
Isabella Rossellini, photographed at the 34th Toronto International Film Festival in Toronto, on Thursday, Sept. 10, 2009. (AP)
Actress, model, and filmmaker Isabella Rossellini has known years as one of the world’s most beautiful, most photographed women.
Five hundred magazine covers — Vogue, Elle, Vanity Fair. Famous screen roles — “Blue Velvet,” “Wild at Heart,” “30 Rock.” Famous parents — Ingrid Bergman, Roberto Rossellini. Famous lovers — David Lynch, Martin Scorsese.
Famous independence of mind.
Now Isabella Rossellini has taken her talents, humor, and iconoclasm to the sex lives of the animal kingdom.
This hour, On Point: Isabella Rossellini on starfish love, environmentalism, and her new series, “Green Porno.”
You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.
-Tom Ashbrook
Guest:
Isabella Rossellini joins us from Southampton, NY. An actress, model, filmmaker, author, and screenwriter, she produces, directs, and stars in “Green Porno,” a series of film shorts on sex in nature, for the Sundance Channel. Daughter of actress Ingrid Bergman and filmmaker Roberto Rossellini, she’s starred in numerous movies, including “Blue Velvet,” “Big Night,” “Fearless,” and many more.
More links:
A “Green Porno” book and DVD set are due out Sept. 22. You can watch a number of the short films on YouTube, like this one, “Preying Mantis”:
And here she is in an unforgettable scene from “Blue Velvet”:
Tags: culture, entertainment, environment, movies












Wow, a very interesting topic, I wish I could listen it live, however being at workplace I wont be.
Never thought there would be a movie exclusively about animal sex life.
Posted by Sam, on September 18th, 2009 at 11:10 AMIs Ms. Rossellini familiar with the book by evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson called Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation?
Posted by Pat Pruyne, on September 18th, 2009 at 11:10 AMActually, although I had heard of Isabella Rossellini in a vague sort of way, the first time I actually saw her on film was on Green Porno.
This is probably because I am a big science nerd and not at all well-informed about pop culture that came before my time.
Anyway, Green Porno is awesome! It’s great for people who like science, as well as people who are interested in demystifying sex.
Posted by Sally, on September 18th, 2009 at 11:19 AMI stumbled upon some of these films while browsing online, and I had no idea what I was in for. I found them to be hilarious, informative, and your beautiful and elegant guest also managed to make the narration quite alluring (in a comical way).
Posted by David, on September 18th, 2009 at 11:31 AMWhat I would like to know is how to age so gracefully as Isabella did. What a beautiful woman. What is her secret?
Thank you
Posted by Samantha, on September 18th, 2009 at 11:31 AMJust what the world needs, a film clip that caters to prurient entomological interests. Pathetic.
Posted by Todd, on September 18th, 2009 at 11:45 AMSamantha, the best advice for aging as well as Isabella has: be sure to choose your parents as carefully as she did!
Posted by gina, on September 18th, 2009 at 11:52 AMHaving lived with cats for many years now, I can assure you that they do think and reason with the same mechanisms that we do. They’re just focused on entirely different things.
Their language has far more to do with posture and expression than phonetics, but so does that of a human infant, for a while at least. Check it out.
Posted by Mark, on September 18th, 2009 at 11:55 AMWhat’s so pathetic about prurient entomological interests? I support prurient entomological interests.
Posted by Sam Gale Rosen, on September 18th, 2009 at 12:04 PM“What’s so pathetic about prurient entomological interests? I support prurient entomological interests.”
Posted by Sam Gale Rosen
I actually find insects quite fascinating, but I don’t lust after them. Keep your private insextcapades in your own bedroom, behind closed doors.
Posted by Todd, on September 18th, 2009 at 12:21 PMIsabella Rossellini’s series “Green Porno” makes me feel that there is hope for the nation and the world! How wonderful to see such intelligence, grace, creativity, beauty, sense of mission, lack of self-importance, AND a SENSE OF HUMOR in one human being! In this day of senseless celebrity worship, here is one who richly deserves every bit of it! As a bonus, she inspires older women like me to strive to be an example of aging with energy and humor. Thank you, Isabella!
Posted by Bobbie Lawson, on September 18th, 2009 at 12:36 PMI’m so sad that such beautiful and successful woman can agree with science that she descend from the animals(monkey). She needs to read the Bible an pray to God ask for a response from Him, her maker and the response will be totally different. I’m a child of God and my children too. God loves us and He also loves animals, however we americans killed 9.9 animals and ate them last year. Thank you for your program.
Posted by jorge riveros, on September 18th, 2009 at 1:00 PMHey, it’s a free country. If I choose to make sweet love to arthropods in public settings, it’s because I think it makes the world a happier, sexier place.
Posted by Sam Gale Rosen, on September 18th, 2009 at 1:44 PM“Hey, it’s a free country. If I choose to make sweet love to arthropods in public settings, it’s because I think it makes the world a happier, sexier place.”
Posted by Sam Gale Rosen
What about the public being free from having to view some pervert acting out some lascivious opinion? Free country? LOL…and from what other delusions do you suffer?
“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.” ~Goethe
Posted by Todd, on September 18th, 2009 at 2:56 PMHopefully more creative works, in many forms including Green Porno, will help regular people to better understand biology… and the creatures of this small planet.
As a past biology student, while most of my work comprised reading chemistry, algebra, calculus, trying not to blow up the lab mixing acids and bases, isolating unknown bacteria, synthesizing clean cmRNA, dissecting stuff, writing nearly two feet of stacked note books from lecture, transects for aquatic and terrestrial field studies, etc., I basically tell folks at the coffee shop that I studied sex in college… I get a chuckle and folks go back to talking about music, the weather, parties, kids, vacations, greeting friends… If I talk about my science interests, I will suck the air out of the room and put a spell on the listener that inflicts sleep walking or random bursts of new conversation… Ironically, the study of biology lowered my genetic fitness in college, in that I “kissed” text books on the weekend rather than the women knocking at my door.
I’ve seen footage of an insect (can’t remember it’s name) caring for and feeding a nest of hatchlings, a behavior often associated with higher trophic level organisms, especially mammals. The babies of a gardener snake are born in a placenta, a reptile with a mammal-like reproductive system. Some fish and other species have been found to change sex in their mid-life cycle depending on group dynamics or environmental chemistry. A light sensitive protein found in bacteria has been harvested and used in high speed memory devices for special computers… which has nothing to do with sex unless you are the sales man selling the computer, in which case you likely have a nice villa in France and/or Lake Tahoe.
Posted by Jeremy Baker, on September 18th, 2009 at 2:56 PMYou’ve outwitted me, Todd. I thought we were engaged in hilarious tongue-in-cheek banter.
Posted by Sam Gale Rosen, on September 18th, 2009 at 3:05 PMIsabella:
Posted by Charlie Mc, on September 18th, 2009 at 4:26 PMPART TWO:
Posted by Charlie Mc, on September 18th, 2009 at 4:28 PM“Grrrrrr!”
I have taken the time to see more of the Green Pornos, but not all so I hope the others are just as interesting. Isabella, I can’t thank you enough for the paramount environmental messages you weave into Green Porn, mostly the insight pertaining to human impact upon the wilderness, especially the ocean wildlife. The skits use intelligent information, multimedia, and puppets to help tell a story about biological trivia related to an organism’s profile aside from a mature and comical look at its sex life which the bashful won’t find too alarming.
Speaking as an experienced commercial fisher with nearly 280 sea days hunting halibut, sword, salmon, herring, tuna, etc., I believe long lining can be sustainable when commercial fishers and fish and game biolgists work together to create beneficial regulations from which the market must accept/grow, and that these regulations can not abide to desired market objectives to meet demand, that supply is based upon biologically sound science and thoughful reason that constrains catches over areas that include multiple countries, that these boundaries transgress traditional terrestrial sovereign legal rights as enforced by the maritime culture of participating countries, areas dictated by the organism’s environmental needs to recognize ecological food webs as systems to be protected to sustain fisheries.
In mid 1990s I cheered when an Irish navy vessel fired a live round over the bow of a Spanish trawler trespassing east of Newfoundland’s fishery, in an effort to enforce regulations… So many issues, like tuna and many valuable fish travel/live all over the globe so our regulation efforts may be in vain… We regulate tuna, they don’t, the same fish here yesterday there tomorrow, over there they harvest too many, and next week there are no more fish. How many of the world’s fisheries have already collapsed due to overfishing? Is it anchovies or sardines near Argentina? One is too many… Another issue, U.N. reports 90% top tier predators removed from world’s oceans during last 300 years of industrial deep sea fishing… and ecology students will understand what this information means for the whole food web. [Deforestation reversed by introduction of wolves, i.e. an over populated deer herd eating all the young tree saplings such that no trees grow, yet after wolves reintroduced to area the forest begins to grow again because the wolves eat deer.] More problems with these new Dead zones in the oceans…
In the n pacific, hunting sword, bad day, gear floating in ocean drifts into adjacent thermal layer a few degrees warmer so baited hooks failed to catch swords but rather caught the by-catch of nearly 400 dog shark in the first half of a nearly 40 mile daily set. Swords eat food, food likes specific ocean temperature, gear drifted out of current. We cut loose first hundred or so shark and then begin retrieving one dollar hooks from the sharks. One otherwise healthy dog shark, grown to nearly 7 feet, was about dead because of a plastic ribbon, from a news paper stack found on any curb any morning in any city, a band secured around its head that cut much like a fence wire wrapped too small for an over grown tree. For that shark, biting our hook was a lucky event because I removed both the hook and the band… and the shark swam away.
A day did not pass in the deepest n Pacific sea in which I did not see garbage float past. Picked a VCR off a long line from 160 fathoms in Gulf Alaska hunting black cod.
I’ve seen giant monstrous deep sea vessels as large as Panamax freighters, gill netting, this one ship accidentally cut our long line, working miles and miles of net… In two months we probably caught 40,000lb, what amounted to maybe two hours of net fishing for the gigantic fishing ship, most of which is by-catch and it likely doesn’t swim away…
Deep sea drift-net fishing is one of the world’s dirtiest fisheries for by-catch destroyed, in contrast drift netting salmon in Bristol Bay is one of the cleanest fisheries in the world, so not all drift nets are bad. It’s horrible for a human to toss old net or raw unprocessed garbage into the ocean. Such a person really doesn’t care about their livelihood, nor for the wilderness… The ocean is a big place and rules are very difficult to enforce, but it’s small enough that changes that occur thousands of miles away can impact local ecosystems.
Posted by J Baker, on September 18th, 2009 at 5:21 PM“You’ve outwitted me, Todd. I thought we were engaged in hilarious tongue-in-cheek banter.”
Posted by Sam Gale Rosen
You mean we weren’t? Entomologically speaking, it was proboscis in mandible banter! Have a good weekend Sam!
Posted by Todd, on September 18th, 2009 at 8:06 PM[...] Rossellini talked with Tom Ashbrook yesterday about her series of 18 shorts, Green Porno. It’s a great interview. Five hundred [...]
Posted by Rossellini shows there is nothing sexier than nature |, on September 19th, 2009 at 4:38 PM[...] van Green Porno van het Sundance Channel. Ik hoorde deze week voor het eerst over Green Porno op de radio waar Rossellini werd geïnterviewd omdat seizoen drie net is begonnen. Ik heb dus al twee seizoenen gemist en dat is eigenlijk best [...]
Posted by Green Porno :: science palooza.nl, on September 21st, 2009 at 12:52 AMHELLO
Posted by JAMES S. WALLACE, on October 1st, 2009 at 11:33 AMISNT SHE BEAUTIFUL
I SAW HER IN WHITE NIGHT, LOVED IT
A BEAUTIFUL LADY.
JAMES