‘I am not able to answer your question’: an irascible Paolo Sorrentino interviewed

Loving the films of the Italian auteur Paolo Sorrentino, I thought he’d be easy to chat to. But a maestro is a maestro, as I was reminded when I interviewed him in London last week. Masked and communicating through a translator, I semaphored my admiration for his new film The Hand of God, starting with its spectacular opening shot. Like a bird, the camera flies over the sea, then focuses on a vintage car tooling along the promenade, before panning over the city again. But he rejected my praise: ‘It’s not complicated. It’s a normal shot by helicopter.’

He’s right, of course, that his new classic coming-of-age story represents a departure towards simplicity. Gone is the virtuoso editing of his 2008 political movie Il Divo, gone the baroque of The Great Beauty, his Oscar-winning 2013 ode to Rome, which conjured a giraffe in the Baths of Caracalla and a disco bacchanal overlooking the Colosseum. ‘I always did a very complicated and tricky mis-en-scène and I thought, maybe this is the moment and the right script to do something simple and easy. This story I had in my mind for many years but I never found the courage to do this movie.’

Set in 1980s Naples, The Hand of God tells the true tale of how Sorrentino lost his beloved parents the year he turned 17. The technical side might be more ‘simple’ but the emotional daring is high. Humour and tragedy are often simultaneous, as Sorrentino evokes, with impressive lightness, how Maradona saved his life. If he had not stayed in Naples to see their new star player, he would have been with his parents when their fatal accident occurred.

This deeply personal material welled up around the time Sorrentino turned 50, a year and a half ago.