I was pretty sure that he wouldn’t ultimately direct the film, but I had long ago learned the power and importance of exploration. General meetings with world-class artists had become standard operating procedure. The meeting was awful. Gabriele didn’t want to use the translator; he was trying to speak English, but he didn’t speak English. JL and I didn’t even try to speak Italian, because we don’t speak Italian. But Gabriele’s artistic passion culminated in two game-changing moves: one, he gave us an Italian film, Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, which won the Academy Award for most
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