http://www.indexmagazine.com/interviews/asia_argento.shtml

ASIA: So when I was getting ready to make my own film, I thought, “The only genre left that has never been explored creatively is pornography.”

BRUCE: It’s a very conventional medium. [laughs]
ASIA: Yes, there are very specific rules. But there’s still so much to tell, even so. That’s why I love your films so much — the genre is only a vehicle to tell your story. I want to do something like that here in Italy, not to shock people, but to open new roads. My favorite thing about porno is that it’s real — I mean the sex is real. Porno moves me so much more than films like Gone With The Wind, because I am always reminded that these people on screen actually met, and this actually happened. No other kind of film can give you that feeling.

BRUCE: You certainly capture that sensation in Scarlet Diva. Though you don’t show penetration, the sex scenes go way beyond acting.
ASIA: It’s true, the sex scenes are real. But I wasn’t interested in penetration — I was interested in showing what the real sex did to the faces and the bodies of the actors.

BRUCE: Did you get a lot of flack for the film?

ASIA: Well, I was protected in a way by my father and my uncle, who produced the film. They never judged me, but they were a bit scared of some of the things I wanted to do. I had hoped to do a scene with bestiality, but they wouldn’t allow me to do it.

BRUCE: I love the scene where your character comes back to Rome and discovers a friend tied up in your bed. You ask her, “How long have you been here?” And she says, very point blank, “Three days.”

ASIA: That really happened to that actress. She’s a friend of mine, whom I completely transformed for the part. But I think I might have ruined her, because now she’s living this character’s life. She’s kept her hair the same red and she wears the same clothes. Now she’s living this harsh reality, getting beaten up by Arab guys and things like that. But she loves it, so maybe I just freed her.

BRUCE: Life imitates art. I like how that scene was handled. It was done comically, like “Lucy and Ethel go porno.”

ASIA: Exactly. The actor who played her boyfriend is really a DJ. He had never done anything like my film before, but a long time ago he told me he wanted to try porn. I remembered him when I was casting, and it turned out he was quite good — he could really get his penis up.