Interpreted by Belgian actor Fabrizio Rongione, by Chiara Mastroianni and Mimmo Calopresti, the film is set in Rome between bourgeois interiors and autumn outdoors, photographed by Luca Bigazzi and with music by Ludovico Einaudi.

What does "le parole di mio padre" tell about?
The film starts on the scene of a father's death. There is a thirty year old protagonist, the son Zeno, who has to face the bewilderment this loss creates in him. He is alone in the world and he gets to know a numerous family where there is a very young and vital father, four daughters of which three already grown, whereas one is still young. In this feminine family, Zeno will start his sentimental education and will elaborate his mourning for his father through the discovery and shapes of love he will believe he feels for each of these girls, in the effort to find through these meetings the image of the young father, by whom Zeno would like to be adopted. 

Why did you choose such a beautiful yet difficult novel as La Coscienza di Zeno?
When I re-read this book around my thirties, after a first school reading where I hadn't comprehended it, I experienced an immediate with the chapter of the father's death. During the reading I talked to myself because I had the impression that the writer was talking to me and I had to answer him. Svevo was telling me of this terrible death, like that of Zeno's father and I felt like working on it.

How did you work with the transposition into script and characterising?
It was a very long work, because I wrote many versions over many years. I adopted only a fragment of this book which tells of a life: the two chapters of the death of the father and Zeno's wedding. In the novel they are told one after the other, in the film I wanted them to happen at the same time. While Zeno is elaborating his father's death and thinks back to this wordless relationship, at the same time he knows some girls he falls in love with. It seemed to me that life prgressed like that, that is, after a death has been processed life goes on. Then I wanted to materialise the girls who, in the book, perhaps for the period or because it was all a projection of Zeno's mind, did practically nothing and stayed at home. For example I gave Ada (Chiara Mastroianni) a strong character, she is a theatre actress and she is closed within an anxiety of perfection because she is the most beautiful and the oldest. With Zeno instead she is fickle, she gets tired after a while.

The family in this film represents a nest, a microsociety where there is room for everything, from affections to the harshest conflicts. There's a father who represents a strong model and there are two daughters of important fathers Comencini and Mastroianni. How much of autobiographical is there?
I come from a family of four daughters, like that of the film. My family was always for me the centre of something that founded but also that was destructive and against which I defined myself a lot. My family was a great problem to me and with this film I was able to tell my eternal love and hate. As a matter of fact as soon as left home I immediately created one of my own and now I have three children. As far as Chiara is concerned I chose her because I liked her, even if obviously the being Marcello Mastroianni's daughter helped her in the construction of the character and in her being an actress.