of the actors.

When creating the strong and demanding Crystal, a character with lines like, ‘That new little pony of yours – she’s riding you’, Bijou looked to noir icon Lauren Bacall as an influences on this role.

“She’s so hot. She’s so amazing. She doesn’t care, and I don’t necessarily think my character is anything like her, but she’s got the whole noir vibe of underplaying things, and I wanted to try to achieve that as much as possible. It’s not about the hysterics and the whatever – it’s the reserved emotions.”

Dark Streets has amazing music and crazy choreographed dances. It all takes place in a downtown nightclub (city probably Los Angeles circa 1930, but who knows for sure?) where the women are loose and the men are all crooks and true love never wins out when someone has a dime to make.

Bijou, a singer and songwriter since she was 17, got to sing her favorite kind of music and perform in an eerily beautiful world from long ago. It was “Unbelievable.” She says. She loves Billie Holiday and jazz music and anything with a blues riff, just like her numbers in Dark Streets.

“When I was little and I was in NY and I was 16, I would walk through the streets, I had this like long trench coat, and I would listen to Billie Holiday on my little walkman.  I’d have it in my pocket and I’d have my headphones and that’s all I listened to and I’d walk through the streets. It was like the only tape I had. I learned every song by heart and it was just such a big part of who I was. I listened to it when my father passed away. Just getting to do this and be a part of this and make this type of film. In my minds eye its exactly what I wanted to do when I was younger, Making this movie; its singing and its dancing and its jazz and this feeling- I always wanted to do this. So getting to make this movie, it was literally unbelievable. And it was so unbelievable for my mom. My mom was just sitting there with tears, for us. Because it was the kind of thing you would never except to be able to do when you want it so bad.

When Hostel II came out in 2007, the initial poster featuring Bijou standing naked, holding her own severed head, gathered such huge criticism from feminist journalists everywhere that the studio (Lionsgate) was actually forced to take it down due to pressure. Bijou thinks these women sucked.

“That poster’s like for the guys, to say, ‘I know it’s a chick flick, but come see the movie’”, she defends the poster. “But the majority of the movie, it’s a chick movie. It’s a girl’s movie. It’s an empowering movie for women.”

As far as the totally crazy reaction that ‘feminists’ seem to have about ‘Torture Porn’ (movies like Hostel, Captivity, and Saw in which excessive torture defines the type of horror) she thinks they’re all nutso.

“Hostel II is the farthest thing from degrading to women,” she explains. “Hostel II is the most empowering movie to women I’ve ever seen as far as empowering movies to women go. You know, Lauren German cuts the guys balls off in the movie… I guess Heather’s scene and my death scene could be torture porn. I don’t know, I mean, no one’s getting fucked in the movie.”

She continues, “My only comment would be never say anything unless you have all the facts and those women obviously didn’t have all the facts or they wouldn’t have said that… Torture movies have been around since the beginning of movies. It’s not like these people invented something. I just think that people get bored.”

One of Bijou’s favorite websites is Showhorse.com, where you can virtually buy and show your own horses! She uses it as an example of how she feels about people posting ideas and even articles about Hostel II and her poster that make huge generalizations and sweeping assumptions about the nature of horror movies.

“These people on the site itself [showhorse.com] get bent out of shape on what goes on on this site. At the end of the day you’re thinking, ‘it’s a website. It’s a game on a website. Like, Really? Like, you’re this upset that you’re crying on your blog?’ People think because they’re writing or going online that it’s a free-for- all - that they can say whatever the fuck they want to say. Things that they would never say in person, or that they would ever even write in a letter to someone or say over the phone. There’s just this other rule when people think that they can say whatever the fuck they want and there’s no consequences. It’s pretty scary, because you tend to think that an entire group really thinks this way about the world. But if you really confronted these women, they probably wouldn’t even admit to writing these articles. And if you talked to them about it they would probably break and change their tune within a minute or two.”

Dark Streets (www.darkstreetsmovie.com) is directed by a chick and it comes out on Dec 12^th . Go see Bijou, she’s great! And Its Alive will be out in the next few months as well.