I returned to Sweden for Il diavolo, the most interesting adventure of my professional career. If I linger a bit on this adventure, it’s because I consider it unique to Italian cinema. No film ever came to be in this way. One night at eleven o’clock, Dino De Laurentiis called me and said: “I have to shoot a film by the end of April, and we’re already halfway through November. There’s no time to write it. Find a comedy that’s already written: Pirandello, De Benedetti (…). Work on it for a couple of days and then we’ll shoot it with Sordi. Otherwise I have to pay two hundred million in damages and interest”. I asked him to give me a night to think it over, and the next day I went to meet him at his office. I proposed that we leave with my friend Polidoro (who had made Le svedesi), a cameraman, a production director and a very small cast, that we rent a sleeping car, take the train and write my travel diary, but without taking pads of paper like writers do (Stendhal, Chekhov, etc.).  And thus we began, me and my double, meaning the actor and the other fifteen people. The adventure truly began when we got on the train at nine in the evening. I told Sordi: “Get in bed with some reading material, a pack of cigarettes, and meditate, think”.

Rodolfo Sonego talking to Tatti Sanguineti, 25.04.2000