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From The Archive: Arielle Holmes, The Star Of The Safdie Brothers' Heaven Knows What, Talks About Her Troubled Youth

In 2014 I met Arielle Holmes, the then-unknown star of the Safdie brothers' uncompromising drugs drama, Heaven Knows What, at the Venice Film Festival. Below is a record of our candid encounter.

Arielle Holmes is sitting on the terrace of a posh Venetian hotel, trying to understand how she got here. Not long ago she was a homeless junkie, panhandling in New York's Upper West Side. Today, she is receiving plaudits for her vivid performance in an independent feature based on her life, Heaven Knows What.

I can't wrap my head around it,” she says, her big, expressive eyes hidden behind even bigger shades. “I was definitely in the right place at the right time. Met the right person.

Holmes is talking about Josh Safdie, one half of the Safdie brothers film-making team. He spotted her entering a subway in Manhattan's Diamond District while researching another film and asked if she wanted to be in the movie. It was strange, Holmes admits, but her life wasn't really going anywhere. By day she was learning to use software for designing jewellery. At night, she worked as a dominatrix named Siouxsie at a club called Pandora's Box. Parks and doorways were her home.

I figured, what do I have to lose by giving him my number? I looked him up. He made movies. So I thought, you know, maybe it'll work, maybe it won't.

As they became friends, Holmes opened-up about being homeless, her drug habit, her destructive relationship with another addict, Ilya (played by Caleb Landry Jones in the film), and her troubled upbringing. Safdie encouraged Holmes to write about her experiences. Her candid recollections – soon to be published as a memoir, Mad Love in New York City - convinced him to give up the project he was working on and bring her world to the screen.

Heaven Knows What is raw and unvarnished, and so is Holmes. She's a survivor not just of drugs and rough sleeping, but of a childhood that could have destroyed her. Instead, she recently became a client of the powerful ICM Partners talent agency, and has just been cast alongside Shia LaBeouf in Andrea Arnold's first American outing, American Honey. Not bad for someone who describes her home life growing up as “erratic and chaotic and unstable, and really, really horrible”.

As a baby, Holmes was taken away from her mother, who had a “drug problem”, and grew up, largely unwanted, with an aunt, uncle and cousins. Aged nine, she was returned to her mother, who offered her unlimited freedom. “She never gave me any rules,” Holmes recalls. “I had no consequences. I could do anything I wanted so I never had any, like, boundaries for myself. So any impulses I had, I just did them.”

At first, Holmes thought this was “awesome”. “When I was 13, my mother would buy me and my friends booze. Smoke weed with us. It was like, 'Oh, I'm so cool.'” As she got older, though, Holmes realised that “she'd never wanted to be a mother. She just saw me like a sister or a friend. She became a really bad alcoholic, and totally lost her mind. She's passed away now, but I didn't talk to her for like the last year, maybe, that she was alive.”

Holmes's tone is matter of fact. If she has any self pity, it isn't evident. These are the details of her life she is telling me, nothing more. Partly as a result of genetics, partly of upbringing, Holmes says she is “definitely predisposed to it all” when it comes to drugs. And she hasn't only used them. When she was 17, she and her boyfriend Ilya also sold them, to make rent on an apartment in Jersey City. This came to an end, however, when “Ilya decided to get some crack and smoked all our money. That was it for our drug business. And then our apartment burnt down.” Ilya was caught in the fire: “His hands got burned. He had skin grafts. All his hair burned off,” says Holmes.

She had already tried heroin by this point, but wasn't using it every day. Now forced on to the street, she found herself around it “literally 24/7”.

Everyone was on it, and just seeing it everywhere I couldn't help but do it and fall into it. But I knew exactly what I was getting into. There is a beauty to it, there is a romance to that lifestyle, and I wanted it. I knew it would bring me down eventually, but I couldn't resist it.”

There was beauty to her relationship with Ilya too, she insists, although the film focuses on the end, when he has become another destructive habit that Holmes (or Harley, as her character is called) cannot kick. She slashes her wrist following an argument with him, and winds up in a psychiatric unit in New York's Bellevue hospital. This happened, but the back story about Ilya “flipping” because Holmes “had kissed somebody else when we were together and he got really upset over it because of certain other things that happened, like in the past”, is missing. “He didn't want anything to do with me and I was just so dedicated to him,” she says. “I was willing to give my life to prove to him that I loved him.”

Described by Jones as “intense and dark”, Ilya often visited the
Heaven Knows What set, though his erratic behaviour didn't always make him welcome. In April this year [2015], several months after my meeting with Holmes, he was found dead from an overdose in Central Park. He had tried to get clean, and failed. Holmes, on the other hand, entered rehab following the shoot and got drug-free. She admits that she'd felt trapped by the lifestyle, but never believed it was impossible to escape. “I just had no idea how it was going to happen, or even if it would.”

When she was using drugs, life was a big adventure. “Everything that happens, it's like a new thing every day,” she says. Or that's how it seemed. Watching the film made her realise with horror that despite “fun things happening all the time”, she was in fact stuck.

But I learned a lot of good from [that life] too, like to always be grateful for what you have, no matter how little it is. That apartment in Jersey City, before it burned down it turned to shit. It would flood up to the knee. There were rats. And I was saying, 'Fuck! I would rather sleep on the street.” But then when I was on the street for a while, I was like, 'What was I thinking?'”




©Stephen Applebaum, 2017

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