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 The fantasy adventure opens
with Jeon's mysterious Mona Lisa using
supernatural powers to break free from the
maximum-security wing of a mental asylum in New
Orleans. Running away from the police she finds
herself in the city's raucous French Quarter
where she comes to the rescue of exotic dancer
and single mother Bonnie (Hudson) who in turn
takes her in.
Mona Lisa, with a taste for junk food and a
tenderness towards the underdogs, strikes up an
unlikely friendship with Bonnie's young son,
Charles, and a local drug dealer (Ed Skrein),
who are untroubled by her otherworldly
abilities.
"I wanted to find what's optimistic about this
madness that we're all in. And I do think
friendship is such a defining and important
thing. It feeds us so much and it can take so
many forms," Amirpour said in an interview with
Reuters ahead of the film's world premiere at
Venice.
"I definitely always have been an outsider in
almost every way, literally coming from
somewhere else, looking different, speaking
different, adapting and surviving through that
and also just not being into the things that
seemed that everybody was into when I was kind
of finding my own space," the English-born
American-Iranian filmmaker told a news
conference.
Amirpour, whose 2016 dystopian thriller "The Bad
Batch" also premiered at Venice, cast Hudson in
a role the "Almost Famous" and "How to Lose a
Guy in 10 Days" actress relished.
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 "She was pregnant the first
time I met her. I was like 'so, if we can get
that baby out then do you want to come and be a
stripper?' And she was like 'yeah, cool',"
Amirpour joked at the news conference.
"I sort of found this like a celebration of
people who live very hard lives," Hudson, 42,
told Reuters.
"I think there's this sort of liberating thing
to be able to just live as you want and not care
what other people think about your choices. And
it was fun. It was fun to get into that with
Bonnie," Hudson added.
With Mona Lisa, Amirpour said she wanted to
create a new type of a hero who is able to
reinvent herself as she moves through different
environments.
"That's freedom. That's exciting," Amirpour told
the news conference, adding that she hoped her
protagonist would inspire young viewers to
embrace their inner weirdo.
(Reporting by Hanna Rantala; Editing by Sandra
Maler)
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