Asia babe

I just wish people would leave poor Courtney Love alone”, rails Asia (pronounced Ass-ee-ah) Argento. “Hasn’t the woman suffered enough? She’s had a horrible life. What do people want from her? To lie down on Kurt’s grave and die?”

I feel like I ought to say something. I’m so not one of those people. I can recite every lyric from My Body, The Hand Grenade for one thing. But I wait to point out that we’re on the same team. I wouldn’t dream of interrupting Ms. Argento in full flight. I wouldn’t dare.
She’s far too imperious and magnificent a creature. Earlier today, she arrived in London just over 24-hours late for our interview. Something about missing a plane or a train from Paris or Italy.
Now that’s the right side of fashionable. Not that I mind in the least. Sitting listening to her relate incidents from her life – tales of spontaneously stripping in some Tennessee club one night, smoking a cigarette with Kurt Cobain in Rome just days before he died, her youthful ketamine habit, her omni-sexuality, her two years as a professional boxer – one begins to suspect that missed appointments are unavoidable in such a whirlwind existence.
Up close, and perhaps from galaxies away, everything about the 31-year old actress seems designed to leave an indelible impression – her glamorous, demi-aristocratic Mediterranean accent, her ferocious intellect, her stormy, passionate presence.
Impossibly beautiful, even in jeans, she looks as though someone decided to improve on the Angelina Jolie fembot design and succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
Naturally, there’s been a string of interested gentlemen (and occasional ladies) on her arm down the years, including Michael Pitt, Vincent Gallo, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Harmony Korine, Marilyn Manson and just about any guy hip enough to grace the cover of I.D. magazine.
Odd then that the Italian starlet seems so haughtily indifferent about her appearance.
“When I was a child everyone around me thought I was ugly but I paid them no attention," she sighs. "I knew I was beautiful. I just knew. Now the situation is reversed. I hear people say that I’m beautiful but I don’t really believe it. I’m such a contradictory person,” she says.
One suspects it was ever thus. The daughter of legendary psychedelic horror-meister Dario Argento and his one time muse, Daria Nicolodi, stardom or freakish semi-celebrity of some sort was practically a given.
Sure enough, aged nine, she made her onscreen debut in Sergio Citti’s Sogni e Bisogni. Stressed by work and her parents’ divorce, she took up smoking that same year, the first of a million toxins.
“I did everything in my younger days but I couldn’t stand being one of those 30-somethings who still do ecstasy,” she declares dismissively. “I have something that ensured I would never become one of those lost people. I have rage. It’s my rage that drives me to create. It’s my rage that kept me hanging on when I was young and wild.”
Over the next decade, her darkly intense performances in films such as Cristina Comencini’s Le Amiche Del Cuore (1992) and Carlo Verdone’s Perdiamoci di vista (1994) would earn awards and lavish praise. Her most memorable, or certainly disquieting work would happen under the direction of her father.
Their relationship is legendarily a tempestuous one, though much accepted Argento lore – that she was only allowed to read his demented screenplays as a child, that he dragged her along to meet the pope – is, she claims, just that.
“Everybody asks me about going to the Vatican”, she laughs. “It’s bullshit. My father is very Christian but it never happened. I read the most astonishing things about myself sometimes. I did grow up reading and watching horror. That’s obviously true. That’s what warped my mind I think.”
She first ran away from home aged 14, getting as far as London after a pit stop in the cloudy cafes and tattoo parlours of Amsterdam.
She was escorted back home to daddy following a bust for marijuana possession. The following year, in a fascinating oedipal twist, she replaced her mother as her father’s leading lady in Trauma, the first of three such father-daughter collaborations.
As those familiar with the Italian auteur’s output will know, the fantastically ghoulish Dario has since filmed his daughter being raped, gouged, beaten and generally treated in a manner that would have a girl pining for the enlightened direction of Lars von Trier.
“I don’t know that I was ever really his muse,” she says very quietly. “I was just there when my mother had gone. It was accidental. I wouldn’t want to be a muse for him or anyone else. When I think of the word I can only think of ancient paintings and poems about some ideal that a woman can’t possibly attain. I can only think of something dead.”
Then she laughs. “I’m always thinking of dead things.”
She and Dario stopped speaking in 2000 when she refused to appear in his movie, Sleepless.
She had, professionally speaking, outgrown him, writing novels and making her own directorial debut with the divinely named, auto-therapeutic Scarlet Diva.
Since then, she’s found an unlikely mainstream following through her role as a rock-chick Bond bambi in the hyperactive actioner, xXx, a vision in fur and PVC which brought all the men’s mags a-calling.
While she briefly flirted with gothic goddess pin-up status, she insists her days of appearing in Maxim are now at an end. Four years ago she gave birth to Anna, named for Asia’s late half-sister.
“After my daughter’s birth I had to really start considering such things,” she says. “It sounds very bourgeois but I didn’t want her to see me that way. I have no interest anyway. I don’t even feel ambitious as an actress anymore. I’m certainly not interested in modelling and celebrity.”
Happily, you can still catch Asia kicking-ass in fishnets and boots in George A. Romero’s superbly entertaining Land Of The Dead. Playing one of the zombie holocaust’s human survivors, Asia finds herself caught between Dennis Hopper’s cackling capitalist ambitions, marauding bandits and the slowly (very slowly) evolving undead.
“I did worry about doing Land Of The Dead because even though George Romero and my father are friends and they’ve worked together and they know each other, I was worried that my father would feel jealous,” she says. “But in a way, because of the genre and because of George, it’s the closest thing to working with my father I could have done. It turned out he felt the same and was delighted about it.”
Though one suspects that crockery may well fly during family reunions, Asia and Dario have recently reconciled following a screening of her second film as director, a gorgeous screen adaptation of The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things.
“He called me up to say he could see little influences, little shots in the film that reminded him of his own work. That’s a fantastic compliment. Especially from him.”
It’s easy to see why the elder provocateur was impressed. Her treatment of JT LeRoy’s coruscating semi-autobiographical novel is certainly daring enough to warrant the Argento brand.
In The Heart Is Deceitful, seven year-old Jeremiah is spitefully snatched from nurturing foster parents by Sarah, his white-trash truck-stop whore mom. His life quickly becomes a litany of sexual and physical abuses, as Sarah drifts from one trailer-park John to the next. In one particularly horrifying scene, Jeremiah dresses up as his mother before seducing Marilyn Manson’s beer jockey loser.
“Everybody told me not to do that bit. JT wasn’t sure it could be done. Even Gaspar Noe (the controversy merchant behind Irreversible) didn’t think anyone could make it work in a cinematic way. But I knew I could see it in my head and I think its one of the best moments in the film.”
Indeed, she only became daunted by the prospect of visualising LeRoy’s fragile, haunting prose long after she had done so. “I met JT at a reading of The Heart Is Deceitful in Rome and the book immediately obsessed me. It’s both immediate and yet very fragmented in the way it reflects how the mind plays with things,” she said.
“I wanted to film it right away. I just jumped. It was only later that I became fearful of damaging this beautiful book in some way. But JT was very helpful throughout. He commented on every draft of the script, talked with the actors about their characters and even donated some of his old clothes to the actors.” For Asia, herself no stranger to traumatic childhoods, directing and starring in such a project became a cathartic process.
“Sarah was a very strange being to inhabit. The story is experienced through the child, so my point of reference was always Jeremiah,” she says. “And as a mother, it’s impossible to imagine doing the things Sarah does to her child. But I was determined she wouldn’t be monstrous. I wanted the audience to decide for themselves. I wanted the kind of trajectory you find in Dostoevsky – that even the worst evil has a context. In Sarah’s case, she’s just acting out an inter-generational pattern of abuse. It’s not so black and white. I couldn’t take her home but in the end, for practical purposes I stayed in character when directing as well. I didn’t even wash myself. I had to ask a lot of people for forgiveness by the end of the shoot.”
That might explain why ex-fiancé Michael Pitt (who appears in a supporting role) said that working with Asia on The Heart Is Deceitful… was comparable to being directed by “a 90 mile an hour train hurtling toward a massive void”.
He doesn’t appear to have been too put out. He’s also starring alongside the actress in Gus Van Sant’s Last Days. Officially the film is not an account of Kurt Cobain’s final disintegration, but then Mr. Van Sant would also have us believe that Elephant is not really a depiction of the Columbine Massacre.
What the director will say is that Last Days’ dreamy disconnected narrative was indeed inspired by Cobain’s death. So we’re back to Courtney.
“I’m definitely not playing Courtney Love,” pouts Asia “It upsets me that people keep saying so. My character is very dorky, very different from Courtney.”
She’s right you know. Though Pitt’s muttering and alienated rock-star is unmistakably a Kurt clone, Courtney ersatz remains off-screen. (We’re told, via a mumbled telephone conversation that our protagonist is estranged from his wife and child.)
Instead, Asia portrays one of the many dazed and confused hangers-on who live in his mansion and borrow money. In a weird hinterland of very strung out people, only Kim Gordon, playing a record company executive, reaches out to Pitt’s lost soul, but by then the damage has set in.
“I think that the character is called Blake rather than Kurt is very important,” she explains. “It de-sensationalises the story and takes you away from the MTV reports. That distance enables you really feel his plight, really feel him as a person, not just a fucking rock-star or icon.”
In an already hectic year, Argento has also just finished work on Sofia Coppola’s Marie-Antoinette biopic, an experience that proved considerably less scarring than most of Asia’s other projects.
“Sofia is such a lovely creature – so frail and quiet, but calm and strong as well," she says. “Next time, I think I’ll direct as Sofia rather than Sarah. But it’s great working for a female director. There are so few of us.”
Then she emits another husky giggle. “We girls need to stick together.”
Amen sister.