His current work, The Young Pope is headed for television, but The Great Beauty and Youth director Paolo Sorrentino has come up with a tantalising inspiration for a future film. According to Variety's source, he's developing Loro, a film about notorious Italian media mogul and politician Silvio Berlusconi.
Though the new movie (which translates to "Them" but is also a play on the word L'oro, which means gold) is not expected to be a scathing criticism of a man who has come in for plenty of it, Sorrentino's film will likely touch on the issues that have largely defined Berlusconi's life: that of excess and scandal.
A successful businessman (he has owned football club A.C. Milan for a long time), Berlusconi served as Italy's prime minister four times for nine years in total. His career has been marked with political turmoil, sex scandals and, more recently, his conviction for tax fraud, which saw him sentenced to community work and banned from holding public office for six years in 2013.
Sorrentino has made films about powerful men dealing with their time at the top before, including Il Divo, which chronicled former Italian leader Giulio Andreotti. He's at work on the script for the new movie now, and might be ready to shoot as early as next year. As for The Young Pope, that will be on UK screens from October 27.