Wild child

It's difficult to spend a long time with Asia Argento without getting onto the subject of families. First of all there's her surname, which her director father, Dario, has made synonymous with a certain brand of gruesome Italian horror movie through films such as Suspiria, Profondo Rosso and Tenebrae. Asia's mother, Daria Nicolodi, was the star of many of Dario's films (which were produced by his father and his brother) and Asia starred in three of Dario's later ones.

Replacing your mother as your father's leading lady cannot have been without its complications, but then neither can having a father who deals in horrific violence for a living. The only stories Dario would read Asia as a child were scripts for his latest projects, apparently, and under his direction, Asia has been undressed, raped and generally psychologically traumatised on screen. She ran away from home at 14, and now has her own four-year-old daughter, Anna, named after her half-sister who died in a motorcycle accident a few years ago.

Argento has spent the past three years directing her second movie, The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, which also deals with family, but not her own. It is adapted from a novel by cult writer JT Leroy that is a loose fictionalisation of Leroy's own traumatic childhood. In the course of the story, Leroy's alter ego Jeremiah (played by twins Dylan and Cole Sprouse) is dragged across the US by his junkie prostitute mother, regularly abandoned, sexually abused by his mother's boyfriends and submitted to an equally brutal spell of indoctrination by his Bible-bashing grandparents.

As well as directing, Asia plays Leroy's mother, Sarah, in the film, thus setting up another complex Argento-style family dynamic. Leroy collaborated with her on the film, and they became close friends in the process. "I was very scared when he came to the set," she says. "I was scared every time I gave him a draft and scared every time he gave me notes; scared of his judgment and scared of betraying him. We had to get as much as we could right, and a lot of it was to do with the fact that I love JT truly as a friend. He's somebody who will be in my life for ever. It wouldn't have been the same film if we didn't trust each other."

Argento is not the first celebrity to fall under the spell of the frail, mysterious Leroy, who is rarely seen in public without a hat, dark glasses and a blond wig, and makes public appearances at which he nervously speaks in a barely audible mumble. With their disparate, but similarly unorthodox upbringings, they're quite a team - and between them, they've managed to assemble quite a cast, including Winona Ryder (an avid Leroy fan), Marilyn Manson (Asia starred in one of his videos) and Peter Fonda (who works for an association that helps abused children). It may sound like a bit of a celebrity love-in - a sleazy trawl through the landscape of white-trash America in general, and Leroy's painful memories in particular - but Argento doesn't see it that way. "He has written the book, so he has dealt with it over and over for years I guess. And he's been in therapy for years. In a way, when you talk so much about something, it does not belong to you any more. It's happened to me and my bad memories. I've manipulated them and now they could be parts of Gone With the Wind."

It would be easy to paint 29-year-old Argento as a privileged dilettante who's manipulated her own life story with an unhealthy degree of fascination. Before The Heart Is Deceitful, she was building a reputation as something of a gothic wild child. The "bad memories" she refers to point to a childhood she characterises as lonely, bookish and depressed. She has dabbled in photography, fiction, singing, painting, and glamour modelling, and her first movie, Scarlet Diva, was a semi-autobiographical portrait of a jaded young international starlet. On top of that, she has had a string of famous lovers (Italian actor Sergio Rubini, Vincent Gallo, Michael Pitt, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) and been a regular fixture of Italian gossip pages. But The Heart Is Deceitful was evidently more than a vanity project. "I thought, being the director and working with children, it would make it easier for them to trust me if I was playing Sarah myself," she says. "Having been a child actor, I remember how directors would trick me to get good performances out of me. I don't think you need to do that."

Directing children through such difficult material was not without its challenges. In one key scene in the book, Jeremiah dresses up as his mother, and seduces her boyfriend. Even Asia's friend Gaspar Noé, director of shock-movie Irréversible, suggested she leave the scene out. Instead, Argento cleverly shifts the scene into fantasy, thus enabling her to play Jeremiah (fantasising he is Sarah), instead of the child actor. "I didn't realise how hard it would be," she says. "I was in the bubble of this character, but I also had to direct and be myself. I tend to be a lazy actress, unless I'm pushed. Most of the time nothing much is required of directors, which is a pity. I've worked with very few directors who've asked of me what I asked of myself."

Argento has more than 20 years acting experience to draw on, during which time she has worked with some useful directors, including Nanni Moretti (she played his daughter), Patrice Chéreau (she had a small part in La Reine Margot), and Abel Ferrara (while she was on set, she made a documentary about him). In her early 20s she won two Donatello awards (Italy's equivalent of Oscars) for best actress, playing a young paraplegic in Carlo Verdone's Let's Not Keep in Touch and a self-discovering teen in Travelling Companions. More recently, however, she seems to have veered towards playing goth-horror sex symbols. Many of her grown-up roles have called for softcore eroticism, dark brooding and heavy eyeliner, and Argento appears to have been all too willing to oblige.

"I always saw myself as really ugly," she explains. "My father even told me I was ugly because I would shave my head and look like a boy. Then when I was 21 I was offered this part in a movie where I was supposed to be really sexy [Michael Radford's B Monkey, which was never released in the UK]. It was strange for me to have to research femininity, but I found out these tricks for getting attention that I didn't know before. It was a kind of revenge, I guess, on all the kids who said I was ugly at school."

When she landed a part opposite Vin Diesel in the big-budget action thriller xXx, Argento seemed destined for a future of action-babe parts and respectable placings in men's magazine polls of "sexiest stars": "After xXx came out, because of all the publicity, I was wearing Prada and going to the gym, and I had an agent in LA and all this shit that I've avoided for years. I felt that was expected of me, that I had to be a sexy bombshell. I started receiving all these offers for these kick-ass chick sort of roles. But it didn't make me very happy, to tell the truth, and after giving birth, it all felt different. I don't mean to sound like a bourgeois moralist, but it's true - I started thinking, 'What is Anna going to think?'"

So now she's back in her "boy uniform", she says - jeans and sweatshirts rather than Prada. She lives in Paris with her daughter and boyfriend in the same apartment she has had since she was 20. She doesn't have an agent in LA any more, but the acting work seems to be better than ever. She plays the Courtney Love figure to Michael Pitt's Kurt Cobain imitation in Gus van Sant's Last Days; she has a part in horror maestro George Romero's comeback movie; and she has been working with Sofia Coppola on her Marie Antoinette movie.

The Heart Is Deceitful is unlikely to earn Argento unanimous respect as a director, but it is another learning experience in what has already been an enviably brave and varied life. More importantly, perhaps, the movie represents another step further out of her father's lengthy shadow. It is something of a tribute that we barely get on to talking about Dario until it's nearly time for her to leave. "The questions about my father get less and less, and I'm relieved about that," she says. "No, I wasn't upset by the things he did to me in his films. I never thought of it like it was me doing it, because he would say, 'It's only a movie,' and I thought the same."

Did she seek his advice on directing? "Well, we had a fight and he didn't talk to me for two years because I didn't do his last movie. So I felt very resentful about that. I really respect him, though. I've studied his work more than anyone, and I thought of him a lot when I was shooting this movie. He would have been the perfect person to call, so it was a pity not to have him as my ally. But I felt I had to prove something to him. To prove I could do something else."

· The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things is released on July 15.