I wrote the outline for The Son's Room after finishing Dear Diary.
Part of that film was about about me looking back over a period of illness and discovering I had cancer. I had started thinking about how one would react to the death of a loved one - my worst fear - and I wanted to confront it by directing a film about it.
It was the mid-Nineties. But then something happened to cause a hold-up. My wife was expecting a child and, quite frankly, it didn't seem right to continue making a film about a death in the family during Silvia's pregnancy or during the first few months of this child's life. I couldn't do it. So I put it aside knowing that, whatever happened, I would make the film later on - I came back to it once I had completed Aprile. The screenplay was written with Heidrun Schleef and Linda Ferri. We did a lot of work on it - spent more time than usual when writing a screenplay.
I play a psychoanalyst (below right, with Giuseppi Sanfelice). The opening scene of me running could have come from any of my previous films - and the second scene, where I am having a cappuccino in a bar, is exactly the same as the final scene in Dear Diary. The Son's Room joins together and develops my earlier films - situations and characters that are already familiar.
But then everything is blotted out by this great pain - the son's death. Giovanni, the psychoanalyst, cannot accept that to a large extent, everything is determined by fate. His wife reacts differently - and their differences force them apart. At the same time, they still have affection for each other. Their lives will never be the same as before, but something starts to resolve itself.
