Il Divo: Paolo Sorrentino interview

Best known for super-slick film noir The Consequences of Love, Italian director Paolo Sorrentino’s latest film Il Divo reunites him with Consequences star Tony Servillo. Together they take a look at the career of seven-time Prime Minister of Italy, Giulio Andreotti, who was tried on multiple occasions for murder, corruption and Mafia involvement, but never convicted. We caught up with Paolo on one of his rare trips to the UK and asked him how making a film based on a political figure differed from his usual fictional characters. Paolo was only too happy to answer our questions, but insisted that for him, film comes before politics…

LOVEFiLM: What was the inspiration behind Il Divo?

Paolo Sorrentino: Well basically the idea was making a film about a character who had accompanied the lives of the Italian people for such a long time. It was something that I’d had in mind really from the very beginning, when I started to enjoy cinema. I decided to do it now because I could afford the luxury of taking a little time. There was no guarantee that I would actually be able to get this project together. I knew that it would be difficult to get funding, but I also knew that, at this stage of my career, it was a risk that I could take. If it wasn’t a particularly successful project, it was not going to be a disaster.

LF: Is that because of the success of The Consequences of Love?

PS: It’s really more a case of... When you want to make films, when you haven’t yet done so, you have this sense of urgency that you have to do it. When you’ve actually achieved your objective and made a couple of films, that degree of urgency is reduced. So there’s not that same driving need to make them relentlessly, one after the other.

LF: Giulio Andreotti is a popular author in his own right, there’s a wealth of academic writing about him and of course you lived through the events depicted in the film. How did you go about approaching...

PS: The mass of material? Well, in reality there was quite a lot of study and work, probably because I like studying. For Consequences I set myself the task of studying all the mass of material about the Mafia...

LF: I love the scene in Consequences where Toni Servillo’s character is taken to Mafia headquarters and you really believe that every extra he passes is a member of the Mafia just from the way they look.

PS: Exactly. And in order to get there, you have to study. You have to deal with things that are real, and you have to keep to the facts otherwise you will be accused and exposed.

And so the difficulty with Il Divo was in the selection and how to make everything fit. Because although the film takes things from reality, it becomes rather borderline once it’s on screen. It actually tends to tip over into the grotesque.

LF: Irony is very important to you, isn’t it? And the grotesque is linked to that...

PS: Yes, I always look for irony. The biography of Andreotti is the story of a man who makes an enormous use of irony himself. So there is that as a part of his way of dealing with things in the film. And then there’s the whole process of transforming reality into cinema reality, being distorted and turning into the grotesque.

You could use the example of the scene with the cat. A man who encounters a cat, there’s nothing ironic about it, it’s a normal thing. But put onto screen in this sort of distortion that the process imposes makes it tip over into the grotesque. That’s when you get the irony.

LF: What do you hope the audience will take away from the film?

PS: My hope is that the film will please the audience as an actual film, rather than interest the public as a political film.

LF: This is the third time you’ve worked with Servillo now [the first being 2001’s One Man Up]. What’s the process like when the two of you get together?

PS: We’ve known each other for many years now, so I wouldn’t really know how to describe it. Our relationship is very good. We don’t need to spend much time on words because we know each other so well. The whole process is sort of an automatic thing. But it’s based on the fact that we get along very well. We share the same sort of ideas. We have a common view of things and that’s very useful.

LF: Your cinematography is very dynamic and your composition is very precise. Where does that come from?

PS: I would say that it comes from what I like as a spectator. Reality is fairly random and imprecise, and if I were to make a film in which I presented something that is as imprecise and as random to my audience, I would be afraid of boring him. So I prefer to make a film in which reality is real, but it’s also something else, and that other thing is, more or less, how I would like it to be.

Alexander Pashby