Quiz

Protege of Italian director Dario Argento.

Was offered the opportunity to direct Dal tramonto all'alba (1996), but turned it down. Job went to Robert Rodriguez.

Quentin Tarantino is a big fan of his early work.

In early 2008 announced he was set to return to the horror genre with "Catacombs Club", a project written by frequent Terry Gilliam collaborator Charles McKeown. The screenplay was based on a previous script called "The Catacomb Club" which Richard Stanley wrote specifically for Soavi in the early 90s. The plot involved a wealthy Russian married couple building a casino-cum-disco in London's West End. The wife wants to be a headline singer in the club; only problem is, she's completely tone-deaf and can't carry a tune, so her husband hires a singing teacher to help her fulfill her dream ambition. As construction begins on the site, a drunken accident finds the instructor falling into a recently uncovered passageway that leads to a kingdom of strange creatures. They've gone undiscovered since their burial during the Roman invasion 2,000 years before, and the teacher is shocked to learn they know nothing of the surface world. He's even more surprised when he falls in love with a female creature with the most beautiful voice he has ever heard. Alina Nedelea was confirmed as being part of the cast, while Conchita Airoldi was one of the producers on the film. Soavi claimed the film would've been in the spirit of Dellamorte dellamore (1994), but the project didn't take off.

Among his dream projects there is "The Well", an Australian set esoteric horror script with fantasy elements he's been trying to get off the ground from the early 90s. Soavi got the basic idea for the project in 1987, while he was working in Australia as the assistant director to Dario Argento for one Fiat Croma commercial; he imagined a story set among the Aborigines and focused on their fantastical cosmogonical conception: Oruro, "the time of the dream". Oruro stands for Uluru, also known as Ayers Rock, the world's largest monolith, from which the Australian tribal cultures think everything that exists on Earth came to be. This script, which was going to be produced by Joe D'Amato at one point, went through about 10 rewrites before becoming "The Well", whose premise is based on a gigantic hole that magically links two different places of the globe, one located in Ireland, the other in the Australian outback. The script also involved Nordic legends and an evil blue rabbit placed to guard the well. Some ideas originally conceived for this project ended up in La setta (1991).

Temporarily retired from the film industry in the mid-1990s to spend time with his family meant to care for his sick son.

Frequently casts Raoul Bova.

Son of writer Giorgio Soavi.

First name is pronounced "Meekehleh".