![\"Andrea](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/1757315485116_0620x0413_0x0x0x0_1757315761400.jpg\")
<\/p>\n\u201cI\u2019ve always wondered why films about sports only ever talk about the winners\u201d<\/p>\n
08\/09\/2025 – VENICE 2025: We talked to the Italian director about his new film, starring Pierfrancesco Favino as a failed tennis player<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
(\u00a9 2025 Fabrizio de Gennaro for Cineuropa – fadege.it, @fadege.it)<\/p>\n
Pierfrancesco Favino has moved spectators at the Venice Film Festival<\/a> with My Tennis Maestro<\/a>\u00a0[+see also: Cineuropa: The film arrives at the moment when the victories of Jannik Sinner have widened the audience of those interested in tennis. What themes are you referring to? Were you inspired by someone? When did you offer the role to Pierfrancesco Favino? It\u2019s a tragic character, a fragile man with nevertheless a great sense of irony. Was it complicated to shoot the tennis matches? (Translated from Italian)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cI\u2019ve always wondered why films about sports only ever talk about the winners\u201d 08\/09\/2025 – VENICE 2025: We…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":128373,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[442],"tags":[49,48,82,593],"class_list":{"0":"post-128372","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tennis","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-sports","11":"tag-tennis"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=128372"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128372\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/128373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=128372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=128372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=128372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
film\u00a0review<\/a>
trailer<\/a>
interview: Andrea Di Stefano<\/a>
film\u00a0profile<\/a>], directed by Andrea Di Stefano, presented Out of Competition. Favino plays a former tennis rising star, who has known glory and then the abyss of defeat \u2013 a loser training a 13-year-old boy who carries on his shoulders the expectations of his father, in a parable of downfall and rebirth. We talked about it with the director.<\/p>\n
Andrea Di Stefano: The film was conceived of more than 15 years ago. It\u2019s my first screenplay. I\u2019m happy about what\u2019s happening with Italian tennis now, but this is a film about something else and I decided to make it because, basically, I found the right actor for it. I also felt that I had to detach myself from genre films. Dealing with emotions, directing actors in films with certain themes. This is the cinema that fits me better.<\/p>\n
This is a coming-of-age film, a buddy movie, you can call it what you want. But basically, as a former sportsman, I couldn\u2019t find myself reflected in films about sports, because they always talk about the winners. I wasn\u2019t a winner and I\u2019ve always wondered why they weren\u2019t films about athletes who don\u2019t win. Before the tournament begins, they all have their dreams of glory, even the less strong ones. I started from that to tell two parables, one who dreams of glory in the present and the other who has touched glory in the past. I knew that there was material to work with in that comparison.<\/p>\n
I took inspiration from a real person, my tennis coach, and a large number of the scenes I\u2019ve put in the film are situations that I directly experienced.<\/p>\n
It was during promotion for The Last Night of Amore<\/a>\u00a0[+see also:
film\u00a0review<\/a>
trailer<\/a>
interview: Andrea Di Stefano<\/a>
film\u00a0profile<\/a>], there was a strange asymmetry between the success of the film and how we were feeling: it was a very complex production that we made with so much effort, but we were missing the \u201cputting ourselves in difficulty\u201d, something new and different. He decided to work on this character in depth. There are few actors who can do what he did in this film.<\/p>\n
I know that there is a hidden emotion, my ability must be to bring it to the surface. I don\u2019t know how to make \u201cconceptual\u201d cinema. I like to talk about an unfair society, in which a father can impose his choices on his son and a tennis instructor decides to ruin his own life and abandon his daughter. These life trajectories take us to an emotion. Then, it is important to let the spectator go home after seeing the film and rework it, as if the film had to continue in that work. I\u2019ve always observed life from the side of the street, I don\u2019t need to present a thesis.<\/p>\n
It was a nightmare. Shooting tennis is extremely complicated, and with the time we had we were forced to be ingenious to get it right. It was a challenge and I learned a lot. I knew from the start that I would enter into the dynamic of \u201c15-0, 30-15\u2026 Match point\u2026\u201d. I found the trick of the line on the field. In front of the line, behind the line\u2026 These are places of the soul. Tennis is a palette of actions that aren\u2019t stylistic but narrative. It\u2019s a dialogue. There\u2019s always the risk of doing camera movements that are only self-aggrandising. On this subject, I\u2019ve been feeling for a few years a stale atmosphere in cinema, as though it had lost its narrative potential.<\/p>\n