Asia Argento On If She’d Direct A Movie About Anthony Bourdain, And Making ‘Death Has No Master’

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:01][music] [music] [music] >> How Death Has No Master comes from this recurring nightmare that I have where I'm roaming around an abandoned building possibly in Caracas, the city I'm from.

[00:00:25]Um and I feel filthy. I feel hungover. I feel like I'm looking for the exit or maybe a place to hide and there's people partying and and when I wake up I think of home. I think of everything I left behind and I fear the possibility that I'll go back too late.

[00:00:45]So in a way this movie is the nightmare of going back and finding the ghost of your past but also finding the you that you're the old you that has that is brought in from the inside out.

[00:00:58]Um and um and of realizing that if you're a foreigner in your home then you're a foreigner everywhere permanently. I still have some family in Venezuela but every day that that goes by they're getting older. Well, so we shot this film we finished shooting in September of last year so we didn't know that that was going to happen obviously but while we were shooting the American warships were on the coast and um that only heightened the sense of paranoia that uh military forces already have in Venezuela and the sense that you know this might be the last day of the shoot any moment.

[00:01:43]For various reasons not only for that.

[00:01:45]Um and um and yes I can only hope that it's going to be for the for the best but um people may have readings about, you know, what's happening with the current film. Um I didn't set out to make something to make a comment on that. When we were shooting, I was feeling this threat, but the whole shoot was really insane, you know, because it was a fragile. My character was very fragile, the story we were telling, and many contrasting politics uh in the country, and um it's impossible to go to such a country and have an idea of what is right and what is wrong. Yeah. This is what I I gathered, especially after leaving and after everything that's happened, of course, you know, feeling the fear, but it's impossible to grasp or have an opinion on what's going on, because it's so intense and so far away from anything that we can imagine from Italy or from other Western cultures.

[00:03:01]How does Caro parallel to your own life, the character?

[00:03:07]I've been with her through to probably the darkest spots of my soul. Uh and I thought, you know, I had already gone there, but uh there's, you know, the the shadows is endlessly deep. And I really had to drive myself insane to go there and see things about my life, my past, my heritage uh through my family and my childhood, things that I really had put away.

[00:03:40]And uh it wasn't easy to do so, and that's why I felt sometimes I was really going insane when I was shooting, living in complete isolation.

[00:03:49]That's the the I decided to to to make character to to to have some you know uh credibility to myself to play her.

[00:04:01]Somebody so isolated I barely left my room the whole shoot. I never left my room. I saw her picture and something in her eyes just caught on to me and I I knew that she was going to be the character and and I've seen some of her work before.

[00:04:20]Uh but not not most of it of course.

[00:04:23]Um and I when I was started like to read more about who Asia is I was really uh fascinated you know by by what her persona could bring to to the character. Um and and I'm and I'm really glad I did it.

[00:04:42]When she she Asia came uh with us to Venezuela for an entire month before the shooting. She learned Spanish for the role.

[00:04:51]Uh we really immersed in the place.

[00:04:53]Um and we we got had the opportunity to rehearse on location with the non-professional actors.

[00:05:00]Um Yeah, she was a fierce collaborator. I came here with a movie of mine when I was 16. That was the first time I came.

[00:05:10]Uh-huh. Uh with my dad later we presented at the market you know it was more like but I must have had something you know even in my youth then the year later there was L'Arbre Magique. So I've had been here all my life. I've had so many movies here and uh uh my first memory I remember uh feeling ah okay that's what fame is like. Uh-huh. Like I said the paparazzi the thing the dress and I was like okay I I'm not you know I'm too shy for this. So I better invent some kind of character to to make it to a alive through this. Are you directing again?

[00:05:53]Not as of now, no.

[00:05:55]No, I I really enjoyed this movie and it brought me back to what acting can be like uh for me and I would love to have opportunities to do a movie like that, but it's impossible. It's very rare. I never had the chance to rehearse a movie for a month and and really get down deep with the director with the story like I did here. I wish there was a there was time. I think that's what's missing in cinema. Yeah, I love directing so much that I don't just shoot any movie. I've done only three movies and I have one in mind, but I think unfortunately the times with all the censorship it's very hard for me to do the kind of movies that I love doing. Oh, no, I would never compete with the master. Are you kidding me? I'll never shoot a horror, a giallo, a thriller, never in my life. And those are not the movies I receive. I receive more crazy stories, a horror of the everyday life. That's what I the stories I tell.

[00:06:53]There's like a movie coming out about Anthony. Would you ever want to tell your, you know, your side, your your cinematic version?

[00:07:01]Um No, I have the cinematic version here Yeah. of Anthony.

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