If you’re a certain person with a certain look having lunch in a cafe in Hollywood, don’t be surprised if an Anita Pallenberg-lookalike with a valley girl accent and a broad smile asks for your phone number.  Chances are, it’ll be Alex Prager. The Los Angeles-based artist is often on the lookout for those with a distinctive look to include in her hyper-colour, hyper-stylised photographs and short films. Recently she spotted a young French boy having lunch with his mother. “I knew that if I left the cafe before asking him to be in the film that I would regret it forever because he looked so cool. Now he’s one of my go-to characters.”  Prager’s first Australian solo exhibition has just opened at the National Gallery of Victoria. With intricate staging, meticulous attention to detail and inescapable creepiness, her work is reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock or David Lynch, her glamorous noir-esque heroines dying horrible deaths by drowning, falling out of windows or suffering excruciating loneliness.  The NGV exhibition includes 25 major works, including three newly acquired by the gallery. For Prager, it’s almost a mini-retrospective, spanning her early photographs from 2008 right through to her latest series Face in the Crowd, which was exhibited at Art Basel art fair last year. Seeing it all together, she can appreciate the evolution of her work and some of the themes she’s explored. “For me, as an artist, [it’s about] trying to keep myself challenged and evolving. It’s showing me that I am moving forward so that part is good.”  It’s a long way from her first show in an LA hair salon in 2001. The self-taught Prager picked up a camera in her early 20s after seeing an exhibition of the US photographer William Eggleston’s work. She started with street photography but quickly moved to styling her friends in wigs and vintage Hollywood starlet getups and shooting them.  Growing up in Hollywood meant artifice and glamour have always been part of Prager’s world and heightened drama often features in her work. “People can be murdered and there can be all kinds of violence and horrible seedy things going underneath all that glamour and people will still watch it and love it.”  She uses saturated colour for the same reason. “I thought it added this strange lie on top of the truth that I thought was just a little bit creepier and more interesting to work with. When it’s over the top with saturation and blue skies and bright red lips, over-the-top Kodachrome, I think it plays into our nostalgia and our familiarity … but do we really know what’s going in that picture? It’s always that thing that throws you off balance.”  Making short films was a natural progression, Prager says, after she noticed audiences asking for the backstory to the images. Video works including Sunday (2010) and Despair (2010) got plenty of attention and in 2012 she made an Emmy award-winning series of short films with the New York Times entitled Touch of Evil featuring Ryan Gosling, Jessica Chastain, Rooney Mara and others.  Face In the Crowd is her most ambitious series, including large-scale photographs of staged crowd scenes and an immersive video installation.  It was an epic shoot in every way, says Prager, with 350 extras, 150 crew members, four rotating sets and a tight schedule across four days. She directed the sea of extras by giving some specific characters, some photographic references and asking others to improvise. “You really feel like you are not quite sure what world you are in, if it’s real or if it’s fake and I think that’s something we can relate to in the world that we are living in right now.”  The video installation stars the actor Elizabeth Banks wading through unrelenting crowds. Although her work often centres on a heroine, Prager says it’s not about women as much as about emotions she’s keen to explore. Using female characters is her way of being honest about a topic, she says, because she’s female.  “I don’t know how men feel in the same way that I know how a woman feels. The emotional aspect is so important to me, that it rings true and that it’s honest. On top of it, you can put all the glamour and the stylisation and the facade of everything else, but underneath it, there has to be something real, otherwise I just don’t think I would be able to look at i; I don’t think it would feel right to me.”  The artist adds a dose of reality by including family and friends in the shoots. She laughingly dubs her sister, the artist Vanessa Prager, her “Waldo” as she appears in all her work. “All these strangers walking around me, all in costumes, who knows who anyone is? Then I see my sister in there, and I know exactly who she is because we’re so close – it puts that bit of reality into the pictures.”  Her next exhibition will be in Hong Kong at Lehmann Maupin in March, then she’ll begin on new work. Surely she’ll follow her Hitchcockian and Lynchian influences and make a feature film soon? “I haven’t even done a film with dialogue yet so I don’t know that that’s the obvious next step,” she says with a laugh.  But it might be on the cards: “If you had asked me 10 years ago if I was going to do even a short film, I would have probably said no, so who knows what is going to happen in the future. I’m kind of open for anything at this point.”  • Alex Prager runs from 14 November to 19 April at the National Gallery of Victoria
The Los Angeles artist tells Alexandra Spring about her first solo exhibition in Australia, layering lies over truth and hiding her sister in her work