Transcript
Part 1: Isabella Rossellini

Ben Arthur
(Voiceover)

From PRX, this is SongWriter, the podcast that turns stories into songs.

My name is Ben Arthur.

Season seven is made possible by a grant from Templeton World Charity Foundation and focuses on elements of human flourishing like polarization, empathy, and in today’s episode, animal intelligence.

Today, we have a brand new song from Sharon Van Etten, a conversation with Dr. Diana Reiss about animal behavior, and an interview with one of the most fascinating and surprising people I’ve ever met.

Isabella Rossellini

My name is Isabella Rossellini and because I’m old I have many facets, as you say.

So I mostly worked as a model and as an actress, but I always loved animals.

So when the work slowed down as an actress and as a model because they prefer them young, I came back to university at Hunter College to take my master degree on animal behavior and conservation.

When I had my appendix operation, I think I was five or six, my mom gave me a dog, a little Maltese called Youppi.

I call Youppi.

Youppi in French means hooray, happiness, wow.

And Youppi was my first love, you know, and then after Youppi I had another dog called Nando until I was 25.

So when Nando died, it was a really incredible loss because I didn’t remember my life without Nando.

It was a little dachshund.

And maybe I was closer to Nando because Youppi was given to me when I was very little and Nando when I was a little older.

And also it was at the time of my first operation where I had to be in a hospital and in bed for six months, immobilized completely.

And the rest of the time is another six months at home.

So Nando was my toy, my companion.

He was delighted I was in bed because that’s what he wanted to do all day.

Just sleep.

Dogs sleep 20 hours a day.

And probably I would have not been allowed to sleep in bed with a dog, but because I was a sick child, I could, of course, let Isabella have Nando.

I remember, I mean, I’ll give you a little episode.

I came home one day and I immediately sensed that there was something wrong.

And I don’t remember the detail, but I remember this incredible panic and calling my dad and my dad coming from work.

We looked for him everywhere, but I knew instantly that he was sick.

And then I remember how afraid I was to lose Nando and how I brought him sweaters with my — I would wear the sweaters and then bring the sweater.

He stayed at the hospital that had my smell because I understood that smell for him was important.

Nando recovered.

I came back home.

But there was a real connection.

I mean, even in that moment where I immediately knew there was something wrong, or sometimes I just looked at him and said, “Oh, you’re thirsty.”

How did I know that?

My father gave me when I was 14 years old — he knew I loved animals — and he gave me the book by Konrad Lorenz called King Solomon’s Ring.

That was a book that Konrad Lorenz wrote about the science that he had founded called ethology, which was animal behavior.

And I read the book and that was a moment, aha moment, said, “Ah, that’s what I want to be. I want to be like Konrad Lorenz. I want to be an ethologist.”

In Italy, when I was ready to go to college, they didn’t offer ethology.

There was biology, zoology, but the science of ethology, animal behavior, is relatively new.

So they offered it at, I think, at Cambridge or Oxford, in America, in Florida.

But I lived in Italy and English was my second language.

So when I was in my twenties, I just didn’t think I could enroll.

Plus there is two years of the undergraduates before you can even get to study what you want.

So it just seemed when I was 18 or 19, an impossible task to go all the way to a master degree.

Ben Arthur
(Voiceover)

Also, there were other opportunities for Isabella, who began her work as a foreign Italian correspondent in New York, moved on to modeling, and then acting.

I’ve actually found it’s quite difficult to sum up Isabella Rossellini’s storied career without somehow sounding as if you’re underselling it.

Suffice it to say that she’s won an Emmy Award, a Golden Globe, and was just nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Conclave.

Through all of this, her interest in animal behavior never waned.

And so when a surprising opportunity presented itself, she jumped at the chance, even though it was at a moment of profound vulnerability.

Isabella Rossellini

So I was born with a deformity of the back. It’s called scoliosis. It’s very common, but mine was very severe.

I had two operations — one when I was a little girl and one when I was 60.

The second one was a major operation where they fused 17 of my vertebrae.

So I had a very long period of recovery.

That was six to eight months where I couldn’t work.

Plus, I was old to be a model and an actress.

So I just didn’t know. I didn’t know if, once I recuperated my health, what my life was going to be.

Ben Arthur
(Voiceover)

It was at this moment that Isabella heard that Temple Grandin, the noted ethologist, animal behavior expert, and inventor, would be speaking at Hunter College.

Isabella Rossellini

I came in a wheelchair with a nurse.

She was a student nurse here at Hunter College, and that’s how she learned about it.

She knew that I loved animals, so she said, “Oh, let’s go there.”

There were people handing out pamphlets saying that Hunter College had just opened a program in animal behavior and conservation.

And I said, “Oh, this is all I’ve wanted to do all my life.”

And she said, “I’ll sign you up.”

The next day — I think it was January — and the classes started a week or so after.

She brought me back in the wheelchair.

The first classes I attended were in the wheelchair.

Then I got better.

And so here I am now, walking.

Ben Arthur

And so began Isabella’s work with Dr. Diana Reiss.

In fact, it was Diana who first encouraged Isabella to write a script about animal behavior.

Isabella Rossellini

Well, I always said to Diana, you know, Link Link Circus really is your classes translated into a theatrical form.

There was so much information that you gave us that I’ve used — bits and pieces — but I draw everything because it has to be visual.

You cannot, in class, you can verbalize and you can tell.

But when you go to the theater or you’re in films, you cannot just talk.

You have to illustrate.

So that’s why I draw and made a series of short films and also make some videos.

All my monologues are heavily illustrated with videos and photos, and generally comical too.

And the reason it’s comical is that animals make me laugh.

I find them funny.

I find them so absurdly funny.

You know, we always grow up saying, “There’s a mommy and a daddy and a baby.”

Then all of a sudden — they are hermaphrodites, they are sequential hermaphrodites, they change sex in the middle of their life.

Anything goes.

And so it’s amusing.

Plus, they do these things that are so mysterious.

We were in the elevator coming to the studio for this interview.

We were talking about whales singing together, and I thought of wolves and how they howl together.

Why do they do that?

We still don’t know.

But of course it’s something more than just…

I think it’s communicating.

I mean, how could they evolve it if there wasn’t a purpose for it?

There is a purpose.

We just haven’t found out what it is.

Ben Arthur

Isabella’s theater productions on animal behavior include Link Link Circus and Darwin’s Smile, which is about Charles Darwin’s study of animal and human expressions using the then-new technology of photography.

Isabella Rossellini

To take a photo, the camera demanded a very long exposure — as long as 60 seconds, which is quite long — but still you could capture something that couldn’t have been captured before.

For example, he worked with a photographer called Rejlander who photographed a child crying.

The baby was screaming, and they photographed it.

That photo sold millions of copies, apparently, in the late 1800s.

Everybody had that photo because it was a very familiar expression.

Everybody had seen a baby angry, crying.

Yet nobody had captured the moment.

There were paintings — an approximation of it — but that photo was completely what it was.

And Darwin thought that photography could help him understand the expression of emotion.

And he wondered something very simple.

He said, “If I smile,” he would photograph people smiling, and he would send the photos all over the world and say, “What is this person doing?”

And people said, “Smiling. Happy. Content.”

Then he would send photos of people frowning or looking angry, showing teeth, and they would say, “They’re angry.”

So you see, some expressions are culturally shaped.

But others — like a smile — are understood all over the world.

It’s the same smiling in Japan, in Germany, in America.

Why is that?

It has been shaped by evolution, just like our bones and our hair.

But Darwin observed children who were born with certain expressions — smiling, crying — and certain others that had to be learned.

And he also included animals.

There was, Diana could tell you better, a movement in America called behaviorism.

They really said you cannot talk about emotions because it’s such a private experience.

So they became behaviorists, saying we can only witness the behavior.

If a dog shakes his tail, we can’t say he’s happy.

We can just say: he shakes his tail every time he sees his owner.

Darwin didn’t have this problem.

This was a problem that came years later.

He was completely convinced that animals had emotions and expressions.

And he gives many examples.

You know, we tremble when we are afraid.

Animals do it too.

We scream when we are frightened or surprised, and animals do too — they emit a very sharp sound.

So he said there are parallels, and he had no doubt that animals had emotions.

It came much later that people said animals didn’t have emotions.

But he wrote to his grandmother, because he went to the zoo quite often, observing animals and doing experiments.

He would bring a fake snake to see if the animal — even if it was fake — would react with fear when they saw the snake.

He was doing very funny, easy, simple experiments.

He writes to his grandmother about visiting the zoo.

The keeper of the orangutan named Jenny shows Jenny an apple, but she wouldn’t give it to her.

So he writes to his grandmother, “Jenny threw herself on the floor in a tantrum that looks exactly the same as my children when they are frustrated.”

And then the keeper said, “Jenny, stop doing that. If you stop growling, I’ll give you the apple.”

And he writes, “Darling, I think she understood every word of it.”

Because she stopped, and the zookeeper gave her the apple, and she sat and ate it with great, great satisfaction.

But he was looking at the behavior.

He said there are so many parallels to the way my children react when they are frustrated.

Ben Arthur
(voiceover)

To me, this story connected Charles Darwin’s work with Isabella’s — not only in Link Link Circus and Darwin’s Smile, but also in her hit video series Green Porno.

In each episode of Green Porno and its many offshoots, Isabella uses costumes, stories, and jokes about sex to teach the audience about the extraordinary world of animals.

(to Isabella Rossellini)

It seems to me that your work communicating the worlds of animals and connecting them to us — I’ve watched Green Porno videos of you dressing up as a shrimp, for example — seems like you are pulling us closer and closer to a recognition of our connection with animals, and the depth of their intelligence and emotion.

And so I guess, in my mind, that story where Darwin sees his daughter in this animal in a cage in a zoo, where he gets into the cage, where he hands over a mirror, is kind of extraordinary and profound and related to your work.

Am I overthinking it, maybe?

Isabella Rossellini
(instantly, laughing)

Yes.

Ben Arthur
(laughing)

Okay, beautiful. Tell me why.

Isabella Rossellini

So, I like animals.

And I always had the impression, when I was a little girl, that they had emotion — that my dog and I were connected by affection and understanding of each other, loving each other’s company.

And I was told, “No, the dog follows you because you’re feeding him.”

I didn’t feed him.

So many times it was my mom feeding him, and the dog was still following me.

So it really comes from very simple things.

Not so much about where is religion leading us, and what is morality, and where is free will versus instinct.

I know that it touches those questions, but that’s not the part that I’m interested in.

I am just interested — I like animals.

I like their company.

I like to observe them, like other people might like Harley-Davidsons and fix up a motor.

So it’s very simple.

It’s not so philosophical.

I’m an actress and I’m an entertainer.

So, for example, Green Porno was really meant to entertain and to make people laugh.

There is a component of comedy and laughter.

I don’t see myself as somebody who wants to convince another person that this is my way and you’ve got to come and you’ve got to admit.

Actually, I don’t have many answers.

But it’s the wonderment that it is wonderful.

So if anything, I would like to invite people to be wondering like I do.

Ben Arthur
(Voiceover)

Still, because I’m a very annoying and stupid person, I pursued this idea and I showed Isabella a video I had recently seen of a rooster who seemed to be mourning his dead mate.

Isabella was not swayed and told this story in response.

Isabella Rossellini

It was Saturday, and that’s when we opened the farm, and it was a dead chicken.

And I saw the dead chicken as the people were coming to see the marvelous farm.

I don’t know how it was killed.

I think it was a hawk who got her.

The hawk — they just eat the head.

They leave them.

I opened the cages to get the chicken around, and they all ran to this dead chicken and they started to eat it — like carnivores, like what you see in National Geographic, lions eating a zebra.

I was so embarrassed because everybody was saying, “The chickens are so kind,” and “You love such a…”

And they were cannibals.

I didn’t know how to justify them morally.

So, I don’t know.

Do they feel grief?

I don’t know.

Ben Arthur
(Voiceover)

At the same time, Isabella does not dismiss the idea that animals have emotions.

And she shared a story about some sheep on Mama Farm.

I should mention that among Isabella’s other endeavors, she founded in 2013 a 28-acre farm in Brookhaven, New York, that aims to support the next generation of environmental stewards through education and preservation of biodiversity.

Isabella Rossellini

I’ve seen a mama sheep die and a baby being very attached even to that mama.

It was difficult to separate them and to bury the mama because the lamb wanted to be with the mama, and then cried and cried and cried and called for the mama.

I think that in the farm world there is a certain amount of roughness with the animals, traditionally.

And so I was told that lamb is too big now; it should be separated from the mother because she has to wean off drinking milk.

So I obeyed, and I separated them — both in two different fields, but far from one another, about a mile.

And they cried.

Mama and babies.

Then I called the vet and I said, “I don’t know. I was told by my neighbor, a shepherdess, that I have to separate mama and baby because otherwise they keep suckling, and now they have teeth and the mom might get an infection.”

And he said, “Oh no, don’t worry about that. Why don’t you put them back together?”

And I did.

I ran.

I got the baby on my car and drove it back to the mother.

And they were so happy to find each other.

And that’s the mama that eventually died.

And she died because she ate a snail.

There is a snail in North America, where we live, that has some toxic thing that affects the neurology of the sheep.

For two or three days she started to walk as if she was drunk.

I called the vet.

We tried everything, but eventually she died.

Ben Arthur
(Voiceover)

As I understand it, at heart Isabella is a scientist.

She will not take a position on something that she does not have the evidence for yet.

And in the meantime, she is here to share passion and interest and excitement about her work and about her observations in the way that she knows best.

Isabella Rossellini

There isn’t a real mission, you know.

I mean, that’s my job as an actor, as a director, is to be a storyteller.

So I translate what is written in scientific terms into another format, which is entertaining.

I always say I want my audience to have two reactions.

First one: ha ha ha — laughter.

And then: oh.

Like, oh, I didn’t know that.

Oh, that is really incredible.

That is really wonderful — wonderment.

So I try to capture what makes me laugh about animals and tell the wonderment of any possibility that happens in nature.

Now, it could be that some people don’t respond to it, and it could be that some people respond to it, and that’s how you find an audience.

And I come from a film business, so I think narrative and telling stories was part of how I grew up.

It came naturally to me.

It wasn’t a decision — “How am I going to tell a story?”

I thought you had to tell the story, because everybody in the family was telling stories.

Ben Arthur
(Voiceover)

As we were chatting at the end of the interview, Isabella had a last thought about music.

Isabella Rossellini

I want to say something about music and Darwin.

Darwin writes that probably music came before language.

That probably we serenaded before we could say, “I love you.”

And he based that on the fact that a lot of animals sing, and that song also had this deep impact on us.

And also it’s a language that is by everybody.