“Hotel Locarno” came together after the manager of the Hotel Locarno where I used to live during my time at Cinécittà came up to me and said: “Why do you go to Cinécittà every morning when you could make a film right here in the Hotel…I have some money to invest too.” When Gerald, Federico Fellini’s personal assistant, told me that the film crew of Fellini’s “Casanova” had no work after concluding the shooting, I grabbed the opportunity and everything happened very quickly. The story is about a small town hotel like the Hotel Locarno that hosted mostly locals, Italian commercial travellers, journalists, artists, recently divorced women and which served also as a refuge for secret affairs. So I imagined what would happen if I were a travel agency “spy”, investigating hotels in Rome for a Swiss travel agent to send their week-end tourist to.
