大象传媒

'The Art of Directing', presented by leading actress Cush Jumbo, this week features award-winning Italian director Paolo Sorrentino, who achieved global recognition with The Great Beauty (2013), which was garlanded with the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. Speaking to us from his home in Tuscany, we learn how Sorrentino grew up wanting to be a rock star, started his film career as a screenwriter, and went on to direct some of the most powerful films to come out of Italy in the last two decades. These have included the Consequences of Love (2004) and Il Divo (2008), featuring his favourite actor Toni Servillo. He has also made films in the English language, This Must Be The Place (2011) starring Sean Penn and Youth (2015) with Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel, and recently branched out with an acclaimed television drama series, The Young Pope (2016), starring Jude Law. Sorrentino's films have won huge appreciation for their extravagant and startling imagery, as well as a dark sense of humour and political insight. The director explains how the cinema of Frederico Fellini and Martin Scorsese has influenced his own distinctive style of film making, and, watching him at work on the set of his new film Loro, about notorious former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, we get a glimpse into how he achieves his trademark visual flair.