This is the English translation of an interview with screenwriter and director Roger Vadim conducted by Ornella Volta. The interview was originally published in Italian, in the Italian monthly magazine Horror, in November 1971. You can find more info about Italian horror movies in the monograph Vampires in Italian Cinema, 1956-1975 (Edinburgh University Press, 2020). If you are interested in buying the book, feel free to use the launch discount code EVENT30 for 30% off.

Together with Valerio Riva, Ornella Volta edited the Italian-language, vampire-themed anthology I vampiri tra noi: 37 storie vampiriche, published by Feltrinelli in 1960. The foreword of this anthology was written by Roger Vadim (available here in Italian and here in English) as a tie-in for the Italian release of his feature film Il sangue e la rosa / Blood and Roses (1960).

Ornella Volta: Roger Vadim, so far you have made two movies that belong to the fantastic genre, Il sangue e la rosa (based on a Sheridan Le Fanu novella) and Metzengerstein (based on an Edgar Allan Poe short story [and part of the omnibus Tre passi nel delirio / Spirits of the Dead (Roger Vadim, Louis Malle, Federico Fellini, 1968)]), and one science-fiction film, Barbarella (1968). Do you prefer the fantastic or the sci-fi genre?

Roger Vadim: I know that it is rare that a person is interested in both the sci-fi and the fantastic, because an abyss separates the two genres. However, I like them both, even if I am perhaps more partial to sci-fi. For me, the fantastic has the fault of being based on a psychology that is connected too much to the everyday. When we enter the realm of the “fantastic”, there is always someone (the protagonist of the story, the spectator or the reader) who is afraid of something. And fear – nobody can deny it – is a feeling that by now has become too ordinary, too commonplace.

Ornella: In any case, you don’t consider the fantastic as a lesser genre?

Vadim: A lesser genre? For me the fantastic is the future of cinema. If you consider that cinema is the only medium that allows you to “see” ghosts, apparitions and marvels in action, how can you underestimate the extraordinary potential of the fantastic genre? Only a minimal fraction of this potential has been explored so far, due to the lack of resources and to the filmmakers’ lack of courage. I myself haven’t gone as far as I wanted and want to. Maybe because I felt that the audience wasn’t prepared enough to welcome my ideas.

Ornella: Do you think that sci-fi is more ductile?

Vadim: Sure. Sci-fi gives us more freedom. We are free to imagine all sorts of planets without any relation to our world – planets full of individuals with feelings and behaviors completely different from the ones we know. Indeed, my greatest ambition is to bring to the screen human relationships that have never been seen before. Just think of how conventional was female psychology before [my film] Et Dieu… créa la femme / …And God Created Woman (1956). One can easily say that Brigitte Bardot entered the history of cinema like a Martian… And even the realist authors I adapted for the screen managed to strike me only when they clashed against reality.

Ornella: You dislike reality, then? Are you a fan of escapism?

Vadim: Not at all! I like reality very much. But I don’t believe that only what man does is real. I believe that what man would like to do is real too. In sum, I believe that it is a big mistake to underestimate the part of reality that is commonly called “imagination”. Imagined and factual things have the same influence on events. And, in any case, imagination is more enjoyable. I like and I am interested in everything that increases the possibilities of man’s life. Even God can interest me, as long as God is seen as an incommensurable entity. That is to say an entity that can’t be measured and that doesn’t measure other beings. On the contrary, I lose all interest when God is conceived of as a sort of tailor who wants people to wear clothes that are too tight. I lose all interest when God becomes a pretext to make human life more miserable.

Ornella: Did you ever have the temptation to bring to the screen the so-called “parallel universe”?

Vadim: Yes, of course. But I certainly don’t want to do so in order to demonstrate the existence of such “parallel universe”: when ghosts will be decoded, I will lose interest in them.

Ornella: Did you ever deal with occultism and spiritism?

Vadim: I sure did. I even conducted a long research in those milieus. All those occultists and spiritists were lying in the most pathetic way. And yet their lies, their clumsy efforts to demonstrate the indemonstrable, showed that they really did believe. For them, lying was the only way to communicate to a non-initiate something that even they couldn’t quite grasp. The bottom line is that they did believe just like I believe, even if I don’t feel like analyzing this belief of mine in depth. I believe because I myself am an ultra-sensitive medium. When I was a kid, I could make a table shake without touching it, just by keeping my hand at a certain distance from it. I also have prophetic dreams all the time. And I have already met my doppelgänger twice over the course of my life.