I was obliged to stand there, holding the leash of this creature for their welcoming publicity shots, implying that this was some kind of image the decided to have of me.

Italian cameramen grow up immersed in an awareness of light. It is part of their mythology.

If you were out of a job and your kid needed diapers and your husband just left you, you would be so confused.

In the sequence where I am burned at the stake, everything was so casual and hazardous that the bottom of my dress caught fire, and the grips became hysterical as they tried to pull me off the stake.

Certainly, in Italy, nobody takes light for granted.

After all, film is so porous, and to my mind, so oddly occult, that I think that film itself absorbs odd energies like a living skin.