Academy Award-winning director Paolo Sorrentino (“The Great Beauty”) is readying the world premiere of his latest film, “La Grazia,” which will compete for the Golden Lion at this month’s Venice Film Festival. But as for future plans, the Italian auteur was non-committal during a masterclass Sunday at the Sarajevo Film Festival—although he braced the audience to expect the worst.
“I don’t like to have objectives. I don’t love the idea that I have to do new things,” the director said. “I stay at home without doing anything, and then suddenly something comes up in my mind that becomes an obsession, and I say, ‘OK, let’s do a movie about this obsession.’”
Where those obsessions might lead next, Sorrentino stayed mum. But his advice to moviegoers was simple: Don’t get your hopes up. “Probably I am going to do worse, like many directors,” he said, drawing laughter from the audience.
Sorrentino, who appeared in conversation with Serbian filmmaker Ognjen Glavonić (“The Load”), is attending the Sarajevo Film Festival this year to receive an Honorary Heart of Sarajevo Award in “recognition of the great beauty that he gave us with his films,” according to festival head Jovan Marjanović.
Sorrentino’s latest feature, “La Grazia,” is a love story that re-teams the director with “The Great Beauty” actor Toni Servillo, who stars opposite Italian actor Anna Ferzetti (“Diamonds”). The film will open the Venice Film Festival, which runs Aug. 27 – Sept. 9.
It’s the latest chapter in Sorrentino’s long-running love affair with the prestigious Italian fest, where he premiered his debut feature “One Man Up” in 2001 and launched the first episodes of his groundbreaking series “The Young Pope,” as well as his 2021 film “The Hand of God,” which won the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize.
Speaking in Sarajevo, Sorrentino recalled his first visit to the Lido a quarter-century ago. “When I went the first time in Venice, I didn’t know anything about the movie world,” he said. “I remembered the first time I did a meeting with journalists—with 10 journalists. I didn’t understand that they were journalists, and why they were sitting in front of me. It was a complete shock the first time.” Just a few months later, the director got a phone call inviting “One Man Up” to the inaugural Tribeca Film Festival. Sorrentino was convinced he was the victim of a prank.
“My producer was always doing games with different voices,” he recalled. “And the guy said, ‘Robert DeNiro wants your movie at the Tribeca Film Festival!’”
The director fielded questions from the audience for much of Sunday’s freewheeling 90-minute session, opening up about why he refuses to direct other people’s scripts (“I understand only the things that I write”), why Fellini’s “8 1/2” is his favorite film (“It’s a great movie because it’s not perfect”) and why producers are lining up to work with him.
“I don’t love to work on set. I’m very fast, because I can’t wait to go home,” he said. “Producers love me because I save money, but only because I am eager to go home to watch football matches.”
Recounting pivotal moments throughout his career, which has produced more than a dozen feature films, Sorrentino discussed some of the larger-than-life personalities that have both inspired and populated his movies, such as former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi—the inspiration behind his 2018 dramatic comedy “Loro”—and Argentine football god Diego Maradona.
It was Maradona’s arrival in Naples to play for the local club in 1984, when Sorrentino was a young teen, that serves as a backdrop to the director’s deeply personal “The Hand of God,” with the filmmaker crediting the flashy footballer’s showmanship for sparking his “love of cinema.”
“When I was 14, and Maradona arrived in Naples, for the first time I understood what a show was,” the director said. “Maradona told us—told me, told the Neapolitan people—what is a big, unbelievable show. And I found out the same thing through cinema—the opportunity to put on a big show.”
The director said he’s largely driven by curiosity about “what happens in the mind of people who are very far from me,” offering up the controversial politician and mogul Berlusconi, a three-time prime minister who wielded outsized influence over the Italian political scene and sat at the helm of a vast empire that included media holdings and one of the largest football clubs in Europe. The disgraced billionaire died in 2023 at the age of 86.
“I am very lazy, and I am exactly the opposite of Berlusconi. So I was very curious to find out how the man is so full of life, so full of enthusiasm, so full of objectives in life,” said Sorrentino. “It was a sort of challenge about how to approach life. The characters that I always fall in love [with] are always characters that are very, very different from me. In a hidden part of me, I would love to be them.”
From his days as a self-confessed “depressed” teenager—when he was “at home, alone, watching movies on TV”—Sorrentino said he’s found refuge in cinema, insisting: “Movies saved my sad life.” Even now, the art form offers an escape, with the director saying: “Every time I feel that I am too sad, I think, ‘Now it’s time to do a movie.’”
Asked by an audience member for his definition of wisdom, the 55-year-old filmmaker channeled Jep Gambardella, the journalist played by Servillo in “The Great Beauty,” whose monologue in the film’s closing moments tries to make sense of a lifetime of unfulfilled promise and ennui.
“Life is a sort of blah, blah, blah. And under the blah, blah, blah, we are living,” said Sorrentino. “We are the heroes of our own life.”
The Sarajevo Film Festival runs Aug. 15 – 22.