http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2009/apr/01/isabella-rossellini-green-porno-sundance
There are certain things you don’t expect to hear Isabella Rossellini say. Things like, “I have sex several times a day. Any opportunity. Any female.” Or, “To have babies, I need to mate with another hermaphrodite in the 69 position.” Or, “When needed, I can have an erection six feet long.” But there are plenty of delightfully unexpected things about Green Porno, Rossellini’s series of short films about the sex lives of animals, the second batch of which has just gone live on the Sundance Channel’s website.
The first season, made last year, marked Rossellini’s debut as a director. She had collaborated with Guy Maddin on My Dad Is 100 Years Old, a tribute to her film-maker father and fellow nature enthusiast Roberto, but she had always struggled over projects of her own that would stretch to television, let alone feature-length. When she learned that Sundance was fishing for attention-grabbing short content suitable for digital platforms, it proved the perfect outlet for her brief directorial attention span, as well as an opportunity to explore her longstanding love of zoology. “And when I thought ‘capture people’s attention,'” she says on a behind-the-scenes clip available at the project’s microsite, one word came to mind. “Sex.”
And so Green Porno was hatched. In each of these very short shorts – none lasts longer than three minutes and up to two-thirds of the running time is taken up with credits – Rossellini expounds with relish upon the mating habits of a particular species. Assuming the first person (or first creepy-crawly), she plays the male, garbed in a series of gloriously expressive handmade costumes in the bold colours and shapes suited to smaller screens; if the distribution model is hi-tech, the aesthetic approach, courtesy of Brooklyn-based artist-turned-production designer Andy Myers, is decidedly handcrafted. Byers’ costumes are made mostly from paper, eschewing digital effects for hands-on craft. Think Michel Gondry meets David Attenborough in the Blue Peter studio after dark.