At age 12, she was gang raped by three boys at a party in Cape Canaveral, Florida, an event that influenced several of her films.

[3] In 1986, Anders won a Samuel Goldwyn Writing Award for a script called Lost Highway that she wrote about her father.

[9] Anders' first film, the punk music-heavy Border Radio, was co-written and co-directed with Kurt Voss and Dean Lent and was made while they were at UCLA.

[13] With a $2,000 contribution from actor Vic Tayback and loans from Voss's parents to fund the film, the filmmakers made up for the small budget by using local locations and casting performers they knew.

Violating UCLA policy, the filmmakers cut the film at night in the school's editing bays, while Anders' two young daughters slept on the floor.

[13] In 2007, Border Radio was given a special release on DVD as part of the Criterion Collection[13] and was lauded as groundbreaking independent cinema.

[15] Gas Food Lodging is a coming-of-age story about a truck stop waitress and her two daughters, three vibrant, restless women in an isolated Western town.

[9] Her next film, Mi Vida Loca (My Crazy Life), was about girl gangs in the poor Hispanic Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, where Anders lived.

This marriage to a songwriting partner and her emergence as a singer-songwriter in the 1970s are among elements paralleling the career of Carole King, but the film is neither a biography nor entirely fiction.

[10][17] Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach had their first collaboration composing a song for the film, "God Give Me Strength," and were nominated for a Grammy Award.

The film starred several musical friends of Anders', including Taylor, X singer John Doe, Spandau Ballet bassist Martin Kemp, and singer/actor Michael Des Barres.

A black-and-white road picture, the film featured Luanna Anders from Border Radio, a scene in the motel room where Gram Parsons died, and a score with music by Ariel Pink and J Mascis.

[23] In 2013, Anders released the Lifetime-produced TV movie Ring of Fire, a June Carter Cash biopic that featured the musician Jewel.

In 2013, Anders bid on and won a rock and roll record collection formerly owned by the actress Greta Garbo.

Anders said that she created a faux grant that she "won" so that she and at least one other friend could study under Wenders on location for his film Paris, Texas.

[31] In 2003, Anders became a Distinguished Professor at the University of California Santa Barbara, where she teaches in the Film And Media Studies Department one quarter each year.

She has taught courses on topics including autobiographic writing, rock and roll films, and music supervision.