bizarre asia interview

This is the interview with Asia that appeared in issue 47 of UK magazine Bizarre conducted by Billy Chainsaw.

My Bizarre Life
Her father is Italian horror movie maestro Dario (Deep Red, Suspira, Trauma, Stendhal Syndrome) Argento. Her mother is renowned Italian stage and screen actress Daria Nicolodi. She wrote and published three books between the ages of five and nine, at which point she started her acting career. Her name...? Asia Argento, an incredible individual who recently chose celluloid catharsis as a therapeutic move to avoid self-destruction, by writing, starring in, and directing the nerve-shredding Scarlet Diva. A traumatic, exceptionally personal tale about excess, God and redemption, Scarlet Diva is as emotionally harrowing and visceral as the movie experience gets. Now entering a transitional rebirth, which will undoubtedly see her celebrated as one of cinema's most challenging and evocative talents, Asia exclusively shares some of her already extraordinary life...

What's your earliest memory?
It's strange that you ask this question, as I always ask this question, it's the most important one for me to know a person... I was in this very small park in front of the hotel where my parents used to send me when I was little; I must have been like three or something. It was a summer place in Tuscany with the ugly sea where you can't even swim, but it had lots of kids. I used to go there with my two sisters and the nanny - not my parents; they didn't come with us. There was this girl who suffered from Down's Syndrome, and she was very tall and blonde, and... I was so intrigued by this girl, yet scared at the same time. She was like my obsession in this summer place... It was her stare that made me fascinated, sorta like a milky stare I never forgot. I used to hide behind a tree to look at this girl. We used to watch Zorro together.

Did you start off hiding from her because you were scared, but then you became friends?
No, I was scared, but also at the same time I was sitting next to her and talking to her... she looked like this ghost more than a girl suffering from Down's Syndrome. Which is unusual because Down's Syndrome sufferers don't usually look like that. Yeah, I know. I remember people were telling me she had Down's Syndrome, but memories have changed her I don't know. Having such famous parents your childhood must have been pretty interesting? I don't have many memories with my family…they weren't there much. But when they were, my father used to show me a lot of films. He used to project these films in the living room, on the wall…They say that when I was born they projected Gone with the Wind for three days.

Did they say why?
No, they had a copy and they loved it, and I love it. It's still one of my favourite films... with Freaks, which they showed me when I was five. I watched my father's films when I was very young, I started when I was six, with... I think Deep Red. And the same year I saw Suspiria. That to me really opened the world because I saw that as... like Hansel and Gretel a fairy tale. This is why I wasn't so scared by my father's films. I never had so-called bad dreams that other people tell they had from seeing his films. When I was a kid I wanted to watch them again and again. I used to watch a lot of films when I was a kid because we had this projector, and then we were like the first ones to have Betamax in Italy because my father had this deal, so we had tapes. I was so lucky. And all the kids used to come over to watch these crazy and incredible films like Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Freaks. I used to watch them five, six times a day. The kids didn't tell their parents. We made a pact that if they wanted to watch these films they couldn't tell their parents. Nobody ever did, 'cos for them it was more important to watch the films. I was scared when I was watching them, I always thought that somebody or something was going to grab my feet or shoulders. But it felt good, it didn't feel like something that was going to fuck me up. My mother was an artist in every possible way. She inspired my father, she taught him everything he knows, apart from cinema, where he is the biggest expert I ever met. She really cared a lot about magic, literature, and art. They were really active in that way, and my mother, more than my father, she was always filling us with information, and I was very open to that. I think my only connection with my mother and father was culture, because I was never close physically. I was always the black sheep, it was always my fault when I was little.

You were the youngest?
Yeah... I never felt I was the favourite of any of them, because my sisters were from previous marriages, and I think my parents were sort of protective and too busy with them to worry about me. But it was good because I was left pretty much alone.

What's your strangest memory of growing up?
I was, I think, ten. My mother woke me and my sister up at dawn, we were in some place in the south of Italy, and she took us to the shore. The wind was very high, and she went somewhere a bit far away from us, and as the sun was just coming up, I felt as if she was... She was playing a game with the wind. She was directing the wind. She told the wind to go this way and that, she was doing what she called 'wind magic'.

She could create it?
Yes, I think so. She did this only three times in her life.

Is she a witch?
Yes, yes. Also my great grandmother was a witch, but, you know, a white witch. For we, I never had the curiosity.

Witches aren't always as evil as they are portrayed.
Well, no. Suspiria is the true story of my great grandmother who was a piano student who went to this school and she learnt that they were doing black magic there, and evil and stuff.

What I meant was they aren't all like that, there are good ones too.
Yes, very good ones.

When we were setting up this interview you and your boyfriend miraculously escaped death in a car crash. How horrendous was it?
I was terribly stunned, I thought for five seconds I was going to die. I was on the fast side, left, and this guy was coming on the right and it was 6.30am, going to a video shoot. We see this car with the indicator going to the left without looking, and Marco screams: "No!" and he hits us at the end of the car on the left, and my car starts going (makes swishing noises) and all the huge lorries are going (makes more swishing noises)... I don't understand what's going on... We had the fog, even more devilish... We're swerving, and it's a miracle I don't hit other cars... and after one kilometre, I think, or two, I managed to get it back under control. I am totally shocked. I didn't realise…crying, shaking. Marco gets out of the car as other cars are still going by...he sees me like that, and he says we have to go to a doctor - I'm six months pregnant, so as we are going there, we call the police. And then we realise that this other one that crashed us, flipped... So the car flipped, and the two people they say are really badly hurt at first. I was like "Oh shit", but they didn't really. So these people said: "Oh, we're going to get money 'cos they didn't stop". We didn't stop because we went to the doctor, but we called the police... Yet this guy accused us of not stopping and helping, and that we were the ones who hit him...

Hit and run?
Yes, hit and run, this is what they wrote in the newspapers... 'the pirates of the streets' me, on the fucking news on TV and on the first page of the newspapers... Writing the most disgusting things. One of the newspapers said: 'Dario Argento's worst abortion, Asia Argento' That I am the devil, and not just the devil, I am having a child too.

Why are the Italian media so hard on you?
I don't know, but for them I think a woman like me is unacceptable. I'm considered to be a dark lady and they don't like that, they think it's a pose. But I'm not a dark lady, because this is not pose. If I like certain literature and if I wear black... I am not the devil. I think I'm much more pure because I experience these things, I'm much more childish and naive... That's where ignorance comes from. I exorcise my nightmares and monsters through my work, and that's why I am a healthy person. My father was the same. I remember once my parents were busted for hash when I was nine. A scary experience... The police came to the apartment and they took my parents away they brought the worst sentence I am going to show you a newspaper from that day that I kept...This is 20 June 1985, and it says: '23 grams of hash him, 24 her', and then says: 'blood, special effects and the paranormal, these are his specialities You know, ha, ha. They use what we are for demonising us - they use our work. It comes from the ignorance of not understanding what they're doing, what you're doing, what your fathers always done. What if he'd made war films, what would you have been then? But he just happened to make horror films, so it's Rosemary's Baby time, and your this witch carrying the anti-Christ. Definitely, but it's OK. I feel people who are different from me are uncomfortable with me, and this feels good. Because this forces them into thinking of what they are saying and maybe to give their best because they're scared... They need to bring something out of the fear for me, and talking about their hatred makes them alive.

How do you want to be remembered?
As somebody who has done everything, but didn't know how to do anything.

June 2001 © John Brown Publishing

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