Un eroe dei nostri tempi was filmed during the Scelba period. It was a politically sclerotic period. The State was very police oriented. I was trying to tell about, to describe the fear of an average oppressed citizen who, because of fear, becomes an oppressor, or rather a policeman. Un eroe dei nostri tempi is a little film full of excesses, written in twenty days, in July, and totally disheveled. That was because I was currently living adventurously with my wife Allegra in sometimes tremendous situations, given the fact that cinema wasn’t yet providing me with the security that it would in the future. But it is a conceptual film. At its foundation there is one concept that pushes and insists: it’s the story of a man who’s afraid. I had given the film precisely the subtitle La Paura (Fear). The idea for Sordi to end up in the operating room came from Allegra’s cesarean section and the birth of our first son Giulio, which had occurred right around that time. Allegra’s cesarean was terrible. I asked to go in, but they wouldn’t let me. They asked me: “Do you want to save the mother or the child?”. Sordi very much liked the idea of a character who was afraid. Someone who wrote everything down on a notepad, ready to raise his hands above his head and run away. Who always left the house wearing his raincoat because he was afraid it might rain.

Rodolfo Sonego talking to Tatti Sanguineti, 25.04.2000