Annapurna Sriram's riotous directorial debut Fucktoys has been screened at Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, bringing its hallucinatory blend of grindhouse aesthetics, punk energy, and a personal feminist subversion to the largest Czech film gathering.
Drawing from the chaos of post-capitalist America, sex work, and occult iconography, the film follows AP, a dominatrix cursed by a psychic and launched on an absurd, color-saturated quest through the industrial underworld of Trashtown.
Shot on lush 16mm, Fucktoys draws equally from the anarchic lineage of John Waters, the sensual excess of Russ Meyer, and the narrative spirit of the Tarot’s Fool’s Journey, though, as Sriram reveals in our conversation, that structure emerged purely by accident. In this conversation, she opens up about her DIY filmmaking process, the politics of pleasure, the lack of “smut for girls, by girls,” and what it means to claim space in a cinematic tradition built by men but now being reimagined on her own unapologetic terms.
Your film uses a lot of occult imagery and metaphors, tarot, rituals, curses. These kinds of symbols used to feel niche or underground, but now they’re everywhere, almost mainstream. What drew you to the occult, and why did you want to weave it into this story?
Annapurna Sriram: You know, it really didn’t come from that directly. It actually started before I wrote the script, when I was just talking to psychics. In America, therapy is really expensive, especially if you don’t have health insurance. So I think turning to a medium or psychic is this very basic, almost primal way of dealing with anxiety. Just like some people turn to religion or therapy.
The movie actually came out of this call I had with a psychic. She told me to dump my boyfriend because he was making me sick. And then I dumped my boyfriend. I was so shocked that I’d ended my relationship because of a psychic. It felt absurd and funny, and I was like, “Oh my god, I’m heartbroken. What did I do to my life?” That was kind of the seed of the film.
And then after I wrote the script, well, I was never really into tarot. I always had a little fear, or superstition. I didn’t want to mess with anything dark. I didn’t want to accidentally pull a card that would, like, fuck things up. Because I do think those things can plant seeds in your head. I’m the kind of person that, if I pull the wrong card, it’ll actually manifest in some way.
The Death?
Actually, the Tower is the bad one. You don’t want that card.
But after I finished the script, someone who’s really into tarot read it and told me that the movie follows the Fool’s Journey. I’d never heard of the Fool’s Journey before. So I looked it up and started reading about it, and I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is exactly the structure I used.” That archetype was just naturally there.
It’s not like the Hero’s Journey or a traditional three-act structure, you know, Save the Cat, break into two. My movie had this vignette style that I couldn’t quite define at the time. It felt more like Pee-wee’s Big Adventure that kind of narrative flow. And then I found the Fool’s Journey and thought, “This is it.”
And of course, Alejandro Jodorowsky uses the Fool’s Journey a lot in his work. I love Jodorowsky. So that connection made sense to me.
Where does the connection to Grindhouse come from?
I wanted to make something like sexploitation, like Russ Meyer, but from a different perspective. I grew up with Ken Russell, Gregg Araki, John Waters, but I always wondered, why is there no camp made by women? Why isn’t there camp for girls, by girls? Or smut for girls, by girls?
So I wanted to make something sexploitation-inspired, but through the female gaze. And I mean that in a holistic way, where everything is beautiful, everything is sexy. The shots are beautiful and feminine, the camera work is feminine. Every aspect has that female gaze touch.
Because I am a kinky person. I’m a smutty pervert! [laughs] But I was like, “Where’s my place in all this?” So much of it is made by men. Or it’s stuff like De Palma films, which are full of sexuality, but it’s clearly his fetish. Or Tarantino, it’s his fetish.
I thought, we need to have girls making our own smut, for us, from our perspective. That’s part of why I leaned into this kind of 70s Grindhouse, 60s New Wave feeling. All those older films I loved... they were all made by men.
That’s where the iconography comes from?
Yeah, exactly. And then once I locked in on the Fool’s Journey, I started thinking about how to build the world of Trash Town. There are so many directions you could go. Trash Town could look like Sin City, or Mad Max, or Strange Days. There are endless post-apocalyptic references.
But I’m from the South, from Nashville, Tennessee, so I wanted it to feel like the South I knew growing up. That sort of nostalgic Americana. Sweaty, green, overgrown, abandoned buildings. Weird little refineries. So I used the Rider–Waite tarot cards as my color palette. That helped me hone in on a design and visual structure for the film.
It also connects to movies like Diva, and those 60s films that use a lot of primary and pastel colors. I really wanted to lean into that nostalgic palette. And in the movie, every character is a different card. Every scene is a different card. So when I worked with my production designer, we built a kind of tarot deck. I told them, “Just pull from the card. If you’re stuck, look at the card. Are there pomegranates? Put pomegranates in the shot. Is it the Judgment card? There are cherubs? Put cherubs in the donut shot.”
This was during pre-production?
Yeah, during pre-production. I said, “Let’s use the tarot as our map. When in doubt, look at the cards. That’s our inspiration.” So that’s how the iconography came into being.
I really like that you pointed out how all those Grindhouse B-movies were originally made by men. The situation’s changed. So maybe just to follow up, how was your experience, originally, as a woman? Because you were the actor, and also the director, you were wearing a lot of hats while making FUCKTOYS.
Yeah, and that actually wasn’t by design. Originally, I just wanted a job as an actor. When I was living in New York, well, I think not being a white person in America is still tough. A lot of the acting opportunities I got as someone who’s not white were like: “You can play the Muslim girl,” “You can play the doctor,” “You can play the girl in a headscarf.”
Did you ever play the doctor?
No. I mean, if I were going to play a doctor, I might as well just become a doctor and make real money.
But in real life, I was living this very sexually liberated life. I worked in a club, I was involved in BDSM, I was in this other world where I felt completely accepted. Sometimes fetishized, yeah, but I was okay with that in certain contexts.
So I felt like I wanted to create the “brown girl Brigitte Bardot sexpot.” That was my mission. I wanted to make a movie for other people like me. And I’m from Tennessee. Growing up there, I didn’t really experience that much racism, not in the way I did in the industry. As an actor, it was always, “You can be this, but not that.” You can’t be the hot girl. You can’t be the sexy girl. You’re the nurse. So I wanted to break those stereotypes.
When I met my producer Timothy Petryni, we spent a few months talking. We were trying to find a director, but after a while he said, “I think you’re the director.” And I said, “No, I’m not a director. I didn’t go to film school.” And he said, “Yeah, but it’s all in your head. And I don’t think we’ll find a director, especially not for this budget, who gets what you’re trying to do tonally, who understands your references and your style. And ideally, this film should be directed by a woman. Best-case scenario, a woman of color. And that’s an even smaller pool.”
So with his encouragement, I went into what I call my DIY film school. I was like, “I need to learn about cameras. I need to learn about lenses. I need to learn about shots. I need to watch a bunch of movies.” We got all these books, shot-for-shot guides, cinematography books. My cinematographer Cory Fraiman-Lott and I worked during COVID, and we actually test-shot the entire movie on a camcorder, just the two of us, in an Airbnb. I was behind the camera.
I wanted to test-shoot everything, shot list it all, make sure it would cut together. I even considered not acting in it. But they were like, “We don’t have the budget to hire another actor. And if you’re in the movie, at least we know you’ll be on set, doing what’s in the scene. You’re not going to be a diva.”
What were some of the major takeaways from test-shooting the whole movie?
Oh my gosh. Well, I got to block the scenes using other people. I wasn’t acting in those test shoots. We just had like four people playing all the parts, and I could stage the scenes and figure out how we’d shoot them. Because when you’re on set, there’s no time to explore. But during those test shoots, we had the space to create ideas, get on our feet, move chairs around. “This is the diner,” “We’ll stage it like this,” “Let’s try that.”
I was behind the camera, so I could really see: What would this shot look like? How could we stage this movement? That gave me a strong sense of what I wanted. Because on the actual shoot day, when I’m in the scene, I won’t have the luxury of watching every shot. But if I’ve already walked through it with my cinematographer, if I’ve seen the frame and how it moves, I’ll know what to expect.
We even imported the camcorder footage into Premiere and cut it together, just to see how the scenes flowed. Like: “Is this redundant?” “Do all these shots feel fresh?” “Does this transition work?” It became a kind of rehearsal. The only rewrite we did later was for the very end of the film, we had to do one day of reshoots for the final sacrifice scene.
But we built this incredibly detailed shot list. I don’t know if other directors do this, but we had tiers. Like: if we have our dream day, we’ll get these eight shots. If we have limited time, we’ll get these four. If we only have time for one shot, here’s the one we’ll do.
So I built this hierarchy of shots, and that way, in the moment, I’d already know which ones I could cut without losing the core of the scene. And honestly, just for my peace of mind, that was huge. I was never on set melting down. I was like, “Okay, we’ve prepared. We only have 10 minutes, great, we’ll get this one.”
And since you didn’t have much time during the actual shoot, how did you know how many takes to do?
Good question. We shot on film, so already I was like: three takes, max. I’ve been an actor for many years, and in the last few years, so much of auditioning is self-tapes. So I’ve directed myself a lot. And I know for me, my first or second take is usually the best. After that, things start to get a little stale. The first take usually has the most spontaneity.
So I knew for my own coverage, I could usually get it in one or two takes. There are even shots in the movie of me where we only had one take, and I just knew what I had to do, and I did it. And then we moved on.
We also did rehearsals. A lot of my actors were New York theater people. What they did in their audition tapes? That’s exactly what they brought to set.
I’m a huge advocate for working with trained, professional, seasoned actors. They show up on set, and take after take, they’re just perfect. They know their lines. They’re giving you different versions. Like the couple at the party scene with the second psychic—they brought so much personality, so many choices. It was just like, “Let’s do it again and try something new.” And in the edit, all their takes were amazing. It was just about picking which version to use.
So we were really specific in the casting process, making sure we got the right person for each part. Not someone I’d have to push or shape too much. If I saw something in the audition, I needed to know they’d bring that energy on the day. Working with Sadie [Scott], my co-lead, was great because they were in New Orleans with us the entire month. We had a lot of time to run scenes together and go through notes beforehand, so on set, it wasn’t the first time they were hearing those directions.
Same with François [Arnaud]. He’s a good friend of mine, and while he was in New Orleans, we met up and ran our scene over and over. He tried all these different versions, and then on the actual shoot day? We only needed two takes. He was so prepared. So I really think prep is everything. You can never prep too much. Prep wherever you can, you can never prep too much.
And why did you shoot it in New Orleans?
Well, I wanted to do it in the South. And in America, we don’t have any national film funding, every state has its own tax credits. Louisiana has a really competitive tax credit: it has one of the lowest spend requirements for one of the highest percentages you get back.
And since we wanted it to look swampy and sweaty, Louisiana was the best state with both the right look and the incentive. That’s why we chose it. And honestly, I think it looks incredible. We filmed all around, not really in New Orleans proper. We shot outside of New Orleans, in Baton Rouge, and a little further north.
So it has this kind of “unplaceable” quality. It’s less obvious where exactly we are in America. In my dream version, I wanted it to feel like Springfield from The Simpsons, sort of like everywhere and nowhere. Just “America,” broadly.
But given that the movie has more budget, isn’t that kind of a logistical nightmare to juggle?
Oh yeah, it was insane. Twenty locations is totally insane. In my head, I thought it would be cheap, because I figured, “Well, we’re only at each location for a day or two, so maybe we can get a low rate.” And that’s true to an extent. But the amount of work it took to move the crew around? Total nightmare.
And this was during COVID, and there was a huge hurricane in Louisiana, Hurricane Ida. Plus Omicron hit, and Mardi Gras happened during our shoot. We were just constantly slammed with chaos. We had a running joke on set that we were cursed, like, every day, something new would go wrong.
But the film has that chaotic energy, it kind of works.
Right? [laughs] We shot over the course of a year, with multiple units. And what was good about that, because the schedule kept changing due to COVID, or an actor would get sick, we could push people to different units.
I could also watch the footage. Since we were shooting on film, we had to drive the film every week from New Orleans to Atlanta and back to get it developed at the film lab. That’s like a seven-hour drive. We’d send someone every week to do what we called “a roundie”, go there and back in one day. We were just too nervous to mail the film. What if someone scanned it or mishandled it? We didn’t trust anyone to understand how valuable it was, so we always hand-delivered it.
Because we shot in separate units, I could review the footage and figure out what else we needed. We could pick up extra inserts, we could add visual beats. Just by sort of “pre-visiting” the edit, we could go, “You know what? We’re really missing something here. Let’s grab a few more shots, just to be safe.” So even though the stretched-out schedule sucked, there was a benefit to it.
You mentioned wanting the film to be liberated—in terms of sex and feminist themes. In the exploitation era of the ‘60s and ‘70s, there were those revenge flicks like I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE or LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, with strong female leads. Do your ideas connect to that tradition? Because those were political too.
Yeah, I think so, but I also live more in the tone of comedy. A lot of those films are thrillers, and they're much more violent. I wanted to make a movie where the woman isn’t a victim, she has agency, she’s fun, she’s playful, she’s coquettish. But not violent in that same way.
So I was aiming more for a tone like Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, After Hours, Crimes of Passion, or even Cléo from 5 to 7, or Nights of Cabiria, something with that kind of tragic-comedy, that clown energy.
The sexploitation comes more through the style than the content, if that makes sense. I've never been a huge fan of rape-revenge films. I have a complicated relationship with that genre. As a woman, and just from being a girl my whole life, you find yourself in situations where it’s very unclear what you’re even experiencing. Like: is this assault? Did I allow this? Was that real? Was it not real?
And I think my tendency is to just move on, to forget about it, to normalize it. That’s what I focused on in Fucktoys. My character just tries to normalize things. When weird stuff happens, she tries to stay positive. And I think, as a woman, I’ve often found myself doing that, trying to keep things agreeable, to not be upsetting.
That’s more the reality I know. I’ve never been assaulted and then gone out to kill someone. I wanted to keep the film true to my own experience, and my tone. That perspective, the performative aspect of femininity, having to perform in ways that are acceptable to men, that’s what I was more interested in capturing.
It’s subtler, but I also think it’s more universal for women. That felt like the more feminist angle I wanted to explore.
Cover image courtesy of Karlovy Vary Film Servis.