- Title: Italy's Sorrentino says making personal film helped him deal with tragedy
- Date: 29th November 2021
- Summary: VENICE, ITALY (RECENT - SEPTEMBER 1, 2021) (REUTERS) (SOUNDBITE) (Italian) ACTOR, TONI SERVILLO, ON HOW MUCH HIS LONG-TIME COLLABORATOR SORRENTINO TOLD HIM ABOUT HIS FATHER AND THE REAL EVENTS AND ON PLAYING SORRENTINO'S FATHER, SAYING: "Paolo is an extraordinary screenwriter and he is also very good at writing dialogues that give his actors a great starting point from whi
- Embargoed: 13th December 2021 13:02
- Keywords: Diego Maradona E stata la mano di dio Filippo Scotti Paolo Sorrentino The Hand of God movie Toni Servillo the hand of god
- Location: VARIOUS
- City: VARIOUS
- Country: Italy
- Topics: Arts/Culture/Entertainment,Europe,Film
- Reuters ID: LVA008F5NGN65
- Aspect Ratio: 16:9
- Story Text: Oscar-winning filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino turns personal with "The Hand of God", a movie about his own coming of age in 1980s Naples after losing his parents as a teenager.
In the film, the "This Must Be the Place", "The Young Pope" and "The Great Beauty" director tells the story of his crowded, playful family and how his life was upended by his parents' accidental death.
Making the film was therapeutic, Sorrentino, who turned 50 last year, said.
"In the end I think making the film may have been helpful because it's one thing to remember the pain and to face the painful memories on your own and another to share them with so many people, which you can't avoid when you decide to make a film about it," he told Reuters in Venice.
"It makes you turn your focus on the practical things, you need to take care of concrete issues such as lights, sound and the makeup of the actors and maybe that then helps to play down these monsters that seem paralysing in one's life."
A Netflix production, "The Hand of God" received its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival and has been selected as Italy's official submission for the international feature film category at next year's Academy Awards.
Sorrentino picked newcomer Filippo Scotti to play Fabietto Schisa, the young version of himself in the movie. The 21-year-old makes his lead actor debut in "The Hand of God".
"I still ask myself how it happened," Scotti said of being chosen out of a huge number of hopefuls.
"I even asked him 'are you sure?', in the sense 'are you sure this wasn't a mistake?' but then trusted him and entrusted myself to him and he, too, placed his trust in me and that is a great honour for me."
The film's large ensemble cast also includes Toni Servillo, one of Italy's most acclaimed actors who has worked with Sorrentino for the past 20 years, who took on the role of his father, and Teresa Saponangelo, who plays his mother.
Though telling a family tragedy, Sorrentino also injected scenes of comedy and humour in his screenplay, showing an extended family taking pleasure in poking fun of each other.
"Many of the comical things in the film are real because, fortunately, many members of my family were funny, or at least they seemed that way to me when I was a young boy. So, it was not hard to write them up because those scenes are more or less as they happened in real life," he said.
The film is named after Diego Maradona's description of his famous goal against England at the 1986 World Cup. The late Argentine footballer - who went on to play for Naples in the mid-1980s and became an instant local hero - looms large in the movie.
Sorrentino, who was 17 at the time, was in Naples to see Maradona play on the night his parents were killed by carbon monoxide poisoning at the family's ski house.
"I hoped, it was a big dream of mine to show my film to him but that wasn't to be. But that's life."
"The Hand of God" gets a limited theatrical release in early December before it starts streaming on Netflix on December 15.
(Production: Hanna Rantala) - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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