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This site is an official Asia Argento website. However,
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The Ghost of JT Leroy: Asia Argento's Deceitful "Heart"Turns out the unbelievable experiences of a young boy dragged from one truck stop to another across the asphalt-scored hills of West Virginia by his drug-/child-abusing prostitute mother were a bit more unbelievable than anyone imagined. Even though the New York Times outed the controversial 26-year-old autobiographer JT Leroy as actually being the 40 year-old, middle-class author Laura Albert (who in fact accompanied "JT" — played by Albert's half-sister-in-law — during personal appearances as "his" traveling companion, Emily Frasier), the film adaptation of "The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things" — directed by Asia Argento, who also stars as mama-from-hey-ell Sarah — spins the story into such a surreal nightmare that it hardly matters that the author is as authentic as Sarah's two-buck orgasms. IFC News' Dan Persons sat down with Argento:
Both. It's really both. Personally, it's a blessing because it was a very important thing in my life to make this movie, and curse because it was a very hard thing to make. The whole hoax thing... Like everybody, I believed that this was really JT's life. I had to, you know. Laura — who now I call "Laura"; for me it was "Emily" all this time — she tried actually to tell me a bunch of times that she had written it, and I dismissed it. I dismissed it because I didn't want... I was like, This woman, she's crazy, why does she want to take advantage... she wants to say that she wrote it? I thought maybe she had helped. I never quite understood what the relationship was between JT and her, why she was always around. I even thought that maybe she was Sarah, sometimes. But the whole time, Savannah [Knoop, who impersonated JT] was such a beautiful person, so charismatic, such a pleasure to be around, very creative, that, me, I had no doubts that this was the person who'd written the book.
I met them many times, and they were always together. Then the movie came out in Italy, they came to Italy for that, we went to Japan, we went to Cannes. I had times when I was with Savannah alone, but we would not talk about the book very much, because I enjoyed her company. [When] we talked about the book, she would give me notes on the phone. But now I know it was Laura actually who was doing that. I don?t feel cheated, you see. I know a lot of people do, but for me, a lot of good things came out of this.
I wanted to be loyal to the book, thinking it was somebody's real life. I wanted it to be therapeutic. I was very careful not to change things from the book; that was a good exercise for me. Some people wrote that the movie's amoral, just because as a director I'm not saying where I stand. I think that evil people, yes, they exist, but why are they evil? It's not that I'm trying to justify, but I'm trying to understand. I had mixed feelings towards Sarah. At first I hated her when I read the book. But the more I tried to understand, and, being a mother, I know how hard it is to be a mother... That's not a justification to be a monster like Sarah, but at the same time, society doesn't help a 14 year-old girl who's pregnant, there's no degree that's required for a young girl to be a mother. We all think about the mother's instinct, but what if somebody doesn't have it? So I imagined: 14 year-old girl, abandoned, what would she do? She would be Sarah.
At first I thought one actor would play the whole film, but when we started talking about the film, I realized that the beginning didn't make sense to have somebody 11 years old. Your mother tells you the police are going to drive a nail in here; the 11-year-old would say, "You're crazy — I'm gonna call the cops." What was tricky was how do you shelter these children from the reality of the story? We decided, especially for Jimmy, that we had to protect him. He didn't know what was happening. I would do a bit of a Fellini trick: I would talk him through it. On my close-ups, he was never there, anyway, because I would have only four hours a day with him. When I would shoot his close-ups, I wouldn't say [my lines], I would say, "Look right. Look at your feet." When you edit it, it looks like he looks at his feet in horror, but he didn't know what was happening most of the time.
Not really. Sometimes I would find myself using old-school cinematic tricks that I learned from watching him that probably directors of my generation don't use or know about. My father never sat me down and taught me about cinema, but we would talk about films all the time, and I'm a good observer. By working with him, I saw so much. I think, in a way, I'm a horror director too, but I don't direct horror movies. My father's movies are like fairy tales: They're horror in a fantasy. My horror is more the everyday life, it's the horror that is, unfortunately, next door. But maybe it's more horrific for that.
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