Asia Argento

A film veteran at only 27 years-of-age, Asia Argento is one Italian bombshell that is ready to burst. Having recently starred in the Vin Diesel action vehicle XXX, Asia’s directorial debut, Scarlet Diva, is currently sending significant ripples of dark, slightly disturbing pleasure through the Melbourne film community by receiving its Australian premiere at the Melbourne Underground Film Festival (MUFF).

The semi-autobiographical story in Scarlet Diva sees a sexy young actress attempting to make it as a Hollywood director and getting mired in the immoral swamp of Tinsel Town in the process. In the lead role as Anna Battista, Asia loves to party on, scores and takes drugs, has at least three different kinds of sex, deals with the slimy Hollywood system, falls in love and then plummets back to earth, all in the course of its [two-hour] running time.

Asia wrote the film, directed 50 actors in 40 different locations including London, Paris, Naples, Rome, Amsterdam and Los Angeles, starred in the film, and also raised the 300,000 Euros it cost to make it. Her efforts recreated her as Italy’s youngest-ever female director, yet for such a confronting film its first steps proved to be the most difficult.

“It was very hard to find finance since it's a very tough story,” Asia admits. “Unfortunately I live in a country ruled by television, and if a film isn't politically correct it'll be hard to find the money.

“I went through all the companies in Italy one after the other and they all turned it down, and it was embarrassing because my father (infamous horror movie icon Dario Argento) was going to produce it executively, and it’s not like Snow White. It’s a tough, sexual, morbid movie. And there was my father embarrassed because everybody was turning it down, and then finally a little company that had always produced pornos actually put up the money.”

So after all that, how does she feel about the film being screened for the first time in Australia at MUFF, more than three years after it’s international release in 2000.

“For me it’s like a great honour… I mean I did Scarlet Diva when I was 23 years old, and I managed to pull it off in less than a year. Today I’m still amazed that I managed to pull that off being so young. And I fought really hard. It didn’t come easy but it was a necessity for me.”

Asia took her first role as an actress aged nine, going against the wishes of her mother, Daria Nicolodi (a veteran Italian actress herself), to do so.
“In a way I chose the easiest thing to do because my family’s been doing this since my great grandfather who was a film distributor in Brazil. My grandmother was a photographer, and then my grandfather was a producer and my uncle is a producer and my mother’s an actress, so I just continued the family business.

“I try to explore every possible way to communicate since I have a serious problem with communication, with people and life. I’m very solitary and very alone, so that’s the only way for me to pretend I’m communicating to people. You know, whatever, writing or doing acting or directing, photography or singing, all these million things I do, it’s just for the impossibility of communication.”

By twelve Asia had received an Italian Golden Globe for her lead role in Cristina Comencini's first film, Zoo, after which she took “the biggest break I’ve ever taken from movies”, not daring to put her awkward, adolescent self back in front of a camera until she was 16, when she starred in a film [written and] directed by Dario called Demoni 2.

“It was those awkward years, you know, when in Italy there’s a saying, you’re neither meat nor fish. [laughs] I had to find my own identity, which I did by completely going crazy at the time.”

Of course many people would say that judging by Scarlet Diva’s standards nothing much has changed since then. The film has been described as twisted, hedonistic, existentialist, and without morality. How closely does such a description fit its creator?

“When people criticize the fact that this movie is self-obsessed, or hedonistic or whatever you want to call it, what they’re criticizing is actually the strength of my movie, and by doing that they’re only throwing fuel in my fire. They’re only making it stronger. Because what else is there to talk about but oneself? What else do we know but ourselves?

“By talking about myself I’m trying to understand who I am. And people might hate that but everybody would like to do it. I think that everybody does that anyway, every day. I mean even if they’re talking about UFOs they’re talking about themselves.

“That’s why I think this movie has such a long life, you know, it’s still coming out in other parts of the world. It’s come out in England, and last time in America, now Australia, and it will come out all over the world. It’s what I dreamt of when I did it. I didn’t do this movie for Italy because I knew that nobody would get it in Italy.

“But it’s lucky that it has a long life, believe me. I’m not the happiest person alive and this means a lot to me, you know, it gives me strength to be alive, to want to live.”

Doing XXX has successfully raised Asia’s profile in the US, though not in the way she wanted.

“I was offered a bunch of action movies that I didn’t do. Maybe that was a mistake, I don’t know. As a matter of fact I’d rather do action movies that some bad, pseudo intellectual Italian movies, that’s for sure.

“I did a movie with Dennis Hopper, but it was like a small movie. I always liked Dennis Hopper so that’s why I did it, just for him. But I was not so thrilled about the movie itself.

“If I choose in life I would act as little as possible and I would direct more. I would act if people like the directors were going to teach me things, if it was going to make me grow as a director. But it’s very rare to find projects like that right now.

“My goal, or what makes me happy in life is directing, and that’s something I found out in doing – or actually before doing – Scarlet Diva. I used XXX to be known in America so that I could direct in America which is what I’ve been preparing. I’ve been writing this [new] movie for a year almost, and now it’s in pre-production.

“It’s called The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things and it’s taken from a novel written by JT Leroy, this young American writer. It’s his autobiographical story. I’ve adapted the screenplay and I’m playing the main female role. It’s a story of a mother and a child. The child goes from since he was four years old until he’s eleven. And it’s her descent into Hell, with drugs and prostitution. It’s like an autopsy of America, and people.

“I can identify, I think. I’m a single mother [her daughter Anna Lou is two years old] in the sense that I’m the one supporting my child and I live alone with her and it’s kind of difficult in Italy, in America, all over the world. So I can identify even though I’m lucky because I was blessed with, you know, the belief, faith and creativity. Well, people who don’t have that or don’t have a reason to believe in themselves can quickly lose themselves."

A familiarity to Scarlet Diva immediately springs to mind …

“Yeah, I guess that’s what interests me the most. It’s the horror of real life, of real stories. But I always put like a magical, suspended reality to it, which interests me. In a way it‘s like, Fellini is my favourite Italian director and the reason why I adore his work is that when you watch his movies it’s real, because most of the time you’re talking about his life, but he would change the reality. It was a reality that you had to accept. It wasn’t a real reality, it was a world you had to plunge into and accept.”

© 2003, Steve Proposch