Moretti, an iconoclastic dichotomy, self taught, comedic satirist, mellowed 
former fiery radical, triple threat (producer,director,actor) perfectionist, 
dedicated to make quality films "with Italian roots and Italian ambience," 
departs from previous style,  and explores the "need to transcend grief". 
=============================================
Thanks to LindaAnn Loschiavo at NonstopNY@aol.com

AN ITALIAN SATIRIST TAKES A VERY SERIOUS TURN
New York Times
By Laura Winters
January 27, 2002

Nanni Moretti, who is bearded, dapper and reserved, resembles a university 
professor more than one of Italy's leading comic presences. And yet over the 
course of his first eight feature films, Mr. Moretti had become acclaimed for 
his distinctive brand of deadpan humor: part Buster Keaton, part Oscar the 
Grouch, all joyous self-revelation.

The 48-year-old Mr. Moretti writes, directs, produces and stars in his 
movies, using his own preoccupations and opinions as the starting point for 
his work. He plays himself (or a thinly veiled alter ego) in his films, which 
are exuberant grab bags of physical whimsy and barbed social commentary. In 
"Caro Diario" ("Dear Diary," 1993), his first film commercially released in 
the United States, he tooled around on his Vespa, holding forth on the 
glories of Rome in August, the talent of Jennifer Beals in "Flashdance" and 
the benightedness of movie critics, among other topics.

Despite his idiosyncrasies, Mr. Moretti has become a kind of Everyman to his 
loyal Italian audience, which knows all about his leftist sympathies, his 
sweet tooth and his love of sports (especially water polo). But even though 
he is in some ways an exhibitionist, in others he is a deeply private man. He 
gives few interviews and makes it a point not to talk about his new work 
before it is released.

Mr. Moretti's reputation as a satirist explains the great surprise that 
greeted his latest film, "La Stanza del Figlio" ("The Son's Room"), when it 
came out in Europe last year. The film, which seems like a radical change for 
the director, both in form and in subject matter, became a hit in Italy and 
in France, where it won the top prize, the Palme d'Or, at the Cannes 
International Film Festival. It is also Italy's submission for this year's 
foreign film Oscar.

"The Son's Room," which opens in New York on Friday, is about a close and 
loving family in the Italian port city of Ancona: Giovanni, a psychoanalyst 
(Mr. Moretti); his wife, Paola (Laura Morante); and their two teenage 
children, Irene (Jasmine Trinca) and Andrea (Giuseppe Sanfelice). When an 
unexpected tragedy hits the family, they struggle to fight the emotional 
demons that accompany grief.

Though Mr. Moretti stars in the film, he departs from his previous work by 
building a rich narrative and by forsaking his trademark self-mocking humor 
for an austere emotional power. "For Nanni, this is a step forward into new 
terrain," said Piers Handling, the director of the Toronto International Film 
Festival, where "The Son's Room" played in the fall. "I think the last part 
of the film makes it close to a masterpiece."

Although he acknowledges that "The Son's Room" differs from his other films, 
Mr. Moretti says he views it as a kind of summation as well. "I think you can 
see all my earlier films in this one," he said through an interpreter during 
a recent visit to New York. "But I wanted to write and play a character here 
who is different from my usual ones. He is more tolerant, more ready to 
accept others as they are."

When asked whether the newfound maturity of his protagonist reflects his own, 
he raised an eyebrow. "You should ask the people who know me," he replied.

His closest collaborators, in fact, agree that the fiery Mr. Moretti has 
mellowed. Ms. Morante, who has worked with him twice before, said by 
telephone from Rome: "Nanni has certainly matured. He used to be tyrannical 
when he was younger, but he's become more flexible."

Mr. Moretti nonetheless remains a man of unpredictable will and restless 
enthusiasms, prone to disappear temporarily in the middle of an interview in 
search of the perfect caffè latte. He is both shy and forceful in person, 
speaking in a commanding, slightly husky voice.

He wrote the initial story of "The Son's Room" while he was preparing to 
shoot his eighth feature, "Aprile" (1998). "I suddenly got the idea of a 
psychoanalyst, a person who deals every day with the grief and sadness of 
others, having to react when he himself has to cope with a tragedy," he said.

At the time, Mr. Moretti and his wife, Silvia Nono, were expecting a son, 
Pietro, who was born in 1996, and it didn't seem like the right moment to go 
down a dark path. So he waited until after "Aprile" came out to approach the 
screenwriter Heidrun Schleef and the novelist Linda Ferri to collaborate with 
him on the screenplay.

In "The Son's Room," when tragedy hits the family the husband and wife 
unexpectedly pull apart: Paola reacts with anguish, while Giovanni retreats 
into an obsessive (and unreasonable) questioning of his own possible role in 
what has happened. "The usual rhetoric is that pain unites a family," Mr. 
Moretti said. "I wanted to show that grief can actually divide people who 
love each other."

He was interested, as well, in exploring the question of individual 
responsibility. At the beginning of the film, Giovanni tells a patient that 
one can't control what happens in life. But in the throes of grief, he finds 
himself besieged by self-doubt and guilt. "I gave Giovanni several of my own 
qualities, such as his mulling over things that have happened in the past," 
Mr. Moretti said. He stressed that the film was not based on any specific 
event in his own life. But since he was describing emotions that everyone has 
felt, he sought a tone of unvarnished truth. "Nanni asked us to delve into 
our own memories of grief, to make a voyage into our interior lives," Ms. 
Ferri said. She, Ms. Schleef and Mr. Moretti spent more than a year working 
together on the screenplay.

Mr. Moretti is known for taking time with his projects, which he can do 
because he always works with the same small production team, among them his 
longtime producer, Angelo Barbagallo. He likes to mix both professional and 
nonprofessional actors (including, in the past, members of his family).

The shoot lasted almost six months, with several stops and starts. Ms. 
Morante, who knows Mr. Moretti's pace, came prepared to put her daughter in 
school in Ancona. "My family was happy because I'd finally found a job that 
allowed me to stay in one place," she said with a laugh.

When directing, Mr. Moretti likes to shoot many takes and gives very concrete 
instructions. "He will say, `Don't put your hand in your hair when you say 
that,' " Ms. Morante recalled. That perfectionism stems, Mr. Barbagallo said, 
from Mr. Moretti's utter absorption in his work: "Nanni demands the maximum 
from everyone, but even a little more from himself."

>From the beginning of his career, Mr. Moretti has been self-taught and 
iconoclastic. He grew up in Rome, where he still lives, in a close family of 
academics: his father, who died 10 years ago, was a university professor of 
Greek epigraphy, while his mother taught high school Greek and Latin.

No classics scholar himself, Mr. Moretti considered entering film school in 
Rome, but could not proceed because it required a university degree. Rather 
than continue his schooling, he shot a full-length Super 8 feature on his 
own, starring himself, his friends and family members. Mr. Moretti submitted 
this film, which was aptly called "Io Sono un Autarchico" ("I Am 
Self-Sufficient") to a small cineclub in Rome called Filmstudio, where the 
movie screened. At the time Filmstudio was run by Adriano Aprà, who now heads 
Italy's National Film Archive. The movie, a tale of an avant-garde theater 
troupe (one of whose members is Mr. Moretti's frantic on- screen alter ego, 
Michele), became a word-of-mouth sensation. "Here was somebody unknown who 
had made a film for nothing," Mr. Aprà said.

Encouraged by his unexpected success, Mr. Moretti made another film, "Ecce 
Bombo," which again depicted a group of disenchanted young people. "Ecce 
Bombo" became a cult hit, mostly because of Mr. Moretti's skill at capturing 
the angst of his particular generation, heirs to the revolutionary fervor of 
1968 but no longer truly believing it.

Mr. Moretti says he was surprised at first to be hailed as a spokesman for 
his generation. "My characters in `Ecce Bombo' were not really 
representative," he said. "They were leftist, but they were bourgeois, not 
militant." This film already included the three creative elements that would 
be important for him in the future: "One, to act not only a character, but 
myself as a persona," he said. "Two, to tell about my own environment, 
whether political, generational or social. And three, to poke fun at myself 
and my world."

Mr. Moretti directed himself as Michele Apicella in three more features: 
"Sogni d'Oro" ("Sweet Dreams," 1981), "Bianca" (1984) and "Palombella Rossa" 
("Red Wood Pigeon," 1989), in which his alter ego was, respectively, a 
filmmaker, a teacher and a Communist party operative and-water polo player 
who has been struck by amnesia (a sly joke at the expense of the Italian 
Communist Party). In his film "La Messa è Finita" ("The Mass Is Ended," 
1985), Mr. Moretti plays a priest named Don Giulio who shares many of the 
same traits as the hapless Michele — outrage at other people's moral laxity, 
for instance.

In 1986, Mr. Moretti founded his own production company with Mr. Barbagallo, 
Sacher Film (named after the Sacher torte, Mr. Moretti's favorite cake). 
Besides producing his own films and those of several other directors, Mr. 
Moretti now runs an art house theater in Rome, the Nuovo Sacher, as well as 
an annual festival of short films.

Sacher Film is the natural culmination of Mr. Moretti's free-wheeling, 
hands-on approach, though in Italy it is rare for a director also to be a 
producer. He became a producer not so much to get creative freedom ("I 
already had that") as to help nurture new Italian talent. "I wanted to make 
movies with Italian roots and Italian ambience," he said, "with the idea that 
if they were quality films, they would receive international acclaim as well."

He was proved right by his own hit, "Caro Diario," which found a wide 
international audience and in which, for the first time, he simply played 
himself. His transparency was especially startling in the film's last 
section, called "Doctors," in which Mr. Moretti unblinkingly depicted his 
yearlong odyssey (and countless visits with misguided doctors) to find the 
cause of a mysterious itch. His Hodgkin's lymphoma was finally diagnosed and 
treated successfully.

He hesitated when asked whether his brush with cancer affected the tenor of 
his work. "I wasn't anguished by telling my own story in `Caro Diario,' " he 
replied. "I was treating with irony an event in my life that I had left 
behind. But I feel the issues I deal with in `The Son's Room' are much more 
difficult to resolve."

What became especially important to him in directing "The Son's Room," he 
said, was that he somehow be able to hold out some hope for his characters 
without condescending to his audience. In fact, it is the unsentimental 
compassion of the film — and its gentle insistence on the need to transcend 
grief — that is the clearest sign of a maturation on Mr. Moretti's part.

"I wanted to go along a path with my audience, sharing my own emotions as 
they developed rather than imposing a message," he said. "I wanted there to 
be a movement at the end of the film, where each character would open toward 
the others, rather than being closed within their own individual rooms of 
grief."

He paused a moment. "These characters cannot forget what happened — they 
don't want to forget what happened — but in the end, something starts to 
change," he said. "Their lives will not be the same. But maybe they have 
found the means within themselves to turn grief into something else."