Isabella Rossellini Regis Dialogue with John Anderson
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Isabella Rossellini Regis Dialogue with John Anderson John Anderson: We’re at the Walker Art Center for a Regis Dialogue with Isabella Rossellini, an actress of great dignity, beauty, and self-possession. Her talent is expressed in a range of films including Fearless, Left Luggage, Big Night, and Feast of the Goat. Isabella Rossellini has risen above her own enormous beauty by taking it lightly, while using it against itself in such films as Blue Velvet or even by playing the beer-legged lady, Helen Port-Huntley, in The Saddest Music in the World. These are the kinds of roles that make you love an actress. I’m John Anderson film critic, and I’ll be your guide through Rossellini’s work. We will now begin our Regis Dialogue with Isabella Rossellini. Isabella Rossellini: I always felt like protecting my dad. He was always fighting with the critics, sometimes ending up so exhausted, he would check himself into a clinic for stronger doses of glucose to ready himself for the next round of battles. Isabella Rossellini: Thank you. John Anderson: Thank you everyone. Thanks to the Walker Center and the terrific people here, we’ve been handled very well. It’s rather melancholy in that you seem to think your father’s films are being forgotten. Isabella Rossellini: They are. Well, I think that the great danger is for filmmakers that don’t have ... They don’t pay any attention to commercial success as my dad did, because he worked with very independent productions, small companies that often went bankrupt. So, there is a lot of lawsuits still today, 29 years after his death, some of the rights are uncleared. Also, films that don’t have a commercial life, they could be interesting. My father was more of an influential director than a commercial director, but I think when you study history of cinema, all the students knew about new realism, and they were the 16-millimeter distribution of films that became obsolete. And because my father is not commercial, none of these 16-millimeter were printed back into DVDs, which is now what students see on universities. So his films are not seen. John Anderson: Is there, with the 100th anniversary of his birth though, is there any move to get this stuff back in circulation? Isabella Rossellini: Some, some attempts. It is always a problem of money, and the problem was still that there are some lawsuits unresolved 29 years later. John Anderson: Wow. It’s interesting you have Hitchcock there arguing with your father. Hitchcock is often credited with Psycho, for killing off Janet Leigh 30 minutes into the film, but your father actually did, with Rome, Open City had done it 15 years before. Isabella Rossellini: The killing? Nov 5, 2006 1 John Anderson: The killing of a major character before the film was ... Midway through the film. Anna Magnani was killed midway. Isabella Rossellini: Yes. But see, you talk about it in a way like commercial films, like you don’t kill a major character. You don’t kill a leading lady. That’s not the way my father thought. I found out this later on when I came to America, and this is an industry, film industry. People talk a language that I never heard at home. Even with my mother, like career moves. I never knew what they meant really. John Anderson: Well, you’ve been a big one for career moves, huh? Isabella Rossellini: Yeah, or agent planning your thing, or not killing a character, or a leading star, because my father just told a story that he heard in the streets. In fact, there’s also the little quotation from Open City when Anna Magnani’s killed, it was just something that happened, and he went back and reconstructed what happened. So, I don’t think he ever thought about, “Oh, this is a leading character.” And he also was not an actor, so he didn’t have a problem of stars wanting to be liked all the time. John Anderson: Right. Guy Maddin has written that he talked you into playing all the different characters. Isabella Rossellini: Yes, he did. It was his idea. At first I thought I was going to ask some friend actors to play Hitchcock or Selznick, and Guy said, “No, you should do them because it will be clearer for the audience that this is the way you understood that this is nothing.” I didn’t want it to be a documentary or the ultimate just like what my father said, because I might be wrong. This is what I understood. So, interpreting everybody, it was clearer to the audience, this is what I understood of the argument of what film should be, and what cinema and the importance of cinema. John Anderson: Well, do you think this has been an influence on your own work with such relatively uncommercial directors? Directors who have gone completely outside the mainstream? Isabella Rossellini: What was it? John Anderson: Well, you said your father was an unconventional noncommercial filmmaker. Isabella Rossellini: Yes. Oh, I’m sure it had a lot to do with it. I feel comfortable with the director that are not in the mainstream. They feel like family to me. Like Guy Maddin feels very much like my dad. Though his film style is different, his lifestyle is similar. John Anderson: Does he stay in bed a lot? Isabella Rossellini: Had no money, they’re always followed by 10 fans. They love them with a passion, but there are 10. Nov 5, 2006 2 John Anderson: That’s right. That’s right. That’s right. And they’re going to see Borat right after they see that, right? You talk about the morality of the image, and that’s something that recurs a lot with you in interviews, and then in the film as well. You had something of a struggle when you became a model that you found it either a stupid job. I think you’ve said once in— Isabella Rossellini: Well, I started very late because I was told that it was stupid. I got the bid, when you’re 20, you want to be intelligent. But later on when you give up, you find it a relief to be stupid, and seizing it, but at 20, no. John Anderson: You can go into politics, you can handle that. Isabella Rossellini: So I became a model at 28, and then they said ... Then it was a big thing in the articles, she’s so old, she’s so old, but nobody asked how old I was. So, it’s not that I’d hidden it or anything. I didn’t even know that a model had to be 14. John Anderson: Right. Isabella Rossellini: But actually I did enjoy modeling quite a lot. So once I started it, I repented not to have started earlier, because I know I did have a very long career as a model, 20-year career, I could have had 30 or 35 if I had started at 14, and I was sorry not to have done it. It was stupid stereotypes saying this. Well anyway, I had a good run. John Anderson: Yeah. Well, I think I remember reading a story about you going to Taiwan and people genuflecting in front of you and kissing your hand. And you being somewhat, I think, overwhelmed at that point by the power that a single image would have. Isabella Rossellini: Yes, especially advertisement. Laura Dern, the actress Laura Dern, left a message in my machine saying, “I’m doing a film in Mexico in the middle of nowhere, and there is just two things that are familiar: an advertisement, a sign of Coca-Cola, and one of you doing some cream or something.” It was in ... Especially the Lancôme contract lasted very long, lasted for 14 years, and that is unusual. And I think it had a cumulative impact on making my face so familiar, like Coca-Cola, because generally, especially in fashion, it’s all about change, and consumerism, and the next pretty girl, and the next pretty girl. So, it was unusual that it lasted so long, and it was unprecedented, even the impact. John Anderson: Right. Do you think it would happen now, that you would get that length of a career, in just the changes in the last 10 years or so? Isabella Rossellini: See, to me it was always stupefying that I was so successful as a model, especially in the Lancôme ads, and they didn’t attempt to either repeat it or they let me go, I still wonder why. They did hire my daughter lately. I thought it was a good sign. Nov 5, 2006 3 John Anderson: Well speaking of daughters, David Lynch once said something in an interview, that when he first met you he said, “You could be Ingrid Bergman’s daughter.” And someone said, “You idiot, she is Ingrid Bergman’s daughter.” Isabella Rossellini: But that happens to me quite a lot, because I look like my mom, and sometimes I catch a cab in ... Well, especially when I was younger, I would catch a cab and the taxi drivers said, “Oh, I thought I was picking up Ingrid Bergman.” It was surprising. John Anderson: But you never used— Isabella Rossellini: Once I thought I was Ingrid Bergman. That was the strangest. That was amazing, because when I was growing up, and we were always told, “Oh, you look so much like your mom.” And even my mom and I, we said, “Oh,” we looked at each other in the mirror and said, “Oh, we don’t look ..