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Asia Argento's Must-See MoviesThe sexy star picks her five fave flicks. Get ready for madness, despair and freaks. Bt C. Bottomley "I consider myself amateur in everything I do," says Asia Argento, who in her 30 years on Earth has written novels, painted, been on the cover of Rolling Stone, and made VH1.com's 50 Sexiest Actresses list. "I want to keep my naïveté, my surprise and enchantment when I putmy eye to the camera." The daughter of Italian horror maestro Dario Argento is best known to American audiences for beguiling Vin Diesel in XXX. But the starlet is more comfortable hanging out with rogue directors like Gus Van Sant and Abel Ferrara, and directing and starring in her own intensely personal movies. Argento directs and stars in The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, based on the best-selling JT LeRoy novel. LeRoy claimed the abusive childhood of The Heart's Jeremiah was grounded in his own experiences until it was revealed that Jeremiah was the pseudonym of a musician. But Argento knows about bizarre upbringings--her father once cast her in a movie as a woman tortured and raped to the edge of madness. So The Heart, in her hands, gains a renewed power as a harrowing film about a mother and son unsure where hate ends and love begins. "I wouldn't make a film so I could drink champagne and talk about my next movie," the sad-eyed multi-hyphenate told VH1. "It's not about that. It's really a necessity." Maybe it takes an amateur to be so passionate about her craft. She shared with us the five movies that made her that way. Sideshow attractions exact revenge on a gold-digging trapeze artist in this 1932 shocker. My favorite movie of all time. It really changed my life. I first saw it when I was five and it was mind-blowing for me. I became morbidly obsessed with this movie. I would watch it, like, five times a day. Why? Looking back, I think, because I felt like a freak growing up. All of a sudden in this movie, you had these freaks that were proud of being freaks. They had the attitude of, We don't want to be accepted by you, but we accept you. All of a sudden I thought, Oh, I can be proud of being a freak. I don't need to be accepted. That's why in The Heart, I'm not judging anybody. I tried not to make caricatures of the evil characters. Nowadays when you see a movie, the mean character is mean and he's going to die or get his revenge. But in life, it's not like that so in my film, the mean characters are all good-looking guys. A family falls apart in this 1981 masterpiece from Dennis Hopper's wilderness years. I studied it a lot while making The Heart. Dennis Hopper is a school-bus driver who killed a lot of kids in an accident. His daughter is in her own world. She loves punk; she hates disco--disco sucks! Her mother is a junkie so it's a lot like The Heart. But the father becomes a monster, too. Linda Manz who plays the daughter is amazing. The whole movie, she is so free. I actually had Dylan Sprouse who plays the older Jeremiah in The Heart watch the film to get inspiration from the young girl. I also find the way it's shot so freeing. At times, the characters look right in the camera. Dennis Hopper didn't care; he was such a free man. After [his 1971 disaster] The Last Movie, he had such a bad time doing other films until Colors, when he could have done so many great movies. I wish he had rather then become so stupid like he did. Two people go crazy in their apartments in two different Roman Polanski movies from 1965 and 1976. Polanski is my favorite director and it's hard to choose. These are two movies that were very important to me growing up. They're both about people who are trapped in rooms. Growing up I had access to a lot of horror movies, obviously, but Polanski is the director that scares me the most. He finds the truth that is part of our dreams. In The Tenant, he plays the central character and he finds a tooth buried in the wall of his apartment. It's as if these movies were written by someone in a trance or in their sleep. They seem very natural in the way they develop and that's why they're so scary to me ... and so ancient. I call it the "atavic bastard." They're f*cking with something so ancient that you don't even know where it's coming from, but it's inside you. It's something you didn't even know you had experienced. Italian maestro Federico Fellini directs an Edgar Allan Poe story from this 1968 portmanteau movie. The other two films aren't interesting but Fellini's chapter is so psychedelic. Terence Stamp plays this actor who is f*cked up with drugs and everything. He's in Italy to do a TV advertisement or stupid film or something he doesn't care about. He arrives at this very strange airport full of nuns and starts seeing this mysterious blonde girl. He's loud, he's vulgar, he's a piece-of-sh*t actor. All he wants is a Ferrari, so he's going to get paid with a Ferrari. Finally he's drunk and high and crazy at night after this sh*tty party where he makes a fool of himself. He takes the Ferrari and starts driving and dies after seeing the blonde girl, who was his death. The whole movie is totally lysergic. Fellini was starting to use L.S.D. so you feel like you're on L.S.D. watching it--the colors, the way it's shot; it's completely dreamy. A German mental patient gets lost in Wisconsin. From Grizzly Man director Werner Herzog. It's a movie shot in America by Werner Herzog. This poor guy loves this girl. She's being abused so he and her and an old-man friend of theirs go to the United States to find this dream. But everything crumbles in the end. I love the simplicity and the actual mistakes in the film. There are shots that seem like they are stolen, like this one shot from the back of their car [where] you just see the silhouettes of them against the sky. It's a very tragic story--this is the movie Ian Curtis from Joy Division watched before he killed himself. It was scary to watch that movie while preparing The Heart because there were so many times when I thought this movie is not going to happen. But I'm determined. I'm like a bullfighter--or the bull, actually. March 7, 2006 |
