Isabella Rossellini
The daughter of Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman on her parents' work, how their success influenced her own film career, and why she was always terrified of the great Anna Magnani
guardian.co.uk,
Sunday May 06 2007
Geoff Andrew: Well thank you very much, Isabella, for coming along and launching our tribute to your father's work. I'm delighted you can be here.
Isabella Rossellini: Delighted to be here.
GA: [To audience] You've just seen The Chicken, which I always think should be called Chicken Thieves. It's not exactly what you expect after watching Rome, Open City. I wonder, because Roberto Rossellini was thought of as the father of neo-realism, how much reality was there in this film about life with the Rossellini family?
IR: Well, the house is real, the dogs, the children, my brother and cousins. I think this was part of a film series of little episodes with famous actresses and they asked my dad to do one with my mum. I think he shows very well how charming my mum is as a person. She played very much herself and I think she was very comfortable with this invented story about the chicken.
GA: Was she very fond of roses?
IR: No, she never did any gardening [laughs from audience]. She didn't like to cook, she did like to clean, she cleaned a lot: she was Swedish. But she used to say that her favourite word was room service.
GA: Was the business of film-making something that came up in family discussions?
IR: Well, first of all, my parents divorced when I was three, so I don't really remember. Maybe they talked about film: I wasn't paying any attention. Then they were divorced and, yes, we did talk about film. Mother was very much involved with acting; she always said: "I didn't choose acting - acting chose me." She really felt it was a call for her. My dad was not interested in the art of film-making per se but was very interested in science and history, and talked often about what he read in books. He was always trying to translate that into film, but he didn't go much to the movies. Mother went to the movies a little bit, but mostly to theatre, because I think an actor enjoys acting from an actor more in theatre than in cinema, which is really more a medium for the director, who can edit around your performance.
GA: Did you feel, having parents who were both working in the cinema, that it was an obvious route for you?
IR: Oh no, on the contrary. I became an actress way into my 30s because I thought that I had to find my own way, and that's why I worked so much in modelling, until I realised that the differences between acting and modelling weren't that great. I always say that modelling is a little bit like being a silent actress. I still think that what is important is not to look pretty but to express emotions. And I do believe, quoting Diana Vreeland, the great guru of fashion, that there is no beauty without emotion. So once I realised that my job as a model was to emote in front of the camera, I thought, well now I just have to add words and I can do films. But also my success as a model made me more confident about becoming an actress because just in case I failed I thought well, you know, if I failed as an actress, I can do another job. When I was young it was difficult to imagine entering a world where my parents succeeded so much and I could have risked failing. It would have felt much harder.
GA: What was it like having famous parents? I know this is a question you will have been asked many times, but I have to ask you.
IR: Well I always say that I don't really know the difference because I have never been the daughter of unfamous people, so I can't really have a term of comparison. I can tell you though two episodes, one that surprised me. My children were born after both my parents were dead and my daughter one day asked me: "What did grandma look like? What kind of film did she do?" And I said, "OK, let me turn on the TV." And I switched the channel and said: "Oh there she is." Then I thought, not many people can do this... "You wanna see Grandma?" The other thing I remember about childhood, which was different, was the absolute persecution of paparazzi, which a lot of stars complain about today, and I greatly sympathise with them. We always had paparazzi outside the house. Every time we moved there was a paparazzo. Once they caught me when I was 13 smoking a cigarette: my God, it was a drama - my father saw it! You know, it was that kind of scrutiny, that was terrible.
GA: What is the earliest instance you remember of seeing one of your dad's films?
IR: I remember going to my father's set all the time. His cinema was a very poor cinema. My father was much more of an influential director than a successful director. Throughout his life, he wasn't commercially successful. So his films were done on a very limited budget and he recruited all the family to work: my uncle, his brother, did the music; his first wife did the costume; my cousin, who was an architect, designed the sets; my brother was his producer and first assistant director, so it was always shot pretty much close to the home. So I remember being on my father's set from childhood. And the first jobs I had as a teenager were as a gofer or in the costume department, because I always liked fashion.
GA: Could you relate what you saw as the finished product to what you had been doing hanging out on the set with your dad?
IR: I could also relate to the editing because father did all his editing at home, so I was very familiar with that, too.
GA: Rome, Open City, which people here have just been watching, is probably your father's most famous film and was hugely influential, starting off the neo-realist movement. Do you think we have any idea of what a revelation it must have been at the time, because it must have been extraordinary?
IR: Well I think that you have to think that cinema came from magic shows, and still today it has a little bit of the soul that "we are going to impress you; there's going to be colour, there are going to be special effects" and much more so in the 40s when Hollywood had its moment of great triumph, of fantasy, of entertainment and romance. My father was using film as a tool of knowledge, of revelation, even a tool to just show what was happening in Italy. My father always said that he didn't sit down with Visconti and say, "Let's invent this new art form called neo-realism"; they just did the film that they could do and the urge to tell the world what they had seen was the urge; it was an artistic urge, it was really a cry to humanity: "This is what war is; this is what we went through." And that was very impactful because it was the voice of the enemy speaking. Italy was fascist and neo-realism had this redeeming quality: the Italians were finally seen as not just fascists but as human beings.
GA: It's funny because Federico Fellini said that when Rome: Open City was made, the condition that Rome was in, it was very difficult to even get the film together, to get the stock. And Fellini wrote that neo-realism was a necessity of the situation that film was shot it. But for your father, it seems to have been more than that; it seems to have been very much a choice, not so much human realism as a quest for the truth. I think it's quite strange that with later films a lot of people felt he was abandoning the tenets of neo-realism and going into something else, but some people, and I think they were right, said: "No, he was still making films about the truth, but it was a different sort of truth."
IR: I think it's hard to define truth, but he used film as an instrument of knowledge, as a way to understand. My father used to say that you could only access culture before cinema by learning to read and write, but that once cinema was invented, knowledge was available to anybody. He always said to me that film was as important as the discovery of fire for the primitive man. And so he wanted to use this medium in its fullest potential. And that is true throughout his films. When he did neo-realism and it became so successful people wanted him to keep on doing films about the war in Italy and he felt that that was not the reality that was in front of him any more and he wasn't interested, and he was seeking for another revelation; something else to communicate. And I think it became quite clear at the end of his life, when he made historical biographies like Louis XIV. His dream came true: he thought that people could get a lot of information about Louis XIV, Pascal, Jesus, Socrates etc in an hour. His next project, that he was unable to realise, was a film on science. He wanted to simplify science and make it accessible to everyone through pictures. And throughout my childhood he sent me out to out to fish sea urchins, because it was easy to catch them and then get sperm and eggs and mix them and photograph what was happening. He was experimenting at home with the simplest way to do science; all this was done in our kitchen. Today you would have the National Geographic helping you, but this was a long time ago and Italy was too poor.
GA: That just shows how true to life The Chicken is because you had to have nature in the house. But it's interesting that you should say that he wanted to do that because at the very start of his career he made these tiny little movies about animals and snails and so forth, which we are actually showing with the other films in the season. I think there's one called The Powerful or Predominant Turkey, and there's another one called La Vispa Teresa. I'm not sure what that means.
IR: Yes, it was a famous song at the time. It meant "the lively bee". And then there was another one, Fantasia Sottomarina, or Underwater Fantasy. My father loved animals: he loved to go fishing. My favourite photo in his retrospective that is now here in London is in his bathing suit with his big Italian pasta belly with a cigarette, a mask and a gun to go hunting for fish.
GA: Which leads us on very nicely to Stromboli, which has an amazing tuna fishing scene in it...
IR: Yes, and tuna fish have disappeared from the Mediterranean, so one of the extraordinary things about this film is that it is now a historical document. Who would have known that this fish does not even go to the Mediterranean any more, we ate them all.
GA: But when you see that sequence you think: If I were a tuna I would never go near Stromboli. Yet somebody did go near Stromboli and that was your mother. Rather famously, having seen Rome, Open City, she wrote to your father offering her services to him as an actress. Famously, he accepted and came up with this wonderful story for her to act in. And they started filming together and became lovers. That must have been something of a shock for her just to make that film because she was used to working in Hollywood and being treated like a star. Then suddenly she's up on the side of a volcano choking on fumes and working with non-professionals.
IR: Well, yes, I think that part was the hardest part. I don't think a Hollywood actor is safe from acting in the rain: it all depends on the film. I think mother was ready for the adventure, and she understood that you can have very different methodologies for making films and my father for sure had the most original one. My father - and this defines neo-realism - never used actors, or he only used very good ones like my mother or Anna Magnani, but the rest, he didn't want. He thought that if you want a fisherman it was better to ask a fisherman to play a fisherman because he would have the sunburnt skin, the hands, the ability to use the hooks and the net; the authentic movement. Even the best actor in the world, Cary Grant, will always be Cary Grant as the fisherman, Cary Grant as a lawyer, Cary Grant as an emperor. You will always see Cary Grant. He felt that his cinema needed an immediacy. Also you have to remember that only in Anglo-Saxon countries do you have the problem with looping, where you always want to hear the voice of the actor. But throughout the world every Hollywood film is dubbed. Every film that is seen today is dubbed and the Italian audience completely accepts dubbing. So my father was not terribly concerned if the fisherman couldn't learn his line, because an actor later on would loop the line. So for mother, when she had to work with non-professional actors incapable of giving her line back, she found that to be very unsettling and really something she had to learn. She was very shy, so it was probably difficult.
GA: And because of the way that their relationship developed, and the scandal, your mother was basically told she wasn't welcome back in America. The paparazzi were following your parents around a great deal. Obviously you weren't around but did they talk about it much later on to you?
IR: My mother was at the time the biggest star in Hollywood and considered sure box office. She saw my father's film, as you mentioned, and liked it very much and wanted to work with him. When they fell in love she became pregnant with my brother before she divorced her husband and it caused a scandal that still today I can't understand why. Most people divorce because one in the couple falls in love with someone else: it's a common cause of divorce. I still think that it's tinted - this is my opinion - with a veil of racism and American puritanism. It's almost as if Julia Roberts fell in love with and ran off with the best Iraqi director: Italy was the enemy and was looked down on by the whole world. So there was a lot of scornfulness. It was such a scandal that the American senate took a stand against my mother. They were concerned about the status that the superstars had in America. You scrutinise the CEO of a company to make sure they are morally sound but we never do that kind of screening before an actor becomes a superstar. That was the debate in the Senate: shouldn't Hollywood, the studios, scrutinise the background of an actor they know could potentially become a superstar? So my mother became persona non grata and couldn't come back to the States for 10 years.
GA: Did they discuss this with you a great deal?
IR: They did, especially Mama. Papa was just angry and dismissed Hollywood. He didn't belong, he didn't have friends, he didn't have a career there. For Mama, it was a tremendous pain, because she had a daughter she couldn't see for 10 years. She couldn't work in Hollywood for a long time. And if you see Stromboli, and then you see Europa 51, I mean it's two years and if any of you see it, you see a girl and then you see a mature woman. And I think it was the pressure of that scandal that also caused I am pretty sure, their relationship and the divorce. She aged 10 years.
GA: The films are extraordinary works and there's a series of films which your father made with your mother which are all pretty dark. Stromboli may have a note of hope but they are all very ambivalent endings and are all about suffering and pain. Perhaps I'm not selling them very well but you said your father was a very cheerful fellow - where did this darkness come from?
IR: Well I think the films that he did with my mother were about the existential uneasiness that was a surprise after the war because he thought: now that the war is over we're going to be happy, we're going to be serene. But still they found themselves with the longing, with the melancholy and these films try to capture that: why are we still unhappy when we are at peace? I think my mother became the muse because she had everything when she was in Hollywood: she had the marriage, the success, the money, all the films she wanted to do and yet even her, she had a longing and wanted to work with a film that had meaning, something more profound. And I think that was very touching to father.
GA: Some people have actually said that if you look at these films together you get a sense that they are responses by your father to developments in their relationship. Do you agree with that?
IR: It's a theory. With the war films earlier in his career, I think my father's idea was to use film as a knowledge tool. But I think the marriage with my mother became a whole new inspiration. Then I think he went back to knowledge by making first documentaries, and then historical biography and then science films. So I think the films he made with my mother were influenced by their relationship: they are both the authors of these films; my mother was beyond an actress, she was also the source of inspiration. I think [the film] Viaggio in Italia for me is the most touching and the most interesting and that is why my father is more influential than commercial. I have to explain to you Viaggio in Italia, because I only understood it as an adult. It not only portrays the uneasiness of a marriage where you love the person but also the portrait of tourism of Italy. There's tension in the marriage, so let's take a wonderful trip to Italy and in the holiday we'll relax and we'll find ourselves. And they look at the monuments and they look at the Italians: "Oh, they scream so much. They fight so much." They see a fight between a maid with her husband and are slightly scandalised that they are having the same tensions as the Anglo-Saxon couple but it's expressed differently. And mother, little by little in the film, looks at the monuments, and thinks: "Oh, how beautiful, how rich, how interesting." But all of a sudden, it dawns on her, they were people; these are messages they have left for us. And when she finally goes to Pompeii and sees a couple dead in their embrace, she breaks down and cries. Because all of a sudden it isn't Italy of tourism, the strength of Italy is its history, that under our feet, where we walk, there are millions of people buried, literally buried, some of them mummified. And that consciousness is what's so strong in Viaggio in Italia, which I didn't understand as a child but only as a grown-up. At the end of the film, it ends with this miracle of the couple realising how lost people are in this universe and they are separated by a crowd and in that moment of panic they find each other and they embrace. It happens in a religious parade: a lot of people talk about my father and his religiosity - he wasn't religious but he did believe that there was something occasionally in situations where we celebrate where we don't understand. Father didn't go to church but if you are Italian, you are Catholic by culture and a little bit by situation.
GA: Did your mother ever talk to you about whether working with your father was what she expected when she first wrote to him?
IR: I think mother recognised father was a great pioneer. Mother's great friends were people like Hemingway. She was very innocent and self-deprecating, but she loved the company of great, intelligent people because she was one of them too. She loved my father's films and always supported him through light and the dark. She made fun of him because they always bombed and always had very bad critics but she was incredibly supportive of his work. I think she recognised he was one of the greatest.
GA:What we're going to do now is take a brief break and then we'll come back.
(Audience watches US-made documentary about the Rossellini family.)
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