Rossellini's animal magnetism

ACTRESS Isabella Rossellini's latest projects highlight her natural inclinations.

Isabella Rossellini

LIKE many of her peers, Isabella Rossellini mines her life and experiences for her art. She has had a rich life and is a woman of many facets: actor, director, philanthropist, environmentalist. Significantly she does not take herself too seriously.

The former model is seriously lacking in vanity, too, as anyone who has seen her series of idiosyncratic short films Green Porno and Seduce Me will recognise: Rossellini conceived, wrote and directed the films, and takes on the roles of insects, invertebrates and other creepy-crawlies, wearing outrageous costumes and acting out mating rituals in this series of environmental/educational short films that have a distinct touch of the avant garde.

Green Porno and her new documentary Animals Distract Me are having a short summer season at Melbourne's Australian Centre for the Moving Image. In Animals Distract Me, Rossellini shows how animals invade her imagination and her everyday life, from the guide dogs she helps train to the microscopic demodex in her eyelashes. It's almost like "a day in the life of Rossellini" as she walks through New York with Bau, a young black labrador and her eighth trainee guide dog (who also has a cameo as a Neanderthal-era wolf pup), and we have a glimpse of her special relationship with Sweety, another blond trainee who accompanies Rossellini through much of the film, hanging out with her mates, such as Vogue's Andre Leon Talley and chef Mario Batali.

Sweety didn't quite cut it as a guide dog. "She became a breeder, and in September had 11 puppies," Rossellini says, speaking by phone from her New York office. Such breeders frequently give birth at her home. "I like that the best, to raise the little doggies at home," she says.

The love of mothers is set to be the subject of the third in her short film series after Green Porno and Seduce Me. The films are just a few minutes long, and were made for the Sundance Channel and intended to be screened online.

"I would like to make a new series about mothers, called Mammas, and I am looking for financing. Unfortunately Sundance has stopped financing films for the internet, just because the internet has not yet found a way to make money," she says. "Google and YouTube are starting their own channels, and of course I'm looking into working with one of them, but I also have the possibility to work in Europe, so that's what I'm looking at right now."

Her films, while light-hearted, have a serious message: to make people look more carefully at the natural world. "You can get lessons from a spider walking in your sink," she says.

Rossellini lives on a property close to the sea on Long Island. She's been an animal lover since childhood, growing up in Italy and Paris with her parents, the actor Ingrid Bergman and Italian director Roberto Rossellini, whose love affair at the beginning of the 1950s caused a huge scandal in the US.

Isabella Rossellini has been involved in foundations to preserve dance, film and photography, as well in as nature conservation.

Now 59, Rossellini -- whose famous face helped to sell Lancome cosmetics in magazines from 1982 to 1996, at which time she was told she was too old -- has mellowed into a rounder version of herself. These days she sports a boyish haircut and a mannish uniform of black shirt and trousers, practical for walking dogs.

Her beauty and talent caught the world's attention in 1986, when she played troubled lounge singer Dorothy Vallens in David Lynch's Blue Velvet.

"That was a very wonderful and substantial role, and that was the film that launched my career, so I'm attached to it," she says.

Since then, Rossellini has made dozens of films in Europe and the US, and had regular roles in television series Alias and 30 Rock. Recently she has made five films with Canadian avant-garde director Guy Maddin, including The Saddest Music in the World, and a documentary about her father called My Dad is 100 Years Old, in which she plays Alfred Hitchcock, Federico Fellini and her own mother, Ingrid Bergman.

She continues to make three films a year. "A lot are small parts, I'm not the leading lady," she says with a laugh. "I still love it, but not as much as I used to. You know, when you start directing it's so much more engaging that it kills a little bit of your love for acting."

Rossellini tends to form long-term working relationships and has made two films in France with Marjane Satrapi, whose graphic novel Persepolis became an Oscar-nominated animated film. "She made a second live-action film, Chicken with Plums, and I play an Iranian woman. When I said, 'Me, play an Iranian? I don't believe it!' Marjane looked at me and said, 'You play a bug, why wouldn't you play an Iranian?' " She laughs again.

A leading role did come her way recently, in Julie Gavras's film Late Bloomers, playing opposite William Hurt. "That was the first I've had for quite a while, so that was flattering. It was a lovely film . . . it's sold in 23 countries, which is very encouraging."

Gavras, too, is from a film family: she is the daughter of left-wing filmmaker Costa-Gavras. "When she tells a story, it is never just a love story between a man and a woman," says Rossellini. "There is that aspect too, but there is always much more, it includes the family and the extended family, and I think that's very feminine, the idea that love is family, it isn't one individual that you are pursuing. That's what attracted me to work with her, because we always wondered if there is a woman's voice in film, and I think Julie does have a woman's voice."

Rossellini cheerfully breaks the showbiz golden rule about what happens on set staying on set. "Working with William was a little challenging," she says. "He's very private and introverted. We did get along, but he can be a bit severe on set. And I think that because it was Julie's second film, and the cinematographer was also a woman, he was slightly intimidating to them, I think. On the other hand you can't say: 'Hang on, be gentle, we're girls', because you diminish yourself."

She points out that she and Hurt are in their 60s, often working with directors in their 30s. "We are the age not just of their parents but their grandparents," she says. "And I remember how intimidating it was to me to just even speak to people that were grown-ups, just the fact that they were older made me slightly afraid of them. I don't think William took that into consideration, or maybe he thought it was a good way to toughen the women up. Whatever it was, it was tough.

"That's why," she adds, "I always hire myself when I am director -- I play all the roles!"

Animals Distract and Green Porno are at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, January 5-8.