"I will never make another stop-motion movie on my own." Buried under a sort of Italy in miniature, I'd vowed that, no matter what, I would never again spend months locked up in my house working. Then came Covid-19, and this time we were really locked up in our houses. For my previous projects I was in the habit of combing through DIY shops all over Rome. This time I had nothing, or just what I had lying around at home: a broken printer, the back of an old wallpaper sample, some watercolors, my phone to take pictures with and two pages of drawings. The last added up to a study of two characters made years ago by Giuseppe Di Maio, preparatory sketches for the leads in a treatment I'd written with my associate and co-writer Paola Rota. We had dreamed up Renaud, a solitary Parisian gentleman, a creature of habit happily holed up in an apartment on the top floor of a building in Montmartre. This idea from a few years ago turned into a little story that, after these recent months, might well now sound more familiar to us all.
Edoardo Natoli (Rome, 1983) started out as an actor at age fifteen, with roles in film, television and the stage, working with directors such as Mario Martone, Marco Tullio Giordana, Paolo Virzì, Carlo Lizzani, Liliana Cavani, Francesco Munzi, Lucio Pellegrini, Riccardo Donna and Cristina Comencini. Since 2006 he has served as assistant director on commercials, video clips and films by Gabriele Muccino, Paolo Virzì, Luca Guadagnino and Ben Stiller. In 2013 he made his debut at Giornate with his stop-motion short film Secchi, shortlisted for the Silver Ribbons and winner of numerous awards in Italy and abroad, like the SIAE Creativity Award and the Universal Studios Cinemaster. Since 2015 Natoli has been the creative director for Maison Valentino, Tod's and Vhernier, directing their ad campaigns. In 2019 he had his first solo exhibition at the Galleria DUERRE C 1919 in Genoa.
