Hey folks, Harry here with our man in Toronto... Anton Sirius and the first interview transcribed thus far from his amazing work at the 25th TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL.... And this one is Asia Argento... daughter of the great Dario Argento.... And the result is a great interview... check it out....
Asia Argento Interview
Asia wrote and directed her first feature, Scarlet Diva, and starred in it too. The film played at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. I sat down with her at an ungodly hour of the morning to talk about stuff.
AS: I’m going to try not to ask any questions about how autobiographical Scarlet Diva is. I think that’s a big waste of time, and completely defeats the purpose...
AA: But that’s your curiosity, isn’t it, at the end of the day?
AS: Of course, but that’s the intention, isn’t it?
AA: Yeah- no! That’s not the intention. I never did anything just to tantalize anybody. I did it because it was something I really needed to do, a story I really needed to tell. And it’s my story, and I have no problems saying that it all comes from the truth. Of course I elaborated it, to make it... I mean, in life you have only to fascinate yourself, while in films you have to fascinate more people.
AS: I have to admit, the reaction I had watching the film was that you’d taken what people think of you, and your public persona, and thrown it in their face, saying “If that’s what you think of me, then here you go!”
AA: Yes, well, actually it’s very different than what people think I am. People, I don’t know why... well, I do know why, but they see me as a sort of Wolf of the Steppes.
AS: I guess I’m used to the American perspective of girls that have grown up on screen and become women, and there’s very much a double standard, they’re innocent little children but also sexy adults.
AA: But I was never an innocent as a child, when I was doing films. I was always playing the sick girl, in a way. In Italy they call me ‘Dark Lady’ and they put this sobriquet on me which is ‘Carrie’, I hate this. What is this Dark Lady? Barbara Steele, maybe, but that’s not me. I wish I could move my hands like her, but I’m not like her. I think I’m the opposite. With this film I show that I’m a very human, human being, very fragile, very lost.
AS: Let’s talk about the casting for a second. You made some very interesting decisions- Joe Coleman, wherever he is, hopefully looking at shrunken heads somewhere, how did you happen to get him in the movie?
AA: Everybody with this film has a very weird story, but with him particularly, because I was writing a very different film before this, a war film, very complicated, and I was studying all sorts of things in New York, all this very weird shit for this film. Like a faceless man from the first world war, people who had lost their face and then had to have plastic surgery to reconstruct it, and I came across his book by chance in a book store, and I totally fell in love with his work and I was using it as a reference for my film. Then I got really fascinated with him, this face I saw in his book, and the fact that he was doing surgery, actually autopsies, and I needed an actor to play the role of a doctor, so I thought of him.
AS: Now THAT would be interesting.
AA: Yeah, he still loves the project, he says “Please don’t give up on that!” So he was like a hero for me by then. And I was looking for his number, and I finally found it, but I was too shy to call him, so I had Abel Ferrara call him for me and say, “Asia wants to talk to you. Can she call you?” And he said of course. I went out to meet him, and his wonderful girlfriend, and we spent like ten hours drinking beer and talking in his Auditorium, I don’t know if you know about it, it’s a museum of the weirdest shit, it’s so bizarre. So this is how we met. And we became friends. Then the faceless movie... nobody would want me to do that, nobody would finance it. If Scarlet Diva is hard-core for Italy then this one is Santa Sangre for China. So I decided I would do this first, that this would be easier for me to do first. In fact it wasn’t, because it was very hard to finance.
AS: Really?
AA: Yeah, nobody would finance it. Italy has very preconceived ideas about what’s right. Unless you have a TV sale it’s impossible to do a film, and this film people thought it was going to be some porno freak show, so I finally found the money through very weird people. And so I asked Joe to do the film.
AS: The other choice that really struck me was casting your own mother as Anna’s (Asia’s character) mother. I imagine she wasn’t too tough to get.
AA: Well, actually, I didn’t want her to play that part because I didn’t want the set to become a sort of psychodrama. I was scared that it would become something weird. I wanted her to play the agent, and she asked me to play the mother. It actually went very smoothly, because I was only directing those days, because it was a flashback to Anna’s childhood, and it was the best fun I had on the set.
AS: Bossing your own mother around.
AA: Yeah. Exactly. No, but she’s a wonderful actress.
AS: Just to follow up on that, because I don’t know if it was an intentional choice or if it was just the way the story developed... but you have your mother playing your mother, or at least Anna’s mother, in the picture, and yet there’s absolutely no father figure whatsoever.
AA: Exactly, yeah. I didn’t want to put... you know, this is like the worst things that have happened in my life, and I think my father was one of the only positive figures in my life. So I didn’t want to put him in the swamp. I wanted to save him. He doesn’t exist in that.
AS: Obviously you’ve worked with your father a number of times-
AA: Three times.
AS: And then Abel Ferrara you mentioned... Did you get anything from them? Were you always collecting little directorial tricks from watching them work?
AA: It’s not that I was thinking, “Oh, I’m going to use that”, because I didn’t know, even though I’d directed a number of documentaries and shorts and different things before this, I never thought I’d be a director. I didn’t think I’d have the balls to answer all those questions. Bu then it became like an urge for me all of a sudden, after I worked with Abel, because he makes you feel like you’re directing yourself, and I though “Ah! I can do this!” He makes you think that. But I think I was lucky to do all those films. That was my film school. I did twenty-four films, so this is how I learned how to keep a set together. But of course you have to forget everything you learn at the same time.
AS: What about the actual shoot? Were there any difficulties, or was it a smooth sail?
AA: No, it was very hard because we didn’t have much time…
AS: How long was the shoot?
AA: Six weeks in Rome, and then only one week around the world.
AS: Ouch!
AA: And we were a very small crew, and we didn’t have much money. I was shooting in my friends’ apartments, my apartment. The room of the childhood scenes, that used to be my childhood room at my father’s. But it was wonderful too, because the crew was the youngest I’ve ever worked with on a film. I decided to have a very young crew, so the youngest was 19, and the oldest was 32- all first timers. Many of them didn’t even think they were going to do films until I chose them. The sound guy, for instance, was a guy who builds Theremins, and I have a thing about Theremins so I chose him because he promised he was going to build a Theremin for me, which he never did. So I had very weird people working on this. And they all gave their best.
AS: So you were trying to form your own little crew for yourself?
AA: Yeah. And in fact on my next film I’m going to use the same people.
AS: So there definitely will be a next film.
AA: Yes. Yes, very soon.
AS: Is it the war film you were talking about?
AA: No, it’s the porno.
AS: Oh, right! You mentioned it during the EFP conference.
AA: People thought it was a joke when I said it.
AS: Most people didn’t know how to react to it. They laughed because they were thrown off.
AA: I watched this documentary on monkeys, and the reason why monkeys look like they’re laughing is to scare people when they are scared themselves.
AS: Yeah, it’s a defense mechanism.
AA: Yes.
AS: (laughing) It’s to try and look frightening.
AA: (laughing) Exactly. So I guess we’re scared now.
AS: Did you see Baise-moi then? The French film by Virginie Despentes?
AA: No, I didn’t see it. But I’ve seen a lot of porno films in my life, not for this, but out of curiosity. Some weird stuff, and even some interesting stuff. But usually the plot is not very important and from what I know there are not many women directors. So I think this is something interesting to do. And this one won’t really be “just a porno”, because I’ve never been interested in just the fucking and the penetration. I want to tell a story and use that as an excuse. Actually it was not my idea, it was someone that came to me, a porno financier. A very weird guy.
AS: And that scene didn’t make Scarlet Diva?
AA: Not yet, because this came after he saw Scarlet Diva, and then he asked me to direct a porno for him. There’s a lot of money to do this, and a lot of freedom, because these people don’t care. They just have the money. And I’m going to be the producer as well, so I’m going to organize it, I’m going to have this bunch of money, shoot it in Prague where there’s lots of porno actors.
AS: But there’s no real political motivation behind it? It’s just something you want to do?
AA: Yes, it is a bit political. Because it’s the only way to go against what’s going on in Italy which I am very against, cinema-wise, and even politically, the swamp of these two currents of film, neo-realistic and comedies, which I really loathe.
AS: So if Roberto Benigni dropped off the face of the earth, you wouldn’t shed a tear.
AA: (laughing) No, he’s all right, he’s an artist. Or he was. Even though in America they forget he’s a dangerous Communist, which is funny. And he forgot himself, I think. But I couldn’t do horror, because of my father, and I couldn’t do western because of Leone, so the only genre left over was porno.
AS: (laughing) The only one you can make your own.
AA: Yes.
AS: Talk about the situation in Italy, then. This is an American website I’m writing for, so they probably have no idea what it is you’re reacting to.
AA: Well, thank God, because it’s really not interesting. As an actress I haven’t done a film in Italy for five years. There’s really nothing there, at least from my point of view, and what I look for in cinema and what touches me. The reality in Italy is so boring, and so not interesting, that how can you talk about life. There’s no life to talk about, no culture, nothing vibrant or alive. I don’t see anything that really moves me there in any way.
AS: And yet you still live in Rome.
AA: Yeah, I live in Rome but in my own little world, because I don’t have a TV, I don’t buy newspapers. I barely go out, at least… I was agoraphobic for a long time, and I couldn’t go out of my apartment, only when I was working. So I really live in my own world of books and internet and silent films, and some not silent films, like Guy Maddin’s Tales From the Gimli Hospital. So I don’t know what’s going on, really, but what I see around is not so funny.
AS: So you work outside of Italy- New Rose Hotel with Abel, B Monkey with Michael Radford…
AA: And I did two movies in France after Scarlet Diva. One is Les Miserables, yet another one, with Gerard Depardieu and Malkovich. Another one is a weird story about vampires.
AS: The genre that will not die.
AA: Yeah, but this one’s a sort of comedy, I don’t know. I did it just because it was a challenge for me to learn French. It’s the only reason why I did it, so I would have to learn French.
AS: So that’s sort of how you see your career progressing at this point, just making movies wherever the role just happens to be?
AA: No, I’ll make my films, and make other people’s if there’s a challenge, or just to pay the rent.
AS: The Orson Welles model. Take the job, get the money, make your own art.
AA: (laughing)
AS: What was it like, growing up in film? Are you ever envious, even just a little bit, of the people you see walking down the street who haven’t been in the public eye their entire lives?
AA: No, I always felt lucky, because I knew things that people my age never knew, and I had to fight for things, I had to grow. And I don’t regret that, ever. For me, playing with dolls was always very boring. I was writing, I was reading, I had other interests. I felt very lonely, but I think you are born that way and I think as an artist, even a young artist, you can’t allow yourself to have hobbies and shit like that.
AS: No distractions.
AA; No, the fun is in playing, and acting is playing, so I was playing doing that.
AS: You mentioned that there’s an emotional core that’s autobiographical in Scarlet Diva. So is Anna’s loneliness your loneliness?
AA: It’s not the loneliness. Yes, I was alone, all my life, but not lonely. In my family… my father, I don’t even remember him from when I was little because he was always away. I realized… I think maybe I started doing films too, to make him realize he had a daughter. In fact he became my father when we did Trauma, and more of a friend too. I think he was jealous of all these directors, and actors playing my father in films- Nanni Moretti…
AS: And yet before that you’d done work with, well, I guess his ‘disciples’- Michele Soavi for instance…
AA: But never him. And I wanted him to cast me, but he never did. He had me just dubbing his actors, his young actors, in Opera for instance, but never acting for him. But I was very ugly when I was a little girl. I looked like a boy.
AS: It was the haircut.
AA: Yeah, it’s true. My first line on screen was “I’m not a boy, I’m a girl”- and I put a wig on. That was my first appearance on the screen.
AS: And that moment has colored the entire rest of your life.
AA: (laughing) It’s true! I’m still a boy. And this is why it’s so funny, when I allow people to perceive me, as in Italy, as a sex symbol and all these things. Because I’m so the opposite. But cinema is such a fake thing. You can live out your monsters or your aspirations.
