“You’re giving a part of your soul, something so intimate, and you’re paid for it. At the snap of someone’s fingers, you open up like a ripe fruit.” Interestingly, both of the films she has directed feature monstrous mothers. Making the psychodrama even more explicit, Nicolodi plays Argento’s mother in Scarlet Diva, and is killed off via drug overdose. “We always had a tormented relationship,” Argento says of her mother. “After killing her — or that projection of the mean mother — it helped us to become closer.”
With a six-year-old daughter of her own, Argento took on the “mean mother” role herself in The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things. She believes it is that discomfiting memory — more than the revelation that J.T. Leroy was actually the creation of a writer named Laura Albert — that has haunted her and prevented her from writing and directing since. “I’m a bit of a monster when I direct, and especially with that film,” she admits. “I’m scared of becoming that monster again.
She has mixed feelings about the Leroy/Albert deception. “The film stands on its own. In a way it’s easier to watch now that you know it’s not true.” Even before the sham was exposed, she was getting queasy about the JT Leroy circus. “You would think that JT, or whoever it was, was a starfucker but the real fuckers were the stars. They went to him — I still find myself saying ‘him’ — on their bended knee begging for JT to put his hand on their heads and save their miserable catty lives because he had suffered so much and survived.”
Argento is disgusted by the recent court case in which Antidote Films successfully sued Albert for fraud; the company had optioned the book Sarah for director Steven Shainberg (Fur, Secretary). “It’s still a good book,” Argento says. “It’s not real, and everyone now says it’s shit?
“I don’t allow myself to feel cheated,” she continues. “It was probably necessary for Laura. Don’t we all do that? I’ve played a character, maybe not all my life, but since I was 20, to feel better than the person that I was, that I despised, and I know people love me for this person that I invented. How can we despise someone for something we all do a million times a day?”