Oscar-winning Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore (Cinema Paradiso, Ennio) will direct The First Dollar, a biopic about Bank of America founder Amedeo Peter Giannini, a pioneer of modern banking and a pillar of Hollywood’s emerging film industry.
Born in San Jose, California, to a family of Italian immigrants, Giannini founded the Bank of Italy in San Francisco in 1904, which later became Bank of America. He became known as a pioneer of modern banking practices, including branch banking and loan lending to the general public.
Director Tornatore plans to shoot the Giannini biopic in English, using Italian and international actors. The high-end film is produced by Italy’s RAI Cinema and Kavak Films, the Roman giants responsible for works by esteemed author Marco Bellocchio (The Traitor) and other notable Italian directors.
The First Dollar is Tornatore’s fourth English-language film, following Tim Roth’s The Legend of 1900, the art-world thriller The Best Offer with Donald Sutherland, and 2016’s Correspondence, starring Olga Kurylenko and Jeremy Irons. Tornatore recently directed the 2022 Ennio Morricone hit “Ennio” and the 2025 documentary film “Brunello: The Elegant Seer” about Italy’s “King of Cashmere” Brunello Cucinelli.
Tornatore is currently finalizing the script for “The First Dollar,” which, according to promotional materials, explores how Giannini “revolutionized the banking system by extending credit to ordinary people who had traditionally been excluded, including immigrants, workers, women, and families.”
“His life included several iconic moments in American and world history,” the document adds, including the rebuilding of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake, “when he reopened a bank amidst the rubble to restore the city’s damaged confidence,” and his support for the birth of the great (Hollywood) film industry, which “financed the works of Charlie Chaplin, Walt Disney, and Frank Capra.”
In 1923, Giannini established a film loan division that supported Hollywood ventures such as Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin’s United Artists (1923), financing hundreds of films, including classics such as West Side Story, Lawrence of Arabia, and Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life.
In 1937, when Walt Disney was struggling to complete his first full-length animated film, Bank of America stepped in with a loan that reportedly enabled him to complete Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
“I enthusiastically accepted the producer’s proposal to resume a project I had been working on several years ago, the story of Amadeo Peter Giannini, the Italian man who revolutionized the American banking system,” Tornatore said in a statement, calling the biopic’s subject matter “an almost legendary story that seemed exactly to be told on film.”
Paolo Del Brocco, CEO of RAI Cinema, commented: “Entrusting this story to Giuseppe Tornatore means focusing on a vision that can combine memory, emotion and epic scale, conveying the moral consistency of a man who proved how financial success can be combined with social responsibility.”
Simeme Gattoni, Chief of Kavac Films, added: “Bringing this film to the screen is an act that contributes to the preservation of memory, but also a message for the present: the story of an Italian American who embraced ethical capitalism and changed the world without losing sight of the people.”
