Paolo Sorrentino
Paolo Sorrentino ( SORR-ən-TEE-noh, Italian: [ˈpaːolo sorrenˈtiːno]; born 31 May 1970) is an Italian film director, screenwriter, and writer. He is considered one of the most prominent filmmakers of Italian cinema working today. He is known for visually striking and complex dramas and has often been compared to Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni.
Defining films
In their own words
Federico Fellini, Marco Ferreri, Dino Risi, Ettore Scola, Billy Wilder and Woody Allen are sources of inspiration for me. When I started making movies, I tried to keep myself away from Fellini and Scola, then realized it's not only inspiration but a culture that belongs to us.
He's a director with whom I felt in tune. It's hard to imagine my own cinema if I hadn't seen his.
I didn't want the film to be a classic biography of a politician, so the only real reference I had was from the literary point of view, which was The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa and, in the cinematic way, The Leopard by Luchino Visconti.
What's important to me about Amarcord and Roma is that they're not completely autobiographical stories, but they contain autobiographical elements. They use memories as the starting point to tell a bigger story.
Critical context
The comparisons to Federico Fellini may be seen as both a blessing and a curse for Paolo Sorrentino. On one hand, the lofty likening to one of world cinema’s grand masters surely testifies to the quality of Sorrentino’s own work. And indeed, the two Italian auteurs do share numerous narrative and thematic affinities linking their films as imposing views of existential contemplation. At the same time, though, the all but inevitable nods to Fellini, which accompany most critical considerations of…
Films by decade
