Paolo Sorrentino: ‘I am obsessed by the sacred and profane’

A young man stands at the doors of a hospital ward. On the other side are his loved ones, of whom he has just been given grave news. The doctor is sorry but there is nothing he can do. The young man is bereft, broken, his eyes filled with tears, confusion and rage. The doors remain closed. The year is not 2021 but 1986, yet the scene echoes down the decades to our own.

Many of us are still trying to process similar events from the past two years; for the Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino it has taken 35 and now led him to make The Hand of God, a deeply personal and closely autobiographical work based on a tragedy that befell him as a teenager (Paolo rechristened Fabietto in the film). And with it has come a change of approach — the usual flamboyance, even flashiness, with which the 51-year-old has been associated since his breakthrough film The Consequences of Love (2004) and the success of his Oscar-winning The Great Beauty (2013) is still evident in places but has been dialled down.

When we meet at a central London hotel, settling on a balcony so he can smoke, I begin by asking Sorrentino if the personal nature of the story made it more difficult to write.

“At the beginning it was very difficult,” he says, lighting a cigar and enshrouding himself in a cloud of grey smoke to match his wispy hair. “For many years I was reluctant . . . Then, some years ago, I had the idea to write the script just to read it to my son and daughter so they can understand who I am, and why sometimes I am so strange for them, so moody. It is because I grew up alone.” 

It was Italy’s Covid lockdown that prompted him to finally put pen to paper, looking back to the experiences and influences that made him. As the film’s title suggests, one of these was the footballer Diego Maradona, who came to Naples in 1984 and became a messianic figure, lifting the city’s spirits and restoring some of its pride. And for Sorrentino it went a step further. Going to see Naples play on that fateful day in 1986 meant that he escaped probable death himself; thus Maradona became his personal saviour.

“Naples is a city where the sacred and profane touch each other, so Maradona was perfect because he was profane, of course, and he had something of the sacred figure. So he was a god.”

It will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Sorrentino’s previous work that the film draws on both the divine and the decidedly unholy. It opens with a scene in which Fabietto’s curvaceous and skimpily dressed Aunt Patrizia is picked up by a man claiming to be San Gennaro, patron saint of Naples (her hothead husband declares himself convinced).

“I am obsessed by this idea of the sacred and the profane,” Sorrentino admits. “The Great Beauty was a movie that put them together and also my TV series The Young Pope. If you live in Rome for a while, you understand how the two things are very close. There is God. You turn behind a wall and there is . . . other stuff.”

The Hand of God also contains multitudes, not least among the colourful array of family members, friends and neighbours who populate the film. Sorrentino, who shows me a pad of pencil drawings he carries around in which he sketches faces, has a knack for finding and photographing memorable visages. But surely the larger-than-life assembly seen in The Hand of God can’t be based on actuality?

“The truth is that they were real. Probably I exaggerated because those characters are in my memory, the memory of a boy of 10 or 12 years old. So it’s possible that I saw my aunt and my uncle as something strange and unusual. But it’s exactly how I remember them.”

Some critics have taken issue with Sorrentino’s portrayal of Aunt Patrizia in particular as a cartoonish sexual fantasy come to life, even though over the course of the film she evolves to become a far more complex and ambivalent figure. Some Italian observers have also taken issue with the nostalgic depiction of Naples, which appears relatively unblemished, with no mention of the Mafia.

“It’s very simple: I didn’t make a movie about the city,” Sorrentino says. “I made a movie about what I lived in Naples. My father worked in a bank, so I didn’t have a great relationship with the Mafia. In a movie you have to make choices. A big city is many things.”

Sorrentino has lived in Rome for the past 15 years but retains ties with Naples and still speaks the local language. “When I fight with my wife, we speak Neapolitan,” he laughs.

While Naples serves as an evocative backdrop, the Neapolitan character itself comes under scrutiny, not always in flattering ways. A neighbour from northern Italy and a butt of Fabietto’s mother’s frequent pranks, observes in a fit of pique: “You Neapolitans, people say you’re nice, but actually you are mean!” So which is it? “Both. We are very nice, but . . . Yes, both,” he laughs. “Neapolitan people are full of contradictions.”

The Hand of God, too, is rife with contradictions, not least in the scenes involving Fabietto’s extended family, which are both warmly convivial and full of cruel jibes. Politically correct they are not. “Being mean was typical of my family and of many families in a disordered way to express affection,” explains Sorrentino. “Cruelty nowadays is seen as danger, but in the world I grew up in, it was a way to improve yourself.”

Cruelty nowadays is seen as danger, but in the world I grew up in, it was a way to improve yourself

This tendency to criticise in order to build character extended into Sorrentino’s career and his early working relationship with the director Antonio Capuano, who also features in the film. “He was the first person I worked with and he was exactly like that with me. I was scared. Sometimes I cried at home because I was young and he was very rude with me, but it was stimulating.”

Writing comedies became a way of dealing with the pain of loss, just as his mother had used pranks, jokes and juggling to cope with the more dolorous aspects of her life. “The more the pain, the bigger was the prank,” he says. “I am exactly like her. All the time when I am at unease, when there is pain, I use irony to be in the world.”

And this continues to drive him to this day. “[Last month] they gave the Nobel Prize to an Italian physicist, and he said about physics exactly what I would love to do with the movies: ‘It’s a wonderful thing to put order in the world.’ The movies are the same. With them you can put order to things that you don’t like.”

It occurs to me that this was also part of the appeal of Maradona, this godlike figure who was able to control physics, crowds and emotions. That must have been very alluring for a confused adolescent, especially after going through a painfully uncontrollable experience. The director’s eyes light up in a look of boyish wonder. “I will steal this idea,” he beams. “In the next Q&A, I will pretend it’s mine, because it’s a wonderful interpretation of things!”

Sorrentino is not alone among current directors in directly mining his own life for material. The past few years has seen a wave of highly autobiographical films from major directors, among them Alfonso Cuarón (Roma), Joanna Hogg (The Souvenir) and Kenneth Branagh (Belfast).

“It does not happen by chance,” Sorrentino reflects. “It’s a generation of directors that are reaching 52, 55, 60 or so. It’s a natural evolution of a career to go back to your own life. I met Alejandro Iñárritu two weeks ago and he’s doing the same thing.”

For Sorrentino, reaching this time of life and making this film has prompted a shift to a more restrained — some might call it more mature — aesthetic, as he confirms. “The aesthetic was not my starting point of view for this movie. For the other movies I have chosen actors and locations with the aesthetic in mind. In this case, I didn’t.”

Clearly the events that inspired The Hand of God had a profound effect on him; will having dramatised them have a transformative effect on him as a filmmaker? “I’m not going to make another autobiographical movie,” he says. “One is enough. But for sure I found out that the style can change in the course of the years and that this simple style is something that I love. So it’s possible that I will look for another story — not personal, but a story that can be told in a simple way.”

In cinemas from December 3 and on Netflix from December 15

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