“It was the hand of God!” exclaims Fabietto’s uncle in one of the most searing scenes from The Hand of God, the new Netflix drama from Oscar-winning director Paolo Sorrentino.

The parents of teenager Fabietto have just died after a tragic carbon monoxide leak in their vacation home. Fabie is spared because he chose to see his favorite soccer player, Diego Maradona, rather than join them on their trip. It’s a twist that seems right out of the movies, but in reality, many of the crucial moments in The Hand of God came straight from Sorrentino’s childhood.

“I’m sure that there are a lot of people who believe, either for a series of coincidences or not, that Maradona saved their lives,” Sorrentino told The Associated Press. “In my case, that is what happened.”

Sorrentino had been considering making a film about his turbulent childhood for years, and it wasn’t until recently that he decided to finally tell the story that has defined his life and career. “Every so often over the years we’d talk about it,” star and longtime Sorrentino collaborator Toni Servillo said while presenting the film at the Venice Film Festival. 

“Maybe I have made it now because I have the right age,” added Sorrentino. “I thought I was old and mature enough to face such a personal film.” 

When Sorrentino finally decided to make the film, he cast Servillo in the role of his father. To cast his young self, the production undertook a massive casting search, with more than 100 young actors auditioning for the part. Eventually, he settled on curly haired young actor Filippo Scotti (whom some on Twitter have already dubbed ‘Timoteo Chalamezzo’). Scotti’s thin list of acting credits was appealing to Sorrentino: “I didn’t want someone to play me who looked like a character from another movie,” he told Indiewire.

The Hand of God is as much about the joys of storytelling as it is about childhood trauma. Fabie decides he wants to become a filmmaker and sets out to discover what kinds of stories he wants to tell. In a sense, the film becomes a sort of origin story for its own director. In a memorable scene, Fabie confronts filmmaker Antonio Capuano, who pushes him to decide why he wants to make movies. “You gotta have something to say,” Capuano yells. “You got something?”

The real-life Capuano was a mentor of sorts for Sorrentino in the early days of his career. “He was one of the few people who believed in me when I was not believing in myself,” the director recalled to Indiewire.

Even with these competing influences, Maradona never strayed far from Sorrentino’s mind. The filmmaker thanked Maradona in his 2014 Oscar speech, and he wishes the soccer legend lived to see the film that owes so much to him. “The only spectator who really interested me was him, though given he’s a divine figure, maybe he can see it from where he is,” Sorrentino told the AP.

Still, it’s the tragic loss of Sorrentino’s parents that looms large over the film. The Hand of God’s two competing threads — its story of a filmmaker’s genesis and its story of a family struggling to survive an unspeakable tragedy — come together when Sorrentino restages his parents’ imagined final moments. “It was a very strange and unique experience,” producer Lorenzo Mieli told Indiewire. “There was a kind of a sacred quality to what we were doing.”