Abel Ferrara / Does Pain Really Teache You At All?

Abel Ferrara

ABEL FERRARA: “DOES PAIN REALLY TEACH YOU AT ALL?”

Name: Abel Ferrara

DOB: 19 July 1951

Place of birth: The Bronx, New York, United States

Occupation: Film director

Ana Bogdan

Mr. Ferrara, although your independent films have often been described as provocative and controversial, you have always stayed the course. Has it been difficult?

It is difficult, for sure. You have got to learn not to compromise, there's a lot of hard lessons — heartbreaking ones in trying to maintain the honesty and the purity of the film. But I feel like I have no choice in the matter, especially when the road I chose was one of self-expression. It's the gift I have. If I was a good enough musician, would I have been one? If I could paint, would I have been a painter? I don’t know, but this is a gift I have, so I'm not questioning it, I've been doing it since I'm 16.

Jacqueline Bisset / Older women continue to want sex but men don't want to sleep with them

Jacqueline Bisset

'Older women continue to want sex but men don't want to sleep with them'

In Welcome to New York, she plays the long-suffering wife of an adulterous financier, based on Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Here she talks about sexual desire and what divides men and women

Catherine Shoard
@catherineshoard
Thursday 24 July 2014 17.17 BST

Jacqueline Bisset would be lost without her snozz. "I could never sleep with someone who didn't smell right," she says. "For me, smell is intoxicating. It's an animal thing and very, very dangerous." What's the ideal odour? "I can't possibly sum it up. Not like perfume, but clean, for sure – I'm not into smelly armpits." She smiles and sips her peach juice. We're sitting at a breakfast bar in a French hotel, fruit platter in front and sax Muzak in the background. "Probably when you're in love you have some sort of addiction. You can't see straight. Voice is another one that pulls a woman back. When you're trying to break up with someone and you hear them on the telephone – suddenly you're back in that place."

When she shares such theories with male friends, she says, they tend to tell her smell doesn't share the same potency for them. "'What?' I say. 'You're nuts! I find that really hard to believe.' 'Jacqueline, you're wrong – men don't care about that.'" Her eyes pop in shock at the memory.

Bisset's new film, Welcome to New York, makes much of the notion of universal primal weakness, that women and men are equally enslaved by their hormones. Bisset plays Simone, long-suffering wife of Gérard Depardieu's vastly adulterous financier Georges Devereaux (the film is inspired by the downfall of Dominique Strauss-Kahn). Director Abel Ferrara gave both actors free rein to improvise; in one scene, following Georges' release from custody on an attempted rape charge, Simone bemoans the fact that one whiff of him is all it takes for her to be back in his thrall. You can see why Ferrara was keen to keep in the final cut the idea that irrational action is a biological function.