Hi everyone and thank you for tuning into the 427th episode of Awards Shatter, the Hollywood

Reporters Awards podcast, I'm the host Scott Feinberg and my guest today is in the words

of the New York Times, one of Italy's leading contemporary directors and as the Guardian

put it, arguably the leader of a newish wave of exciting Italian directors.

The recipient of five David D. Donatello Awards and six Nashro D. Argento Awards, he is

best known for 2013's The Great Beauty, which was his country's entry for the best foreign

language film Oscar, now known as the best international feature film Oscar, and won that

award.

And his latest film, 2021's largely autobiographical dramedy The Hand of God, which is available

on Netflix, won the Venice Film Festival Silver Lion or Grand Jury Prize, en route to being

submitted by Italy for that same Oscar, for which it has since been nominated.

A man about whom the American cinema tech declared few Italian filmmaker since Fellini

have paired some serious visual style with peak when social commentary as effectively,

who the Guardian said possesses one of the most distinctive signatures in cinema, fluid,

audacious camera moves, grand tableau of events, montages cut like music videos, garish

grotesques, and sleek modernist spaces, and of whom Sean Penn said, I'm dazzled by

this director, the Maestro himself, Paolo Sorrentino.

Over the course of our conversation, the 51-year-old denied discuss the tragedy that struck his

family when he was just 16, around which The Hand of God revolves, and how it set him

on his path to becoming a filmmaker, how he came to work regularly with the Italian actor

Tony Cervilo, who has starred in six of his nine features, including The Hand of God,

why he decided to revisit the most painful chapter of his life in The Hand of God, and

...