Quotes

I don't use Twitter. I'm a serious person.

[on the journeys in The Great Beauty (2013)] In the film apparently there is no destination. People are floating over life. Apparently, they are always still in the same place. They're destined to go nowhere. However, the protagonist, without even realizing it, is moving toward a very precise destination. It is an appointment with the highest moment of his youth, his adolescence and of his purity. So the destination is specifically indeed those cliffs where he ends up meeting the young girl. The love of his life when he was a young man.

[on the constant motion in daily life] It's the fragmentary nature of the movement in today's life that makes it difficult to move in tune with the past. It's the neurotic component of the fragmentary nature of today's movement that makes it difficult to get in touch with the feelings that characterized the past, or other experiences.

[on The Great Beauty (2013)] It's very much a film about the time flowing and with the flowing of time, the time that we end up wasting in our lives. That's why it becomes burdensome and we are all dealing with the aspect of death. But through this fatigue, this weight of our life on all of us, we somehow give dignity to the life that we are living.

[on Rome] There's one thing that I like about Rome that was stated by Napoleon: that from sublime to pathetic is only one step away. And in Rome there's a constant shifting between sublime and pathetic.

What I find compelling is the moment in which people realize, with suffering and pain, that in the past there was a time when they were happy, because back then the present and the future coincided-they were one and the same thing. Whereas, at an adult age, the future is the future and the present is the present and they do not coincide. So they feel a subtle, deep-rooted, and unconscious suffering connected to this adult age.

I've known Ludovica [production designer Ludovica Ferrario] for a long time. She's an architect, which is very useful for me. She has a sense of proportions, of geometry. There is lots of geometry in cinema, nobody ever talks about this. And architects know geometry. On top of that, to use an old fashioned term, she's a classy lady with an innate good taste. That helps me a lot and it keeps me in check when I 'degenerate' - either because I'm tired or for other reasons - and try to force something that's not right. [2015]

Well at first, with the first superstar I worked with, Sean Penn, I was very intimidated. But he helped me a lot. In our conversations before we started he conveyed very clearly to me the concept that he trusted me, because of the script and my previous movie, and our conversations. And no matter what I might have heard about him, if he trusted someone there weren't going to be any problems. And that calmed me. I'm not intimidated by great actors because they are the ones it's easiest to work with. [2015]

Yes, the first edit run for me is crucial. I don't watch dailies because they make me agitated. I never do re-shoots, I've never shot a scene over again. Several years ago I talked about directing with the Cohen Brothers who told me something that illuminated me. They told me: 'making a movie is like a sports match: you have x number of days; x amount of time and the performance has to take place in those days and with those time constraints. You can't cheat; you can't get extra time.' It's a very smart rule. So when I get to the editing stage, it's a great moment because I see all this material, some of which I don't even remember because I shot it months earlier. [2015]

[on never having been at a film school] Precisely because I hadn't gone to film school I wasn't that believable, even to myself. So I though if I show I'm insecure everybody will take advantage of me to get their paws on my things and say: 'let yourself be guided since you don't have experience.' So right from the start I pretended I knew what I was doing. Then, slowly, by working this assuredness became real. But I have my doubts, I just don't show them. [2015]

Aside from all the things I've said before about Diego Maradona, he involuntarily saved my life. I lost my parents when I was 16 in an accident with the heating system in a house in the mountains where I always used to go to with them. That weekend, I didn't go because I wanted to go watch Maradona and S.S.C Napoli play a match in Empoli, and that saved me. That's the main reason. It's true, Americans don't know that much about soccer. My American casting agent didn't know who Maradona was. [2015]

[on being young] Being young is having a precise idea of what freedom is. The reason why I wanted to make a film about old people is because even in old age, you can claw back an idea of freedom and achieve it.

There seems to be a perception of thinking that when you are talking about something real you have to either tone it down or make it look a bit grey. I always think that you can have great truth in great beauty - the two things go naturally together.

Great actors, like great directors, do the same job. They are great observers of reality.

[on The Great Beauty (2013)] There is nothing autobiographical, but there certainly are a lot of personal things. For example, my disillusioned approach towards the same matters that afflict the lead character. Probably that is what I relate to and I feel the closest to.

[press conference for The Great Beauty (2013) at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival] I've gone to Rome regularly, I in fact lived in Rome when I was young - I worked there - then I moved elsewhere. Over the years I have always noted down little anecdotes linked to things in Rome. The idea is that all this could become a film, and this idea was finally born, the idea of the character of Toni [Toni Servillo]; with Umberto [Umberto Contarello], we therefore started to write so that the character portrayed by Toni would be a sort of a witness of a whole world while at the same time being a kind of biography which really matched the story.

Cinema is a place which seems to be glamorous. But films are made by and attended by people who are very much uneasy with themselves, and with life. And I do believe that those who are at ease with themselves and with life are outside that circle.

[press conference for Parthenope (2024) at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival] Parthenope in the first part of the film, when she's young, she coincides with the city. There are two mysteries. And in the second part of the film, it becomes its most critical gaze when she becomes disenchanted and disillusioned. She's a free woman, very spontaneous, she does not judge, as the city doesn't. She's the mirror of the freedom of the city where I grew up. There is a link between the character and the city. The character is named after the city - Parthenope is the ancient name of Naples. Naples is a city where there's a feeling of permanent vacation. It's a beautiful place for a certain stage of life, but then it might become less determinant and less important when you grow up. Many Neapolitan people - and I am amongst those - constantly go back to it and then escape from it. My interest in my own city came late; when I lived in it when I was young, I didn't attach too much importance to the fact that I was growing up in an extraordinary city - I learned that when I went back making my films as a grown up.

[Cannes press conference for Parthenope (2024)] When I think about this character, I feel a lot of things. I feel very close to her for some aspects, for her vision, which turns her into an anthropologist - that has to do with my work as well. I feel very close to her in general and we share things. I think that trauma is life - it's a synonym of life. She hasn't suffered a specific trauma beyond perhaps the aspect of the death of the brother but life is full of traumas, and the fault is life, if I want to sum it up in the extreme.

[Cannes press conference for Parthenope (2024)] I don't think it's a film on the curse of beauty. It's a woman who is born in perfect condition in order to be free. She is born into a city - a city that has always valued freedom and is marked by the lack of judgement - it's not judgmental at all. She has all the favourable conditions in order to carry on her fight for freedom, which dates back a long time, but we haven't stopped fighting for freedom nowadays. There are similarities between the fight for freedom back then and today.