That’s why I decided to become a screenwriter and then later a filmmaker. “That tragedy was so unbearable in terms of pain that the only solution I found was to create a parallel reality, this fictional world where I can escape and find relief. “There is a very direct cause-and-effect relationship between the deaths of my parents and my decision to become a filmmaker,” Sorrentino said, speaking through an interpreter. At 17, I was as old as I am nowĪlso connected: Sorrentino’s choice of career. My adolescence ended with my parents’ death. That pain is still with me and will always be with me and has forged my temperament, my personality, and made me unstable and very prone to rage. I’m still stuck on that date, on that day. “My adolescence ended with my parents’ death.
“That tragedy has marked my life,” Sorrentino told me, in September. Both his parents were killed that weekend, poisoned in their bed by carbon monoxide fumes from a faulty heater. Young Paolo, a fanatical supporter of his local team, was permitted, for the first time, to go to the match alone.
But with the World Cup-winning Argentine as their talisman, Napoli were on the way to their first-ever Serie A championship. Sorrentino, the future maestro of Italian cinema, then a 17-year-old schoolboy, had planned to spend the weekend with his parents, at their house in the mountains. On Sunday, 5 April, 1987, Maradona’s Napoli travelled to Tuscany, where they played out a goalless draw with Empoli. Diego Maradona saved Paolo Sorrentino’s life cinema gave it meaning.