Isabella Rossellini Video Interview On ‘Green Porno’

She is a screen legend who starred in Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart. Now Isabella Rossellini is producing and starring in a documentary about the wild sex lives of animals with Green Porno, Season 2. Here, Isabella takes questions exclusively for users of Uinterview.com.

Q: What drew you to the topic of animal reproduction?

A: I was always interested in animals since I was a little girl. I never expressed it professionally; I’ve been mostly a model and an actress. But when Robert Redford came up with the idea of doing short films for the Internet and asked me if I would direct and write something, it was mostly interest in something to do with environment. I proposed the idea of doing a series of comical films about how animals reproduced, but not all animals. Animals that are strange, like insects or barnacles or starfish, because they do the strangest things, and I don’t think people are familiar with it.

Q: And my follow-up question is, how do you come up with subjects for films, like ‘Why Vagina?’

A: Most of the films, they have the same format. They come with a closeup of me saying, ‘if I were a fly . . .’if I were an earthworm . . . ‘if I were a barnacle . . .’ and then I transform myself in the barnacle or the fly or the earthworm. And with fantastic, very colorful costumes done by the great Andy Byers and Ray Gilbert, who are my associates. And then I show how they mate, which is generally very unusual. It’s not at all how we mate. But ‘Why Vagina?’ was a little poem that came after I read a book called ‘Animal Genitalia.’ And the scientists had a theory, and the theory was that – you know, sperm come by the millions, so they are expendable, but eggs are precious, and every female has certain amount of eggs. And also in the animal kingdom, it’s mostly the female that gets and remains pregnant. Not all; sometimes they are the male, that get the big pouch and the big belly. So the female have to find strategies to select the male, so that they are not willing to waste their eggs and their effort to raise their progeny. So this is how the little poem, ‘Why Vagina?’ came about, explaining how it’s difficult to reach a female because it’s one of the strategies that gives you time to select the male.

Q: There are a lot of very interesting visuals in ‘Green Porno.’For example, how did you come up with the idea for the Forest of Penises?

A: It came from the book. The book had illustrations of different sexual organs and they were drawn in pencil, and because they’re different strategies [of mating], you can’t think of just the same organs as us. Some had the most incredible shapes – from insects to giraffes, and they were all drawn in the same dimensions. So we made [the Forest of Penises] as sculptures.

Q: My follow-up questions are, why did you make these films as shorts, and what is the next project for you?

A: Robert Redford, who is the mind behind the big Sundance entity – you know, he’s responsible for having helped and launched independent film – he thought that the web, and the fact that a lot of people watch films on their cellular devices or their computer, that it would be really a waste to look at films like ‘Lawrence of Arabia.’ That you really have to think of a film for that format, aesthetically, and also length-wise. And it seems that short and very colorful was the best way to see films on your cellular phone. So these films are definitely conceived for the new media. I’m actually preparing the new series for ‘Green Porno’ for September. We will also come out with a book and a DVD included in the book with all of the 18 in the series I have done. And the new series will also include documentary footage, so it will be a mixture of my little theater with my paper costumes, but also a documentary.