Asia Argento honored with the Life Achievement Award at Locarno79

© SOPA Images Limited / Alamy

Asia Argento received the Life Achievement Award at Locarno79. To mark the occasion, Pardo caught up with the actress and filmmaker, who offered a guided tour of her filmography – no doubt one of the most remarkable in recent decades.

Locarno Film Festival © Davide Padovan

Twentieth century cinema ended with an image, an image of Asia Argento – one that is blurry, frosted by the pixelation of primitive video. In Abel Ferrara’s cyberpunk erotic thriller New Rose Hotel (1998), the two protagonists – played by Willem Dafoe and Christopher Walken – hire Argento’s call girl Sandii to seduce a genius computer scientist in Tokyo. As often happens in Ferrara movies, the characters end up under the spell of their own invention – high on their own supply, as it were. While the two men believe themselves masters of her seductive power, stage-managing even her smallest gestures, their mad desire blinds them to Sandii’s ulterior motives. Within the film’s surveillance-like aesthetic vortex, it is the image of Argento, with an angel tattoo extending its wings across her lower abdomen, that has become a flashpoint: as with other nervy, end-of-the-century cyber-treatises like Strange Days (1995) and ExistenZ (1999), Ferrara’s William Gibson adaptation proposes a sci-fi future of images – a world most often experienced secondarily, through recordings – more than it does a dystopian social vision.

“I remember my first day on set with those two giants [Walken and Dafoe] very clearly,” says Argento, reflecting on the shoot. “I was terrified. My heart was pounding; I was stiff as a board. After a while, Abel said to me: ‘You’re so interesting in real life, why aren’t you [interesting] in my film? Don’t follow the camera; it’s the camera that follows you.’ Those were among the greatest lessons in filmmaking I’ve ever received.” Just 22 years old at the time, Argento’s conquest of the cinephile imagination already seemed ordained by the time New Rose Hotel was released the following year.

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Cinema has always been an obsession; as a child I would watch the same film even four times a day on old Betamax tapes.

Her arrival in Locarno marks what is now a nearly four-decade long screen career. She began acting as a child in the late ’80s, appearing in cult films like Demons 2 (1986), by Lamberto Bava, and Michele Soavi’s The Church (1989). She appeared too, in a very different mode, in Nanni Moretti’s formalist comedy Red Wood Pigeon (1989), as the whip-smart tomboy daughter of Moretti’s amnesiac communist party chairman. “Having started at 9, I was already a veteran [by my teens],” she says. “Cinema has always been an obsession; as a child I would watch the same film even four times a day on old Betamax tapes.”

It was with Trauma (1993), her first time acting for her famous father Dario, aged 17, that Asia Argento became Asia Argento, an image – beguiling and unknowable. Awards for turns in popular Italian comedies and dramas followed, most notably with Carlo Verdone’s Let’s Not Keep in Touch (1994), Peter Del Monte’s Traveling Companion (1996), and Antonello Grimaldi’s Bits and Pieces (1996), opposite Monica Bellucci. Then came another Dario concoction, The Stendhal Syndrome (1996), a provocative, mad blend of giallo, classical art, and video game-like graphic elements that renewed interest in the auteur internationally. “Overall, I prefer tormented cinema,” Argento affirms. “The bourgeois and acceptable kind bores me. But spoiler: I don’t like horror films. I like my dad’s films, because he’s a genius.”

Asia Argento, in Locarno with her film "La tua lingua sul mio cuore", 1999 | @Locarno Film Festival

With Scarlet Diva (2000), a tale of an actress, played by herself, indulging a self-destructive streak, Argento initiated her own three-film run of highly personal, self-directed features, shot through with a Ferrara-like self-interrogative fearlessness but fractured by a polyphonic visual style very much her own. “It was Abel who was my film school; he’s the one who gave me the desire and strength to direct my first film,” she says. “We’d go around and he’d be telling everyone I ought to make it.”

But she wanted to make it on her own terms. “I got to Hollywood without caring whether I might become a diva,” she says of her dalliance with the Dream Factory. While American filmmakers as diverse as Rob Cohen (xXx, 2002), Gus Van Sant (Last Days, 2005), Sofia Coppola (Marie Antoinette, 2004), and even George A. Romero (Land of the Dead, 2005) all grappled with Argento’s enigmatic screen presence, it would take a return to Europe for the actor to again be given roles that fully unleashed her: probably her two most extraordinary performances of this time are in Catherine Breillat’s The Last Mistress and Olivier Assayas’s Boarding Gate (both 2007).

“She’s losing control again,” went the tagline for the latter, a masterful, pre-Global Financial Crisis thriller. By this point, New Rose Hotel’s speculative vision of the new millennium was already ancient history; Asia in 2007, playing another woman who fatally seduces a businessman (played by Michael Madsen) for material gain, is no longer a prime mover but a pawn in a grey, faceless network of international trade, shipping, and organised crime. She is “losing control” not because her seductive power is any less, but because the world has changed, grown more anonymous. While New Rose Hotel showed us the gauzy beginnings of the new century – frightening, sordid, but exciting – by the time of Boarding Gate, those shimmering pixelations, as blended with rich 35mm, had given way to flat digital, the grime of the world now better integrated into global flows of capital, and so less perversely enchanting.

©LA FAENA

Now in 2026, in Death Has No Master (La muerte no tiene dueño), which premiered earlier this year in the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, Argento once again plays a woman who gives us the sense of a ghostly apparition, haunting the present. And yet, unlike Sandii or the actress’s other femmes fatales, her character in Jorge Thielen Armand’s film struggles to assert control: her world is crumbling around her, riven by violence once hidden but now openly erupting. Argento’s Caro is an Italian heiress, returned to Venezuela after years overseas to lay claim to her father’s plantation. “This was one of the most tormented roles of my life,” the actress says. “It wasn’t easy because I couldn’t stand [Caro], and you’re supposed to love your characters, protect them... Not to mention the political situation in marvellous and tormented Venezuela, with Trump out there, at sea, just a stone's throw from the coast.”

This being Asia Argento, there’s a heritage that comes with any image of her face, her body. Death Has No Master – selected by the actress to screen as part of her Life Achievement Award tribute at Locarno79 – deftly plays on that: there’s a sense of a lingering colonial nightmare at the film’s heart. The spirit of the Latin American-set exploitation films made in Italy in the ’70s and ’80s looms over the ambient horror of Armand’s languorous images. “Shooting it in Spanish, which I had to memorise [for this shoot], was an experience of total discomfort, of unease; I lived through a solitude I had never felt before, but which made me love cinema even more.”

When asked why she hasn’t directed a film since Misunderstood (2014), Argento pauses. “Creative blackout? Maybe, but I am not afraid of the dark. It’s the origin of everything; the uterine cave: it isn’t cold and scary, it’s comforting.”

“It’s in the dark that I’ve always seen clearly. And when the light comes back, you appreciate it even more, like Dante and the stars – Borges said that poetry is like dawn and sunset, it always returns. Cinema is the same. It will return. It is still the longest love relationship in my life.”

Interview conducted by Alessandro De Bon