Asia Argento returns to the Cannes Film Festival in the Directors’ Fortnight psychological thriller Death Has No Master.
In the movie from Venezuelan filmmaker Jorge Thielen Armand, Argento plays an immigrant heiress to a colonial cacao plantation in Venezuela. She ventures to the country to claim her inheritance, but she’s forced to confront the land’s current occupants as well as its dark, violent legacy.
The role was no walk in the park for the Italian multihyphenate, who purged herself of her darkest emotions.
“When we were shooting, I was feeling this threat,” she tells Deadline, “My character was very fragile.”
“I lived in complete isolation,” she said while on set. “I barely left my room the whole shoot.”
“I’ve been with her (Caro) through the darkest parts of my soul and I thought I had already gone there (before), but the shadows are endlessly deep. I really had to drive myself insane to go there and see things about my life, my heritage, through my family and my childhood; things I had really put away,” Argento reveals to us in a conversation at the Deadline Studio at Cannes.
In the conversation, Argento and Armand reflect on how the significance of Death Has No Master changed for them following the U.S. invasion of Venezuela earlier this year. We also chat with Argento about whether or not she would direct one of her father’s giallo screenplays, and her first time at Cannes when she was 16 years old.
With A24 releasing its own movie about the early days of foodie connoisseur Anthony Bourdain, would Argento ever want to tell her side of their romance cinematically? The two were in a relationship during the final two years of his life before he died in June 2018.
“No, I have the cinematic version here of Anthony,” Argento tells us, pointing to her head.
The Deadline Studio at Cannes is sponsored by SCAD.
