These days, there is much talk about Abel Ferrara and his collaboration with Saint Laurent. The American filmmaker’s latest is produced by the Maison and will world premiere Out of Competition at the 77th Venice Film Festival. There Ferrara will also receive the Jaeger-LeCoultre Glory to the Filmmaker 2020 prize, an award “dedicated to a personality who has made a particularly original contribution to innovation in contemporary cinema.”

The collaboration with Saint Laurent marks the sixth chapter of Self, curated by Saint Laurent creative director Anthony Vaccarello, after multidisciplinary projects with Daido Moriyama, Vanessa Beecroft, Bret Easton Ellis, Gaspar Noé, and Wong Kar Wai and Wing Shya.

But here come my own two cents. When I first met Abel Ferrara and his crew, in Cannes during the festival in 2017, I had by my side the late Richard Lormand, world class publicist and beloved friend. Somehow, even with Ferrara’s bad behavior, his undeniable need for attention and his world class ego, I found him charming and shrugged off the experience as dealing with an artist. Today, as I look back on his unkind comments about me living in Rome (where he also resides) “oh, I thought you lived somewhere interesting like Washington” and his rude interactions with wife Cristina Chiriac — which deteriorated into an all-out fight after the interview — it reminds me of just another cinema male figure behaving like a misogynist. And aren’t there already too many of them out there?

So, I want to revisit with you this interview with Abel Ferrara and his musical crew. I want to also reconnect with the woman I was in 2017 that found it all charming, maybe because the world was a much different place then, and Richard was around to make everything seem fun. Today, I can’t imagine writing a piece like this, not about this person but I must also realize that the group which surrounded him made things OK. His band is terrific and the interview is dedicated to them:Paul Hipp, Joe Delia, Abel’s wife Cristina Chiriac, PJ Delia and Mia Babalis.

Here is the original piece, published on the HuffPost.

“It’s a Tribal Thing”: Abel Ferrara, His Musicians and ‘Alive in France’ in Cannes

A fateful, impromptu meeting. “Do you want to speak with Abel Ferrara later tonight?” Says his brilliant publicist, who always somehow manages to facilitate the most important encounters of my life.

Yeah! I mean, to a film lover like me, Ferrara is a god. And while he’s in Cannes, at the Directors’ Fortnight with his latest, the documentary ‘Alive in France’, he’s brought along his long time collaborators, the band of unique voices and musicians who have made the soundtracks to all his films possible. In independent cinema, and we don’t often think about this, music royalties are an impossibility. Ferrara’s genius worked out a way around that by making his own, great, spellbinding music. And we should all be thankful that he did.

As I sit down with the group, I’m overwhelmed by their energy. We gather around a bar table at a hotel on the Croisette but we may as well be at a dive in the East Village in NYC. Wonderful New York vibes are what the group carry with them, always, regardless of where they live, or who they are with.

The energy that Paul Hipp, Joe Delia, Abel’s wife Cristina Chiriac, PJ Delia, Mia Babalis and the filmmaker himself bring to the meeting is grandiose and I struggle to even find words. Do I really want to ask them questions? I mean, beyond gushing like a broken record (pardon the pun) about how much I loved the film and felt transfixed while I watched it, is there anything worthwhile that I can bring to this table? But after a few attempts, interjected by Ferrara who charmingly keeps helping me to reign in this joie de vivre that surrounds us, I finally manage to get a few words out.

The result, thanks to their answers, is magic.

How did you all initially come together? There is this very diverse and beautiful group of people sitting here with me…

Joe Delia: Abel and I go back to the mid-70s, me as his composer essentially, we worked together for years. Paul Hipp came in around 1986 as an actor, and contributing to songs. I think the musical part of it evolved ever time. Since ‘China Girl’ there were these collaborations that were going on above and beyond composing the score and writing songs.

Abel Ferrara: 1975 and 1986 — those were the happiest years in both of their lives! (chuckles). I’m a filmmaker OK, not a traditional filmmaker…

Yeah, and this is not a traditional band, yet here you are years later. What’s your secret?

Abel: I’m gonna tell you! Now you’ve changed the question on me. How did we get together? We got together because I’m a film director and a film director needs somebody to write for him, and somebody to act for him and somebody to play music on the acting and the writing. Somebody who will work with you on your ideas and get up there and act out those ideas, and somebody has to score those ideas. And that’s the band, and if you take the filmmaking out of it, you’ve still got a band.

But bands usually have all of this drama and you seem to all love each other!

Paul Hipp: Oh, but we have our share of drama!

PJ Delia: It’s good drama.

Abel: Like Paul is upstaging Cristina on stage.

Paul: I don’t know what that means…

Joe: I think that our sense of joy, not to sound corny, and our sense of gratitude supersedes the drama. Which exists, not that much of it, but we don’t have a lot of hassle.

Now it’s my turn to sound corny… I find cinema one of the best ways to get together, and with this film it was the perfect example of how people come together because of cinema. Both what you see on the screen and how you feel as a spectator afterward. Do you think cinema is a unifying force?

Abel: Yeah, so is the music. We play music together, I mean it’s a tribal thing, going back. That tribal thing is all about the music, all about the drum and all about the beat. And film has the same thing, so we were trying to say that in the movie, that it’s all the same deal. You can have a camera or a bass guitar but in a sense it doesn’t matter because it’s our spirit through the instrument.

Joe: Really from the earliest days of working with Abel, we often refer to ourselves as a band, the film team. There were people who were involved with the team very early on. Referring to the tribal thing, the film team was like a band, and Abel fronted it and I think that still exists now. It’s evolved into something else but it’s still around.

Abel: Paul, does it change, the music, when you’re playing alone or we are all around each other?

Paul: Playing on your own has its own fun because you’re building — like sculpting. But when we count off a song and it’s all of us together there is literally nothing better, than that human interaction and interconnected spirits. What you’re saying — bringing people together. Hopefully the performance will reach the audience but for us, we’re just hanging, and that’s its own fun.

We get that, because it transcends the screen. I watched the film and I felt like I was there with you.

PJ: Bingo!

Cristina, your dancing has a very trance-like feel on stage — it’s an addition to the performance. There is all this masculinity on stage and then there’s you. You are like an angel and one of the few female “roles” that I’ve seen in the festival which has touched me and made me feel like it’s cool to be a girl. How do you channel that dance on stage, so sensual and private?

Abel: See, that’s exactly what I wanted to say!

Cristina: I dance every day, we have a big studio in Rome and Abel is playing every day and I’m dancing every day. That’s our life daily. I put on my exotic music — we’re talking Romanian, Moldavian, Gypsy music, Indian… I just feel the rhythm and with the rhythm I go into my center, out of everything, I find myself. I let it lead me like a leaf, like the wind is my music.

PJ: It’s woman power! Women in the front row at the concerts, you should see how they love it, they are feeling empowered by Cristina’s dance, and I get chills just thinking about it.

Joe, do you miss having Abel in New York now that he lives in Rome?

Joe: Yeah. I spent time not around Abel, throughout the last five, ten years and yes of course I miss him. Ours has been a real brotherhood connection, it goes so far back.

If your audience can only take away one message or one image from your film, what would you want that to be?

Paul: I like what you said about feeling like you were hanging out with us while you watched it. On this trip that is the movie, it’s kind of like a fantasy movie and you’re in with the group. And also the fact that you can still play guitar and sing your songs when you are in your 90s.

Cristina: Go to dance, go and sing, celebrate the world and celebrate life.

Abel: Just making noise — make a happy noise or make an angry noise, it doesn’t matter.

PJ: Abel has made so many films but now we see how the music comes in and how involved he’s been with it. This is a language the audience might not have realized he was speaking before and this time it’s right in front of them.

Joe: It’s really about the music and how good the music is. This is not a vanity project, it’s our work. I’m coming away realizing how excellent a songwriter Abel has become over time.

Images courtesy of the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs, used with permission.