Filippo Scotti is the 21-year newcomer starring in Italy’s entry for Best International Feature Film at the 94th Academy Awards, “The Hand of God.” The film is written and directed by Paolo Sorrentino, whose film “The Great Beauty” won the Oscar in this category eight years ago. The Netflix movie is Scotti’s breakout feature film and his newfound fame is still something he’s coming to terms with. Watch the exclusive interview above.
“One thing that I love the most about this job is definitely to meet new people,” Scotti says. “This movie now, with all the travel for the promotion, I’m meeting new people and I’m sharing a lot. That’s what has changed the most.” “The Hand of God” competed for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival earlier this year where it won the Grand Jury Prize. Scotti received the Marcello Mastroianni Award, which recognizes emerging actors. The film will be available to stream on Netflix on December 15.
In “The Hand of God,” Scotti plays a teenage version of his director Sorrentino, although in the film his character’s name is Fabietto. Scotti had just one month to prepare for the role and was given very specific homework by Sorrentino. “He recommended me some music to listen [to],” Scotti explains. “Talking Heads, Tom Waits, The Cure. Then he recommended two movies to watch, ‘Road to Perdition’ by Sam Mendes and ‘The Man Who Loved Women’ by François Truffaut. In the beginning I really didn’t understand, but then I realized that one was a movie about the desire and the other one was a story about family and love.”
Scotti is a trained theater actor who is discovering how different that experience is from film. “Something that I love about the cinema, but is also something that I hate, is that you are doing the movie and then you have to wait,” he admits. “In theater there is the director, but then, when you’re on scene, you have the power to change something. In cinema, things are changing and you don’t even know. You did something and then the post-production is changing it again. That’s something that I like, but that I don’t like too.”
“When I was nine my father showed me ‘Rear Window’ by Alfred Hitchcock and from that moment I wanted to be in a movie and have the power to give something to the audience,” Scotti reflects. “A director that is close to my heart is Julian Schnabel because my father always showed me ‘The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.’ That was, for me, very moving.”
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