By any yardstick, Paolo Sorrentino has had a lot of good luck in his directing career. His first film premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2001 and the next six competed at Cannes, a residency that brought an Oscar nomination for 2013’s The Great Beauty.
But Sorrentino does not take his good fortune for granted. In Netflix’s The Hand of God he reflects on the twist of fate that saved his life as a teenager in the 1980s, when a freak accident claimed the lives of both his parents.
Starring Filippo Scotti as Fabietto, the film is a lightly fictionalized account of the artist as an introspective young man, with a Sony Walkman on his hip and an obsession with S.S.C.
Napoli footballer Diego Maradona…DEADLINE: When did you first decide you wanted to tell this story?PAOLO SORRENTINO: I started to think about this movie 10 years ago, but I had some modesty [issues], and so I just wrote the script.
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