AD: Just to give the title switch a little background for anybody who might eventually be reading this, I should say for the record that the original title of the book was Savage Grace. Unfortunately when a movie was released with the same name, you backed down and changed it. As poetically appropriate as that title once was, I can’t imagine it being named anything other than Narcisa: Our Lady of Ashes now either…. Where did this title come from? Our Lady of the Ashes… I was driving down the 101 freeway the other day and passed an “Our Lady” church and it made me wonder if that sparked the thought.
JS: It was really more about the name “Narcisa.” The “Our Lady” thing was just something I tacked on later for no particular reason other than that I kinda always envisioned this Narcisa character as like something very iconic, mythical, mystical and… transcendent. Like a real religious sort of icon, a kinda biblical figure almost, in her absolute tragedy and power and violent, crazy uncompromising quest for… redemption…
And since this character was a crack addict, the way they smoke crack in Brazil and other places too, I guess, is with a coke can they punch holes into and then pack cigarette ashes around the little holes to use as like a sort of filter or screen to carborate the crack rock when they light it up to smoke…
So this Narcisa character would always have like three cigarettes burning at the same time for the ashes she was saving to use as a crack smoking screen, and she’d always have all these little piles of ashes all over the place that she would use to smoke crack with… And it just seemed to be a logical sort of title for this strange, tragic, self-crucifying Christ-like being, representing the sins of humanity and its fumbling stumbling search for Salvation, the search for God. Pretty deep stuff, hein? (Laughs)... So I guess I just wanted to give her a sort of religious-sounding title and it just sort of fit… Our Lady of the Ashes... then there’s the whole image of the Phoenix rising from its own ashes, the whole concept of rebirth and redemption, I dunno…