Your book also has an interview that you did with Sophia Loren, and there’s this amazing quote of hers that you ask her about. She once said, “If you haven’t cried, your eyes can’t be beautiful,” which is just amazing. But how did this chat with her come about?
You have to put the blame always on Condé Nast [laughing]. It was for a cover I did for Italian Vanity Fair, which was embroidered by me, and she agreed to do an interview. I think she is a great actress because she’s had a fucking dramatic life. I mean, she was born into real poverty, and she had to really struggle to become who she has become, and I thought that that sentence, while being very poetic, was a way of saying, unless you have been confronted by some real rough things, you are not able to succeed at either acting or at telling the truth.
I also want to throw back one of your own quotes to you now—it’s from a video interview you did, though honestly I don’t know if it’s recent, or just recent-ish.
Just say that I’m ageless, so it may have been 20 or two years ago.
Of course. But you said, “I’m a sweet vampire,” and I couldn’t understand the context.
Yeah. That goes back to a period where I was doing a lot of videos with movie stars, and very often people would say to me, “How did you convince Sharon Stone, Helen Mirren, Natalie Portman, Cate Blanchett—”
And Courtney Love, Dianne Wiest, Lady Gaga, Michelle Williams—
Yeah, exactly. And I would say: I always went to these heroes of mine with a very precise project that was somehow built on them. There was nothing gratuitous about it. So, yes, I was a vampire—today, I would say I was an honest vampire, because I never wanted to intrude into their private life. I wanted them for what they represented, because my job was to bring celebrity culture into the artistic discourse—not just through images, like many artists had done before, but through the real physical performance of these unreachable icons.