Francesco Rulli: Could This Be Love… It’s 28 minutes.

Abel Ferrara: Right. It should have been a feature, but we just ran out of gas, I guess. I remember them telling me at school; they said, “You know, what you are going to do with a half hour movie?”

Francesco Rulli: There’s nice music in this one.

Abel Ferrara: The Rolling Stones. It would be $200,000 dollars easy, to use this song in a movie now.

Francesco Rulli: Where did you shoot this?

Abel Ferrara: I was living in this apartment with the blonde girl… We lived together for 5 years. Then we said goodbye. That’s right… after 5 years. This is in Nyack. This is where all the actors and all the money guys go when they make a score and move out of Manhattan. Al Pacino was up there… It’s a very artsy community.

Francesco Rulli: Who wrote the script for this one?

Abel Ferrara: I did, because Nicky wasn’t coming home. He was married to his second cousin and living with his family. His father-in-law had died, and he was now the father of the house, running a chestnut forest in the middle of nowhere. And he was going to stay there because he hated the United States. But I told him that we had to make a movie, that we had careers we had to begin. But this was bourgeois movie [laughing].

Francesco Rulli: So you wrote this one.

Abel Ferrara: Yeah, we were out of school at that point. When you come to a certain age, you know you got to do something. You know, I was in a very desperate point in my life, and Nicky was not here, so I had to go and try to talk him into coming back to the United States.

Francesco Rulli: Well, if I had to go to the Vietnam War, I would do probably do the same.

Abel Ferrara: So I go over there to get him…

Francesco Rulli: Where in Italy?

Abel Ferrara: Caserta. A tiny tiny town. I mean I went to Rome, took trains, just to be able to find Nicky. So I get to this town and try to find him there, walking up this hill, and I see somebody walking a donkey loaded with chestnuts. He didn’t even look like Nicky, and I was about to ask him where the American guy is, and it was him. So as I was trying to talk him into coming back, I ended up staying with him. We did some real old style time living, you know, the mother, the house, everyday jobs, farm work… What happens is that you get a truck with loads of tomatoes in the driveway and make tomato sauce for ten families for the whole year, squeeze them, cook them up in fifty gallon drums, bottle them, etc. And when you pick the chestnuts in the forest, you have to keep the forest like a golf course; you sweep it, you clean it… It’s a beautiful forest that you can walk through.

Francesco Rulli: So what happened? Did you convince him to come back?

Abel Ferrara: I got him. He finally came back. He brought his wife to the United States with him. I promised him all the glories of the film business and we ended up living in the back of a go-go agency in New York. I left her [referring to his then-girlfriend on the screen] and the luxury of Nyack to start a new a career for myself. [Pointing at the screen] This is my uncle, Alfonso Ferrara who basically raised me. This was his bar in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Here he comes… He’s a natural. Look at him, he is fantastic. This is another proletariat story of a happy hooker. “If you are going to make a film that’s 30 minutes long, best advice, why won’t you just make it feature-length?” was the best advice I got from the professors at school… because there is nothing that you can do with a 28-minute film. You know when you work on a film like this piece-by-piece, minute-by-minute, second by second; I don’t think we could have made it. I mean, first of all we didn’t have a story.

Francesco Rulli: Well, internet is the perfect platform for movies like this.

Abel Ferrara: This was all for nothing. We went to these poor people’s house and put them in a weekend of misery. We shot all this stuff, and then all the footage was lost in the lab. We had to go back and re-shoot. It’s a nightmare, but when you’re so deep into a movie, the idea is to finish it.

Francesco Rulli: I think the movie is very-well shot.

Abel Ferrara: Yeah, this is an actual movie.

Francesco Rulli: How many cameras did you use to shoot this?

Abel Ferrara: We could have done more shit when we made those films but anyway you got to put it into what you got to put it into.

Francesco Rulli: How many cameras that you shoot it with?

Abel Ferrara: One.

Abel Ferrara: You know we barely had that. It was a brand new French camera. When I got out of school, I became friends with the kids at the film school who wanted to be cinematographers.

Francesco Rulli: Where did you show this movie?

Abel Ferrara: We didn’t show this anywhere. We had a couple of screenings; we showed it on a wall, we showed it to the people who have seen it. I showed it downtown at the film archives. I showed it around trying to get a job, you know, I mean I don’t know what I got out of this. Not much, I guess except the satisfaction that I could make a movie.

Francesco Rulli: And 27 years have gone by.

Abel Ferrara: And I’m still in the same boat [laughing].