Q&A: Matteo Garrone

May 17, 2008 Matteo Garrone's Rome loft is dominated by two oversized paintings he made, dating back to his early career as an artist. [...] though the 39-year-old director says he has not seriously picked up a paintbrush in nearly a decade and a half -- "At a certain point I had to decide between painting and cinema," he said, "and I chose cinema" -- the influence of art over his cinema career is apparent. Garrone says that he looks at a film as a series of images that tell a story more than as a series of events or dialogue, and the studio within the apartment still includes a 15-foot-wide panel with about a hundred photos from the In Competition "Gomorra" tacked to it, color-coded for each of the six stories intertwined within the film.

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