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?'”
A version of this article appeared in The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jul/02/arielle-holmes-homeless-drug-addict-heaven-knows-what
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