Isabella Rossellini, The Green Porn Star

Ever since she was a child, legendary model and actress Isabella Rossellini has been fascinated and amused by animals and their intricate rituals. Wanting to share her passion with the world through film, she chose a premise no one can say no to. Sex. Thus spawned Green Porno, followed by Seduce Me; short films (all starring Ms. Rossellini herself) that depict in dreamlike scenes the oh-so-real sex lives of bedbugs, ducks, spiders, and praying mantises. The shorts, produced by Sundance, became sensations around the web and even won her a Rachel Carson Award from the Audubon Society this year. Rossellini shares with TreeHugger her passion for animal intimacy, her deep-seated care for the environment, and reveals what's coming up next.

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Full text after the jump.TreeHugger: You've had such a successful and diverse career. Did you ever expect you would be a porn star?

Isabella Rossellini: Ever since I was as a child I was interested in animals. Trying to imagine what I would do when I grew up, I always thought that I would make films about animals; comical films because animals amuse me. Then I became a model and an actress, so my career took different turns. Because I'm getting old, obviously, I have not modeled for many years. Also, my roles in films have diminished. So the dream that I had when I was a child to make films about animals, I thought, "Oh, maybe now's the time to do it."

And so I started a series called Green Porno, about the sex life of bugs and octopus and all of those little animals that are common and live among us, but we don't know how crazy they are.

TreeHugger: Tell me a little bit more about how you go through this process of researching the science, and how you actually turn it into these brilliant vignettes.

Rossellini: The Sundance Channel contacted me, wanting to create content for their web. There is this conflict between television and web: should we all see the television on our computer or our mobile?

So it was born as an experiment to make films specifically for mobile devices. And that's how the short format came about. And Robert Redford, who heads Sundance, was very nostalgic for the short film format, which now are basically done by students, but they never have a professional outcome.

The shortest film you can make today is half an hour for television. At the origin of cinema in the beginning of the 20th century there were many short films. There were short films by Edison, the brothers Lumiere, even Charlie Chaplin made short, comical films. And they were hugely popular.

Redford was seeking to restart that genre that had disappeared with the event of films being shown only on television and in theaters. So he commissioned to make short films, about two minutes long. And he also added that if these films were about the environment, he would be more inclined to finance them because he's very interested in the environment.

And Sundance at the time was doing a regular series called The Green, all about how to make your house green, how to eat organic and have a green diet. That's what gave me the name Green. And then Porno because I was always interested in animal behavior, but I know that a lot of people are not so interested in animal behavior, but everybody's interested in sex.

TreeHugger: Because we all watch nature documentaries for the parts where the animals do it. So you're just cutting to the good stuff?

Rossellini: Exactly! But sometimes they do it and sometimes they don't. I went to the Museum of Natural History in New York where I live and there is a fantastic whale. And I went and looked in between her legs--if she would have legs--to see what they had done there. There was nothing! You couldn't tell if it was male or female.

Obviously, a lot of animals, especially sea animals, have retractable genitals. But there is a slit where they can take them out. I think there has been a certain amount of prudishness about sex that has spilled over to animals. But you do see occasionally on television that animals reproduce and have babies. But you don't really see the details.

In fact it's quite difficult to research the details. It has become easier for me because the success of my two series, Green Porno and Seduce Me, has allowed me to contact scientists who are fans of my films. At the beginning I didn't have that, so it was really difficult to do the research. I was very worried that I wouldn't understood the science right. I could never find the images of the genitals. All my sets and all my costumes are made of paper, so I wanted to remake these genitals from paper. And sometimes it was very difficult to find the details. Just the information wasn't out there.

But now I have some scientists and I can reach out to them. So that process of researching has become much easier.

TreeHugger: So the new series that you've completed is called Seduce Me. What's the difference between Green Porno and Seduce Me.

Rossellini: We wanted to say that there is a difference, but really the difference wasn't so much. The difference was in trying to find a sponsor. Green Porno was very successful, and we were contacted by several different companies who wanted to put in advertisements, which would be great, but they didn't want to use the name Porno.

So we said, OK, we will make a new series called Seduce Me, and it will be similar to Green Porno. It's two minutes long. It's the same crew doing the paper costumes and sets. And it's about the courtship. But then when I wrote the films, I found that the courtship has to end up turning into something. It can't end with a frustrating ending, like the female running away or the male refusing to get her. So at the end we also have the mating, only it now starts with a little bit about the foreplay, too.

And so we called it Seduce Me in hopes of finding a sponsor. Which we haven't found yet. I think these big companies have a very long list of names which they don't want to associate with their advertisement.

And there's still a lot of talk of penis, vagina, and mating in Seduce Me. I mean, it's just the scientifical names. But I still I don't think I will ever be a candidate to have a sponsor, unless it's a very brave one.