Federico Fellini with Giovanni Grazzini
[Grazzini is an Italian film critic. In the following interview, originally published in Grazzini's Federico Fellini: Intervista sul Cinema (1983), Fellini discusses 8 1/2 and highlights some of the philosophies and collaborative methods that have influenced the development of his films.]
[Grazzini]: 8 1/2, which many consider your finest film, [is] widely imitated to the point of becoming a genre, like the western, the detective story, the historical film, science fiction, war films. In almost every country in the world there has been and probably will be again directors who will make or want to remake their own 8 1/2.
[Fellini]: I on the other hand didn't want to make it. The night before the shooting, desperate, confused, I wrote old Rizzoli, the producer, a letter which began: "Dear Angelino, I realize that what I am about to tell you will irreparably terminate our working relationship. Even our friendship will be jeopardized. I should have written this letter three months ago, but until last night I had hoped that …"
The troupe and many of the leading actors had already been hired; sets were being completed; in fact, from the office where I was writing I was listening to the carpenters' hammers. Why then did I want to back out, leave it all up in the air, get away? What had happened? Only this: I didn't remember any more what the film was that I wanted to make. The feeling, the essence, the flavor, the silhouette, the flash of light that had seduced and fascinated me had disappeared, dissolved. I couldn't find them any more.
During the last weeks, with growing anxiety I tried to retrace the course of development of that film whose title I couldn't even decide on. In my appointments book I had written, provisionally, 8 1/2 referring to the number of movies I had made. But how was the idea born? What was the first contact with, the first presentiment of, that film? A vague confused desire to create the portrait of a man on a certain day of his life. The portrait of a man, I told myself, with all his contradictory, nuanced, elusive totality of different realities. A portrait in which all the possibilities of his being happened—their levels, story after story, like in a building whose facade is crumbling, revealing its entire inside: stairways, corridors, rooms, lofts, cellars, and the furniture of every room, the doors, roofs, plumbing, the most intimate, most secret corners.
A life made up of tortuous, changing, fluid labyrinths of memory, of dreams, of feelings, of the everyday inextricably bound up with memories, imaginings, feelings, happenings that took place long ago and join with those occurring now; a mingling of nostalgia and presentiment in a serene yet mixed up time, where our character doesn't know who he is any more or who he was or where his life is going; a life that now seems only a long wakeful sleep, devoid of feeling.
I was speaking of this one evening with Flaiano, [a collaborator], while driving toward the sea at Ostia. Talking about it I tried to clarify for myself the intention of the film. Flaiano was quiet, didn't say a word, made no comment, seemed suspicious, defiant, jealous. I had the impression that he didn't think the theme belonged on film, that my narrative was a presumptuous, excessive, arrogant outpouring in a dimension that only literature could achieve. Tullio Pinelli, to whom I tried to communicate the sense of this fleeting fantasy a few days later, was also silent, perplexed, doubtful perhaps of the possibility of building a story on an impulse so whimsical and so difficult to translate into situations and events.
On the other hand Brunello Rondi, with his usual overflowing enthusiasm, went along with it. He is an invaluable audience; he likes everything, is excited by every project, is ready to go off and collaborate in all directions on anything. We began to write separately, the four of us. I would suggest theme, a conflict, a situation, and Pinelli, Flaiano and Brunello each would script his own version of the sequence.
However I had not yet decided what type of man we would try to portray, what his profession would be: a lawyer? an engineer? a journalist? One day I decided to put my dream hero in a spa. It then seemed to me that the intention of the film began to take on more solid possibilities. We wrote the harem sequence; the night in the baths with the hypnotist friend; the hero now had a wife and a mistress. But then the plot began to unravel altogether. It didn't have a central core from which to develop, nor a beginning, nor could I imagine how it might end. Every morning Pinelli asked me what our hero's profession was. I still didn't know, and it still didn't seem important to me, though I began to get a little nervous.
One day I decided it was useless to go on with the script. I felt that if I wanted to get on with the film I had to begin to look the characters in the eye, to select the actors, to determine the settings, to decide on an infinity of things; then go in search of my film among the people: in clothing shops, at Fiuggi or Montecatini, in theaters; then organize the troupe, talk to the decorator, to the projectionist; to pretend, in sum, that the film was ready and that we would begin shooting within a month. I decided on Mastroianni, chose Sandra Milo, had Anouk Aimeé come in from Paris, and in a forest near Rome began to construct the thermal palace, and in the Scalera production studios the grandmother's farm and the hotel rooms. The vast production mechanism was set in motion: dates, contracts, production plans, estimates, advances. But I, shut in my office, couldn't manage to find my film again: it wasn't there any more; it had gone away. I admitted that maybe it had never existed.
And here we are back to the tale of the letter I was writing to Rizzoli, an edifying tale straight from the heart. I was in the middle of that letter when I heard the booming voice of Menicuccio, the chief machinist, calling me from the courtyard to come to the theater for a moment because Gasparino (another machinist) was celebrating his birthday and offering glasses of champagne. He would be pleased if "the doctor" were there too.
And there I am in the theater. Carpenters, mechanics and painters were all waiting for me, all of them with glasses in their hands, in the huge kitchen under construction; it duplicated the one in my grandmother's country house, but enlarged by my memory of it. Gasparino, a bricklayer's cap on his head and a hammer strapped to his thigh, opened the bottle: "This will be a great film, doctor. Your health! Long live 8 1/2!" The glasses were emptied, everybody applauded, and I felt overwhelmed by shame. I felt myself the least of men, the captain who abandons his crew. I didn't go back up to the office where my half-written copout letter was waiting for me, but instead sat down, blank and emptied, on a little bench in the garden in the middle of a great coming and going of workers, technicians, actors belonging to other working troupes. I told myself I was in a no exit situation. I was a director who wanted to make a film he no longer remembers. And lo and behold, at that very moment everything fell into place. I got straight to the heart of the film. I would narrate everything that had been happening to me. I would make a film telling the story of a director who no longer knows what film he wanted to make.
Yes, but in the "story of a director who no longer knows what film he wanted to make," other elements also enter in with a new clarity, such as dreams and the very language of dreams. How did these elements which essentially characterize the film come about?
The reading of several books by Jung, the discovery of his vision of life, took on for me the nature of a joyous revelation, an enthusiastic, unexpected, extraordinary confirmation of something that I myself seem to have foreseen to some small extent. I owe this providential, stimulating, fascinating discovery to a German psychotherapist named Bernhard. I don't know whether Jungian thought has influenced my films from 8 1/2 on. I only know that reading several of his books has undoubtedly helped and encouraged my contact with more profound and stimulating areas of the imagination. I have always thought I had one major shortcoming that of not having general ideas about anything. The ability to organize my likes, tastes, desires in terms of genre or category has always been beyond me. But reading Jung I feel freed and liberated from the sense of guilt and the inferiority complex that the shortcoming I touched upon always gave me.
Do you think that psychoanalysis, helping man to know himself better, has always made him happier?
I don't know how to answer that question because I don't know how to define happiness. I think that psychoanalysis should be studied in the schools, is a science that should be taught even before the others. Because it seems to me that among life's many adventures, the one most worth the hassle of taking on is that voyage which plunges you into your interior dimensions so as to explore the unknown part of your self. And notwithstanding all the risks it offers, what other adventure could be as fascinating, marvelous, and heroic?
Yours seems to me a rigidly Jungian view. Don't you think you're denying Freud's role its proper setting?
I am not entirely able to give you a scientific or critical response to two thinkers of such stature and complexity who have brought to life fundamental aspects of the human soul which now penetrate our culture. We are participants in and recipients of their thought, beyond measure.
I have read less Freud and can only express guarded, uncertain impressions. Perhaps Freud is a more gifted writer than Jung on a literary level. But his strictness, while it enlists my admiration, makes me uneasy. He is a teacher who overwhelms me with his competence and certainty. Jung is a traveling companion, an older brother, a sage, a seer-scientist who, it seems to me, is less proud of himself and his marvelous discoveries. Freud wants to explain to us what we are; Jung accompanies us to the door of the unknowable and lets us see and understand by ourselves.
Jung's scientific humility in confronting the mystery of life seems more likeable to me. His thoughts and ideas don't pretend to be doctrine, only suggest a new point of view, a different attitude which can enrich and evolve our personality. They guide us toward a more aware, more open way of life and reconcile us with the remote, frustrated, mortified, sick parts of our selves. Jung is undoubtedly more congenial, more friendly, more nourishing for someone who believes he needs to find himself in the dimension of creative imagination. Freud with his theories makes us think; Jung on the other hand allows us to imagine, to dream and to move forward into the dark labyrinth of our being, to perceive its vigilant, protective presence.
From the little I have read one thing more than the others has impressed me: the different views Freud and Jung have of the phenomenon of symbolism. The problem has interested me, since as a movie director I am led to use symbolic images in my work. For Jung a symbol expresses an intuition better than any other expression of it. For Freud a symbol substitutes for something else which should be done away with and therefore is better forgotten than expressed. For Jung, then, a symbol is a way of expressing the inexpressible, albeit ambiguously. For Freud it is a way of hiding what is forbidden to express.
It seems to me that this area clearly shows the different approaches to being of the two great thinkers. It is a matter, I repeat, of two different ways of delineating the human soul. That of Jung seems more fascinating to me….
Let us now take stock. Are you pleased with the way you've used your imagination these years? Do you think it has quickened our pace of life, made things clearer, made existence more bearable?
I have the mortifying suspicion that whenever I signed a contract to make a film I never once thought that I was bound to quicken our pace of life, make things clearer, make existence more bearable. Is that bad? I make films because I don't know how to do anything else. At least that's how it seems to me.
This interview will appear some thirty years after your first directorial effort. Make a kind of balance sheet: regrets, remorse, hopes?
I have no regrets. Those that I do have do not call for confession here. I have made the films I wanted to make and in the way I knew they should be made. I would rather not put my name to them from here on out, because I'm certain that without that ridiculous and paralyzing sense of responsibility-by-name I would make them better, with greater freedom, greater ease, as a pleasant carefree game. I would have liked to have been born twenty years earlier and made films with the pioneers, with Za-la-Mort, Za-la-Vie and Polidor, in that traveling-players atmosphere with the setting sun as a curtain. To participate in the birth of the movies would have been much more gratifying to my temperament than to arrive when specific film rules were imposed: structuralism, semiology. Inevitable things which keep you posted on artistic and cultural conditions but deprive you of that uproarious and disquieting atmosphere, that somewhat savage joy that linked the cinema to the circus and made it feel like a symbolic essence of life's intrigues. I regret having lost too much time between films and having let some continue and others disappear, but I disown nothing. It seems to me that given my bent—laziness, haphazardness, ignorance and a tendency to flounce around—things have gone very well. How could I have hoped for so much?
My personal life has also been fortunate. I have been quite protected, and perhaps I have helped to make it go well by allowing myself to be led: when situations drive me, invite me, beckon to me, I have never offered any resistance. If the general tendency of my life has been the need to tell stories through images, it seems to me that my private life has been organized in such a way that my work has become its most important part. My wife, friends, affections or absence thereof … I can state that there have been no distractions, no responsibilities, no pricks of conscience that have taken time away from my work.
If on the other hand my life had gone otherwise and yet I still went on making films, then the ledger sheet might be more embarrassing. But the certainty is that I would never have changed the way I work. I have made visual images profound; I have freed myself from schemes set up by others. But the universe in which I live has remained the same. With the passing of years I have lived at various levels, but no one more profound or ampler than the others. As a child I saw enchanted things under the circus tent. Now I own the works. I shape it and I move it. I arrived a guest in the hotel. Now I am its owner. I can be the porter and the bellboy but also the maharajah who takes the suite on the first floor. Hopes? I don't have many illusions and so have no need to project into the future. And if there are empty spaces to fill up, I can do what has to be done. I am not particularly dedicated to my friends, to others, even to my wife. Yet I would still have more than enough to choose from.
There are those who say that now you live off your legend and do little to renew your inventive capacity. Truthfully, with the advancing years do you perceive a decline in inspiration?
I don't know what my legend is, and as for my decline in inspiration it seems to me that my bad luck, or good luck, is that I don't perceive it. I don't perceive a diminished desire to do things—if that's what you mean—or even a slower rate of ideas or stimuli. These seem to me to go on at the same rate as before when I was chronologically younger. What I perceive the lack of more and more, as I have already said, is a programmer, someone who will schedule my work. Someone who will say, "Good, I understand: although you're over sixty you still enjoy making little theatricals. I'll see to it and relieve you of the crap. What would you like to make? The Three Musketeers? Good, make The Three Musketeers. The Mysterious Island? All of Poe? The novels of Chandler? Are you going to do Mastorna, yes or no?" Look, I don't want to become rich. All I need is a monthly stipend and someone to organize my work. If I could find him I wouldn't have the slightest feeling of being depleted. If I were allowed to make such personal films, a sort of delightful masturbation all my own, I'd jump for joy to have to bring out a film on The Count of Monte Christo or some other popular nineteenth century novel.
Moving from one thing to another, do you think the Italian style of comedy is the kind best suited to our cinema?
Italian style comedy has depicted a particular moment in our society. Now after some time we have come to see in it a critical perception that it probably didn't have. It stimulates our curiosity or entertains us, the way turning the pages of an old photograph album would, where we discover things to laugh at. We are used to laughing at ridiculous fashions, find them funny or awkward or pathetic. But the old photograph never suspected it was evoking all of that; it confined itself to showing us just as we were.
It seems to me that Italian style comedy falls more under the category of coincidence. Its presentations were wholly satisfying in themselves, with its winks of an eye in search of sympathy. So that the whole critical apparatus which finds indignation and protest in it is fatally flawed. In Italian style comedy you feel that everyone is delighted: producer, script writer, director, actors, and naturally the public also. The people in the audience are mirrored in the film, the film in the audience; thus a game of identification goes on infinitely in reflections more and more blurred and intentions less and less recognizable. It seems to me that floating above all that is a somewhat disreputable joy, like the strident laughter of freed slaves, like obscene freedom of speech that offends officials merely to sanction its own triumph and reward its own self-indulgence. I don't like to seem ungenerous in speaking of films which, for the most part, I haven't seen and which should never be grouped together in a random genre, but instead should be considered individually. I realize that denouncing them doesn't mean much to those who watch stories that constantly build solidarity and self satisfaction, plus a fundamental misunderstanding, which is to consider ourselves better than the representation of the worst part of ourselves. It is certainly true that to evoke all of this they had to use excellent comic actors with real insights into our national characteristics, vices, defects, virtues, tics, physical traits—authentic comic talents, enthusiastic mimes relaxed and at home in this domain. But who can say whether they would not have found their niche along other roads, in other contexts?
There are those who say nastily that the Italian style of comedy mirrors certain aspects of our reality, and that you on the other hand distort it …
I don't think I distort reality at all. Essentially I portray it. To portray it I use one category, expression, to eliminate, choose, select, and regroup in order to achieve an equilibrium which is the story, the narrative. I require the public to participate in it, in my point of view, in my feeling. In that sense expression can be mistaken for distortion. Perhaps it is, being a filtered reality reorganized for representation. Reality is also warped by poetry, by painting—even the most naturalistic painting—by music. It is art as order, as harmony restructured from indifference and chaos, which leads to that inner understanding we define as aesthetic feeling. Therefore I never know what they mean about "my need to distort reality." It is a commonplace which I find pinned to my back and which often causes people to ask me with dazed admiration, but also with an air of seeming reproach: "But where do you find all those types?" A question without answer, since I don't look for and don't find those types. I simply see them. It seems to me sufficient to look at one's self in the mirror to perceive we are surrounded by comic, frightening, deformed, ugly, bewildered faces. Our faces, the faces of life.
You have always had many collaborators around you, often famous important ones. Is any one of them more valuable, more special than any of the others?
Indeed, I have had collaborators not only valuable for their talent, imagination and intelligence but also for the feeling of friendship I have when we work together; it takes on the joy and excitement of a visit to the country, a voyage, an excursion. I want to acknowledge some of them: Piero Gherardi, the set designer of La Dolce Vita and Juliet of the Spirits, aristocratic hobo, an intellectual guest in the house of Trimalchio (the vulgar wealthy boor of Satyricon), as wise and detached as a bonze and as greedy, gluttonous and immature as a newborn babe. I remember certain nights when we slept together in an automobile lost in a bandits' ravine. We were looking for a setting for the Country of Toys—I never admitted it, but Pinocchio was also among my uncompleted projects.
Another very close and congenial collaborator was Danilo Donati, a richly ingenious inventor of costumes and props. From the visual point of view I consider Satyricon and Casanova among my most attractive films.
For a filmmaker the most important collaborators include not only set designers, cameramen and script writers but also a slick, canny, vigorous, unscrupulous production director. He can become the mainspring of the film.
Tullio Pinelli, with whom I have written so many sequences, I respect as an inventor of plots, a dramatic craftsman with regard to scenes and characters someone who has the calling and temperament of a true novelist. Including Ennio Flaiano, the equilibrium among us three seemed perfect to me. Pinelli concerned himself with narrative structure, that was his peg; and Flaiano did everything he could to demolish it, to break it into bits: at times he was more disastrous than a wild boar in a field of fava beans. But just because of these absolutely opposite tendencies, those parts of the walls that remained standing among the debris could be counted on to carry the structure of the narrative. Flaiano and I shared the same sense of humor about everything: a tendency to play it cool, kidding around, buffoonery, plus a touch of neurotic melancholy that makes me feel very close to him.
My encounters with Bernardino Zapponi have been stimulating. We have worked well together and share the same experiences and the same adventures: Marc'Aurelio, vaudeville curtain raisers; the same loves and enthusiasms: Poe, Dickens, Lovecraft, the occult, the spectral, mythological adventures, science fiction, and a bureaucratic feel for work that lies somewhere between its being unreal and fear of getting fired.
With Tonino Guerra I wrote Amarcord and The Ship Sails On. We share the same Italian dialect, an infancy spent among the same hills, snow, sea, and the San Marino mountain. The regions where we were born are nine kilometers apart. As a child I went by bicycle with other friends to his Sant'Arcangelo, and it seemed to us that they were speaking another language. In Rimini we looked upon Sant'Arcangelo as a colonial possession where the missionaries had not yet arrived: "Boss, the bearers want to turn back!" Titta would say, referring to the crude and inhospitable condition of Sant'Arcangelo.
But the most valuable collaborator of all, I can say without a second thought, was composer Nino Rota. Between us there was complete and total understanding, beginning with The White Sheik, the first film we made together. Our understanding had no need of adjustments on either part. I had decided to become a director and Nino was already at hand as if set in place so that I might continue to do so. He had a geometric imagination and a musical vision worthy of the heavenly spheres, so that he didn't even have to see what my films looked like. When I would ask him what themes he had in mind for this or that sequence, it was immediately clear that no preview was necessary. His was an inner world where reality could scarcely penetrate. He lived music with the freedom and ease of someone in a dimension that is effortlessly his own.
He was a being possessed of a rare quality, a precious quality belonging to the realm of intuition. It was this gift that kept him so innocent and lovable and happy. But don't misunderstand me. When the occasion arose, or even when it didn't, he could say profound and perceptive things, could make impressively penetrating judgments about ideas and men. Like children, like simple souls, like certain sensitives, like certain innocent and guileless people he could suddenly utter brilliant remarks …
During work on my films I have the habit of using certain records as background noise: music can condition a scene, give it a rhythm, help suggest a solution, a character's attitude. There are themes that I have brought with me shamefully across the years, La Titina, The March of the Gladiators, tunes tied to specific emotions, to gut topics. Then obviously what happens when I have finished shooting the film is that I've grown fond of that improvised soundtrack and don't want to change it. Nino would agree with me right away, say that the themes I used during the shooting were absolutely beautiful (even though they were the most sugary and banal tunes); that they were just the right stuff and that he could never have been able to do better. And while he was saying that his fingers would caress the piano keyboard. "What was that?" I would ask a little later, "What were you playing?" "When?" Nino would ask in a distracted manner. "Now—I would insist—while I was talking you were playing something." "Ah, yes?—Nino would say—I don't know, I don't remember any more." And he would smile as though wanting to calm me down; I needn't have regrets or qualms; the records I used were more beautiful. And in the meantime he would continue to caress the keyboard as if by accident.
That is the way the captivating themes for my new films were born, making me forget my suggestions about the old tunes used during the shooting. I would stand there near the piano and talk to him about the film, explaining what I wanted to imply with this or that image, with this or that sequence. But he paid no attention to me, seemed to be thinking of something else while acquiescing or while nodding vigorous agreement. In reality he was establishing contact with his inner self, with the musical themes already within him. And when that contact was established he paid no attention to me any more, didn't listen to me any more. He put his hands on the piano and was transported like a medium, like a true artist. Finally I would say: "It is absolutely beautiful!" But he would answer: "I no longer remember." There might be catastrophies with tape recorders, with sound systems; those would have to be fixed without his knowing it. Otherwise his contact with the heavenly spheres would be broken …
It was a real joy to work with him. His creativity made me feel so close to it that it inspired a kind of giddiness, giving me the feeling that I myself was creating the music.
Nino would arrive at the end of the shooting, when the stress of retakes, montage, dubbing was at its peak. But as soon as he arrived the stress disappeared and everything turned into holiday. The film would enter a happy, serene fantasy world, an atmosphere which took on the quality of a new life. And it was always a surprise to me that after he had contributed so much feeling, so much emotion, so much life to the film that he would turn and point to the principal actor and ask: "Who is he?" "He's the leading man." I would answer. "What does he do—adding in a reproachful tone—you never told me anything about him!" Ours was a friendship nourished by sound.
I prefer not to hear music outside of my work. It conditions me, makes me nervous; I become possessed by it. I protect myself by rejecting it, by running away like a thief from temptation. Perhaps that too is Catholic conditioning: the fact that music makes me melancholy, burdens me with remorse, and with a stern voice tortures me by reminding me of a dimension of harmony, of peace, of completeness from which I am excluded, exiled. Music is cruel. It fills me with nostalgia and regret, and when it is ended I don't know where it has gone. I know only that the place is unattainable, and that makes me sad.I can't even listen to someone tapping his fingers on the table without suddenly being disturbed and sucked in to the point where I breathe differently, in keeping with the rhythm. Nino, on the other hand, smack in the middle of a band noisily playing one of his themes, manages to write the notes of another theme which only he was listening to. A feat of magic that bowls me over!
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