Ana Lily Amirpour on her Iranian vampire Western

England-born, US-raised Iranian filmmaker Ana Lily Amirpour has a tip for any immigrant alighting upon the shores of her adopted homeland: “You come to America, then you watch Coming to America, and then you kind of figure out what the American dream is, and you fall in love with those things.”

Amirpour, who moved to the US as a nipper after growing up in Margate (“I remember the hedgehogs, I remember there was like a seaside area, and I remember the salt and vinegar chips”) is talking to us down the phone from LA, where she’s in the middle of picking up her morning caffeine hit. It’s easy to understand why her love for American movies is so ardent. They helped this young girl with Iranian parents and a weird English accent assimilate; they helped her understand her strange new home. “American movies, they have a very specific power of magic and adventure that you don’t find anywhere else, and when I came here I fell in love with them. Take Back to the Future. That’s, like, next level. It’s about this kid who has the power to change his future. That’s everything that’s good about America – this idea that anyone can be anything if they really want it. Free will.”

This infatuation runs through Amirpour’s debut feature, but she blends the Americana with an eclectic bag of more exotic ingredients to create a heady cinematic salad. It’s a dreamy fairytale that borrows iconography from Western and horror films. It’s both a vampire movie and a hipster romantic comedy, but it’s a million miles away from Twilight. It’s shot in high-contrast black and white in a run-down Californian oil town. Oh, and everyone speaks exclusively in Persian. The film is called A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, and if you haven’t already guessed, it’s one of the year’s most beguiling movies.

That title is quite misleading: the eponymous girl with no name (Sheila Vand) is in no danger during her evening perambulations. Quite the contrary: she’s a blood-sucking avenger. Prowling the streets on her skateboard, her chador (the head-covering cloak worn by many Muslim women in Iran) flapping behind her as she glides, she’s cleaning up her nowheresville hometown one lowlife at a time. The chador, Amirpour explains, was her chief inspiration for the story. “I had one on the set of another short film that I was making, it was a prop, and from the moment I put it on I just thought of the character,” she recalls. “It was so obvious: of course, this is an Iranian vampire.” The garment had a funny effect on her: “The way it moves and catches the air makes me want to jump on a skateboard and ride down the street like a sailboat or a stingray or something. So I did that, and it feels so good when you’re cruising down the street. That was the moment I created the character and I just created the world around it.”

And what a world! “I wanted to make an Iranian vampire film, but I couldn’t shoot it in Iran – obviously.” Instead, she created her own comic-strip universe: a town called Bad City. “I wanted this stylised, archetypal place, like a Sergio Leone Western or something.” She found the perfect setting in Taff, a threadbare town not far from Bakersfield, California, where she spent her high-school years. “Taff has the highest density of oil in California. It’s got thousands of oil derricks, so it kind of had this flavour of a Middle Eastern desert town. But it was also really economically depressed – there were very few businesses operating, and so there were very few signs on the street.” In other words: she had a blank canvas on which to put her stamp. “It’s a real joy to do that too because there are no rules when you make your own world. It’s like The Neverending Story or a graphic novel, you get to create a universe. That’s something I’m quite into and I did it again on my second film [a post-apocalyptic cannibal story with a cast that includes Jason Momoa, Keanu Reeves and Jim Carrey], which I’m on post production on now.”

The film is at once very familiar and wholly original. Amirpour’s not coy when it comes to discussing A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night's influences. She explains that three movies feed directly into its DNA: Rumble Fish (Francis Ford Coppola), Wild at Heart (David Lynch) and Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone). “I had my DP, my actors, everyone watch those movies. From them we developed a cinematic language to bring us to some kind of common ground.” Filtered through her own personal vision, this cinematic language takes on its own wild, beautiful parlance. “It becomes limitless, especially when you’re doing a full-on, surreal, stylised fairytale. That’s what’s great about how many movies there are: there’s so much to look at and take inspiration from and get excited about.” She doesn’t have much time, however, for filmmakers who claim to be immune from the influence of cinema's past. “It’s so absurd when people say that. I mean, everyone has seen thousands of movies in their lifetime, it’s crazy to think they aren’t embedded in your brain and in your ideas about who you are and what you think.”

“I wanted to create this stylised, archetypal place, like a Sergio Leone Western or something” – Ana Lily Amirpour

The film is ripe with possible allegorical readings, but Amirpour has been reluctant in interviews to discuss its righteous gender politics or its dissing of Shariah norms. As expected, when we suggest some possible subtextual themes the director remains tight-lipped. “There are no rules. You’re free to extract as much subtext as possible, that’s your joyous right with a movie or a song or anything. But my job isn’t to sit here and tell you,” she says forcefully. For her, discussing the film’s themes reduces them somehow. “Words can make a big thing small,” she says. “I think it’s like how you dance: a song is on and you dance a certain way, and then someone says, ‘Explain how you’re dancing?’ How can you explain it? It’s something that you feel, you know what I mean?”

While its playful approach to genre, its juicy sociocritical readings and its overflowing abundance of style are more than enough to recommend it, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night succeeds most as a tender love story. The girl of the title is clumsily wooed by a good-hearted lad (Arash Marandi) with a James Dean fetish. Their introduction is the ultimate in rom-com meet cute. It’s Halloween, and boy meets girl while walking home drunk from a fancy dress party while dressed as Dracula, complete with plastic fangs and all. Sparks fly. Few films so evocatively capture the butterflies in stomach-feeling of sexual attraction. Amapour is clearly a dyed-in-the-wool romantic. “It’s the best,” she says of capturing these emotions on screen. “It’s so cool when you undeniably feel this feeling of magic about finding a connection. Sometimes it feels like it’s impossible, you know? For me, if I like somebody, and then it ends, I really literally think, OK, I’m never going to like somebody again. It’s too impossible; it’s magic.”

She’s right, it is, but we defy you not to fall for A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. She’ll have you at salâm.