EVERY artist needs a muse. The muse in my new film, Stealing Beauty, happens to be Liv Tyler. But in another case, it could be parmesan cheese - as in my film, The Tragedy Of A Ridiculous Man, about a man who owns a cheese factory. Or it could be the beauty of Tuscany - which is also the muse in Stealing Beauty. A muse is not just a girl with long hair and a tulle dress - Marlon Brando was a muse for me in Last Tango In Paris.
So what exactly is a muse? Perhaps the real person in front of the camera always wins out over the character written on the page. I'm always ready to change, to follow the real person, even if it takes me far from the written script. There's always a documentary side to my work - I make fiction films, but there's always an element of cinema verite. In general, the protagonist of my movies, whether it's a man or a woman, has to become a muse. I always have to have a kind of love-story with the people in front of the camera - that's the only way my camera gets stimulated and the story comes alive on screen. But when I talk about a love story, I don't necessarily mean a real love story - you have to feel an attraction for every person in front of the camera. In Liv's case, I felt I was catching her changing day by day. She was growing up during the film, learning things, enriching her knowledge about relationships. She was around people such as Donal McCann, Sinead Cusack, Jean Marais. She was an American girl having a European conversion. So what happened to the character wasn't very different from what Liv was feeling for real. In Stealing Beauty, I decided to go back to Italy, but not to talk about Italian reality 15 years after my last Italian movie I didn't know enough about it. So I took the way that Anglo-Saxon expats traditionally take, I went to Tuscany. After three ambitious productions - The Last Emperor, The Sheltering Sky and Little Buddha - this was more intimate, the story of the girl who comes to Tuscany and has an initiation into life and love.
The character was conceived as a New York girl. We started looking for her in Hollywood, but we couldn't find her. So finally I decided to go to New York and that's where I found Liv. Right away, she looked to me like a schoolgirl on her holidays. It's always like that - either it happens with an actor or actress in the first few minutes or it doesn't happen at all. It was very difficult to tell her real age. She was like a landscape with clouds passing over it, changing every few seconds, becoming older and younger. That was exactly what was needed for the character of Lucy. She was American because I wanted someone from another world not the world of the expats but from really far away. She could have come from Russia.
Some of my other films, such as La Luna or Before The Revolution, have powerful female presences at the centre. Before The Revolution was meant to be autobiographical - about a young man from a bourgeois family facing a dilemma between his origins and his Marxist vocation. But then there was the lead actress, Adriana Asti, who was also my companion at the time. And she stole the centre of the film because I found her much more interesting than myself, who was the character of the boy.
I started making films when I was very young, so I was making movies about older women. Now, of course, I'm in the same position as directors like Godard and Rohmer, making films about young girls. But to me, Stealing Beauty is about more than a young girl - it is about Liv's generation. Before, I had always had a lot of prejudice towards that generation. These young people have a kind of emptiness behind them. They live in the present, not very much in the future, and above all they know nothing about the past.
There's a lack of memory, but that isn't their fault. Getting to know Liv and the other kids around her, I became conscious that they're innocent - they are our generation's victims.
The rock culture she represents was important to me too. Throughout the filming, I listened to it with her and some of her love of it rubbed off on me.
If a film's central character is a girl, I have to identify with the girl. The camera the invisible witness to everything that happens - is identified with her. That of course, is a bit of a challenge - some could see it as a joke because I'm 55 years old. But maybe the fact of not having had children meant that I could get closer to her without being a father figure.
I was overwhelmed by Liv's erotic impact, but that wasn't something that happened between takes, or in the evening. It happened when the camera was there.
She's a rare creature. Like Dominique Sanda, or the young Stefania Sandrelli, she becomes enormously alive when the camera is on her. If you met her, you'd think, this is not the same person. Of course, it depends how you stimulate that. It depends on knowing how to look at her.
Why does everybody in the film talk about Lucy's virginity? As Jeremy Irons says: "We're here on the top of this bill and we don't know what to talk about and now here you are, the obscure object of desire." When they were young, virginity was something to get rid of as soon as possible, an impediment to freedom. So they all project their fantasy on to her. Why shouldn't they be curious? And, of course, the audience is curious too - one would expect that such a beautiful and blossoming girl would have slept with a man already. But there was something else about virginity that appealed to me. In making a film that cost a third of what my last one cost, I felt as if I was closing one chapter and opening a new chapter of my work.
When we opened in the States, some critics said: "Oh, Liv's fantastic, she's the real thing but can she act?" I may use verite, but my cinema verite is about getting to the secret of my characters. But what is acting, anyway? This is definitely acting, and Liv is extraordinarily gifted.
SHE was on every magazine cover in the States. Of course, there was a backlash -journalists are like Dr Frankenstein. They create their stars, and then they become afraid and start to hate their creations. It happened with Maria Schneider in Last Tango. I don't feel responsible. It's something that goes with the life of cinema.
I don't think of myself as a Svengali that would make me seem too old. I'd much rather be Liv's contemporary.