Against the odds, Isabella Rossellini transforms into a migrating salmon with nothing more than goggles, a body-stocking and an elaborate paper hat, and waits for a worthy mate to notice her. He arrives in primary colours, dangling jauntily from a string, and quickly wins her heart. "Here are my eggs," the daughter of Hollywood legend Ingrid Bergman cries to the quivering puppet. "Spray them with your sperm!"
Welcome to the quirky world of Seduce Me, the latest series of disarming short films from the 58-year-old actress, model and ex-wife of Martin Scorsese best known for Blue Velvet, Fearless and Death Becomes Her. The films, produced by Robert Redford's Sundance Channel, are written and co-directed by Rossellini, who takes three minutes or less to portray the bizarre seduction rituals of animals around us, with help from paper puppets, foam film sets and often unflattering costumes that never fall short of heroic. The films are described as "the spawn of Green Porno" referring to Rossellini's Webby award-winning previous series of equally outlandish shorts exploring the sexual proclivities of bees, barnacles and other creatures.
Next week, seven of Rossellini's films go on show at the Natural History Museum, as part of a major exhibition called Sexual Nature. The museum decided to host the films because, amusement value aside, they are scientifically accurate: snails jab each other with painful darts before sex and female ducks have versatile vaginas. "The films turned out to be a wonderful experiment," says Rossellini. "We certainly didn't expect them to end up at the Natural History Museum in London."
As the museum boasts: "You'll be amazed at what nature gets up to."
In conversation
Ian Sample: How did the project come about?
Isabella Rossellini: Through Sundance. Robert Redford founded the Sundance Institute to create independent film and, with the advent of the internet, he wanted to experiment with the short film format, anything from one to five minutes. That format doesn't have a distribution – the shortest film you can find on television is about half an hour. So Redford called me because I had had a long association with Sundance through films such as Blue Velvet and Big Night and I've also been at the institute working with young film-makers. They knew I wanted to start directing, so I was given a little budget to do three pilots for the first Green Porno films. Redford liked it, Sundance liked it and they commissioned more. They were very successful and we ended up making 28 episodes, shown on the Sundance Channel.
And the Seduce Me series followed?
A potential sponsor called to say they liked the films but that they couldn't support anything that had the word "porno" in it, so we made a series similar called Seduce Me. Green Porno is about the mating habits of animals and Seduce Me is about the courtship rituals of animals. Although we took out every word that could have been offensive we still didn't find any finance.
Can you describe the films?
They're short, between 90 seconds to three minutes each. They start with a close up of me saying: "If I were a fly…" and then I transform myself into a fly, with complicated and beautiful costumes. And then I show how a fly would mate. Or a praying mantis or a duck. They are meant to be comical films – there are many ways to reproduce – but scientifically accurate.
Who are the films aimed at?
We weren't aiming at a certain group. This was an experiment to see how people reacted, to see if the short film format was something that could be developed. At the beginning of the 20th century, short films were very popular. Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin did a lot of short films – that's how they became famous – but then they went out of style. Nowadays, they are confined to students, who make short films to showcase their talent. Once they were out there, we found that the films were particularly popular among young people.
What do you hope people will learn from them?
I want people to laugh and then to learn. All the animals are familiar, so the idea is you can look out in your garden and see a dragonfly and know more about it than you did before, such as the male has a sexual organ that can clean the female's sexual organ, because the female tends to be extremely promiscuous. So the male grabs the female, cleans her, inserts his sperm and then holds her by the neck until she is ready to have his babies. Little things like this I have always found comical. I have always liked animal behaviour, since I was a child and I have read a lot. I'm a bird-watcher; I'm always in my garden turning up stones to see what's underneath.
Why did you choose to focus on sex and seduction rituals?
Because I know that people in general are interested in sex.
The films have a distinct style…
Sundance said, keep in mind that these films may be seen on mobile devices with small screens. That dictated the art direction, which is simple and like a cartoon. We looked at lots of films on cellular devices and found that Disney translates well to a small screen, but certain films like Gone With the Wind demand a big screen otherwise you can't follow the story. So that dictated the look of my films. I use strong colours, but few of them.
How do you choose which animals to include?
There are some criteria. First, I wanted animals that people knew. Second was to try to make sure that all types of sexual behaviour were covered to reflect the diversity of nature. Third, I would need to be able to come up with a solution for the costume – these are quite fantastic and need a lot of designing. I work with two artists, Rick Gilbert and Andy Byers. I write the script and illustrate it, then I sit with them and try to create a costume, but sometimes we have to give up an animal because the costume doesn't work.
The costumes are amazing…
People think that because they are so light, they must be built very easily, but it takes a lot to make them. Rick and I decided on paper costumes just because paper costs less. But they have this effect that is almost like animation – they give a stylistic unity to all these different animals and different stories.
Do scientists help with the research?
The first eight films I did by myself and I chose animals that I knew and observed regularly. Once these were a success, I was contacted by several scientists who wanted to collaborate, and two of them became part of our staff – John Bohannon, who writes for the magazine Science, and an Argentinian marine biologist called Claudio Campagna who works with the Bronx Zoo. John came up with the idea that spiders see different colours because they see a different range, so we made the new spider in Seduce Me see with a blue light at night, which gave us an opportunity to do a different effect. Our films have simple special effects. We wanted a simplicity and a naivety, which I think adds to the comedy. They look like they are made for children, but instead we talk about sex, which is generally something we don't talk to children about so it's another way of making it more ironic.
Which scene did you most enjoy filming?
I loved Anchovy because the anchovies are in a school and I am one fish among many. I wore a blue leotard and a hat and all the other anchovies were strung around me. We all pretend to swim together and then we fight, because we all want to be in the middle, which is safer from predators. But then you are getting all the pee and waste of the one that is in front of you and there isn't enough oxygen, so you are always torn about where is the best place to be. It was very amusing.
Which animal has the most interesting sex life?
I don't know about the most interesting sex life but the female duck has an interesting vagina. It has a lot of dead ends, like a maze. Female ducks are often raped violently by a group of males. She can decide where the sperm goes; if she is mated by a male she likes and thinks would be good for her babies, then she would let his sperm go to a channel that leads to her eggs. Otherwise, she can send the sperm to a dead end. Extraordinary.
Your second series also looks at overfishing. Did you want to include an environmental message?
My films were just meant to be comic and to inform people about different behaviours, but Claudio Campagna asked me to try a more explicit environmental message. He felt the message had become too doom and gloom, that it alienated some people. He wanted to try using something comic to lure people in and then tell them about some of the problems. So we did three episodes of Green Porno called Bon Appetit. They start with me in the kitchen preparing different types of fish, then we go through the mating ritual, and then we are fished out of the water. The puppetry then turns to real footage of this massive fishery, with technology that can empty a region of the ocean of all its fish, filmed secretly by guerrilla protesters.
There are some gruesome moments in your films. I'm thinking in particular of your film about the sex life of the bee, when you break your penis while having sex with a female mid-flight and die.
Well, that's what they do!
Do you ever consider glossing over the more squeamish details?
I think it is most fun when there is something so dramatic and to ask why that happens. We assume that everybody is dictated by survival, yet the male bee that mates with the queen bee knows that he will die after the mating, because his penis will get stuck in her reproductive organ. But then this plug is also a way to guarantee that he will be the father of the babies. Vaginal plugs are quite common in nature, so that after mating, even if the female is promiscuous, she cannot have babies with other males. All this I find incredibly hilarious.
A lot of wildlife documentaries are quite long and serious. Do you think other directors have something to learn from your approach?
I don't see myself as a documentary film-maker, I see myself as sort of a hybrid between fiction and documentary. My information is correct but it's always me playing the animal. I did this film because it was fun and original; we don't consider ourselves part of the debate about documentary.
How does acting in these films compare with the roles that people know you for?
Well, I played humans most of the time and these are animals, so that is different. And it's easier to act when you write your own material. Partly why I did it instead of hiring an actor is that I knew it would be difficult to explain what I had in mind. How do you tell people to behave as a fly or an anchovy?
Have you had any feedback about the films?
The films have been well reviewed by the press, by my friends and by my children who are the most severe of the judges. They brought them to school, and the science teacher asked me to go into school to talk. I've been invited to go to several colleges to talk about the process: from costume making to the scientific research, so what started as a little experiment to make a film on the internet has had an enormous life.
So what next?
I have just finished a film that premiered at the Sundance festival called Animals Distract Me. It is made with the same designers and crew but a much more traditional format, 45 minutes long, we did it for Discovery's Planet Green. After that… because I work by myself, it takes time to write, to develop an idea, to fundraise for the films. Last year, I made four films as an actress and two films as a writer and director and I need another year or two to start writing again.
Eight films selected from the Green Porno and Seduce Me seasons will be shown as part of the Natural History Museum's Sexual Nature exhibition, which runs from 11 February to 2 October
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