Federico Fellini: Playboy Interview

A few months ago, during the closed-set filming of Juliet of the Spirits, Federico Fellini's long-awaited latest film, Roman TV officials congratulated themselves on what promised to be a major video coup when il grande maestro unexpectedly rescinded his own ban on press coverage of the production in progress and acquiesced to their repeated requests for a sample snippet from the film. They were understandably baffled and bedazzled by the footage he supplied—an extraordinary comic-opera scene starring the elephantine, wild-haired whore from 8½ outrageously decked out as D'Artagnan in feathers, velvets, boots and blond mustaches, surrounded by a motley chorus of nuns, clowns and gypsies, all cavorting about to the tune of a blaring Neapolitan aria. The viewing public was equally perplexed when the scene was subsequently sneak-previewed on television, but the critics greeted it with learned interpretations of its allegorical significance—or lack of it. Not until the finished film premiered did they discover that they'd been had: Never intended as part of the picture, it was conspicuous by its absence; Fellini had dreamed up the whole thing as a put-on for symbol searchers.

Unamused, some reviewers replied that the joke was on Fellini; though dazzling to behold, the invented scene was no more or less profound, or relevant to the story, they averred, than any given episode in the picture, which one of them contemptuously dismissed as "a fever dream with delusions of grandeur." A kaleidoscopic pasticcio of visions, dreams, memories and hallucinations conjured up by a middle-aged housewife who takes refuge from reality in a private world of fantasy, and finds it peopled with erotic and terrifying specters, Juliet has been hailed by other critics as a phantasmagorical masterpiece of cinematic psychodrama, and a spectacular affirmation of its creator's status as a protean poet of the cinema. But acclaim or abuse—neither of which is new to Fellini—serves merely to certify his contentious world fame. And the paradoxical appellations he's earned during his 15 years as a director—genius and madman, tragedian and clown, archangel and archdemon, moralist and sensation seeker—testify not only to his defiance of definition ("Tags," he says, "are for suitcases") but also to his prodigious originality as a moviemaker.

Even his detractors acknowledge that whatever else he may be, Fellini is irrepressibly, inimitably, eternally himself. On the visual level, all of his films bear the unmistakable stamp of a flamboyantly inventive directorial technique; and beneath the bravura façade, his protagonists all share a dual quest: for human warmth, usually from the wrong people; and for their own identities, usually in the wrong places. "Sometimes," he told one journalist, "I feel that I am all the time making the same film." By his own admission, this serial screenplay is a chronicle of his own spiritual odyssey, a search for self in a liberation from the past—a past steeped in the guilt-edged moral ideals of stern Church dogma drummed into him as a boy.

Son of a well-to-do wholesaler of wines and groceries in Rimini, a small provincial town on the Adriatic coast of northern Italy, Fellini took to neither the disciplines of parochial schooling nor the sedate comforts of middle-class home life: He quit school at 12 and ran away to join a traveling circus as an apprentice clown. Not quite ready to sever the parental ties, he was back home dead-broke a few months later; and he remained there, restlessly, until a vaudeville troupe hit town soon after his 17th birthday. When it pulled up stakes two days later, so did he—this time for good—following the show from town to town, writing comedy sketches for his keep. Drawn to the bustle and bright lights of the big city, he abandoned the caravan in Florence and decided to seek his fortune as a freelance contributor to local humor magazines. But pickings were slim, and Fellini soon moved on to slightly greener pastures in Milan, where he turned a talent for cartooning into a modest but fairly steady living by pirating American comic strips—banned from Italy by Mussolini—for various city newspapers. Drifting on to Rome a few months later, he spent the war years avoiding the draft and scuffling for bread money as a prolific gagwriter for local humor weeklies.

It was also during this otherwise bleak period that he met and married the struggling young actress who was to become world-famous as his tragicomic star: Giulietta Masina. The war's end, however, found them both pounding the pavement: she in search of movie bit parts, he as a street-corner caricaturist in sidewalk cafés along the Via Veneto—even then a watering place for showbusiness moguls great and small, hangers-on and has-beens—where he began to mingle and make friends with aspiring moviemakers who were just breaking into the burgeoning postwar film industry. Among them was director Roberto Rossellini, who invited the articulate, energetic young jack-of-all-trades to collaborate with him on the scenario of his first film. They did, and the picture—Open City—was hailed as a milestone in the Italian cinema, progenitor of a seminal new movement in moviemaking: neorealism. With Paisan, their second joint effort, Rossellini's renown became worldwide, and Fellini was launched on a full-time screenwriting career.

A score of successful film scripts poured from his pen in the next two years, though his income failed to keep pace with his rising reputation. Rankling not at financial frustration but at the creative confinement of the printed word, he leaped in 1950 at the chance to bring a script personally to life as both author and co-director of Variety Lights, a poignant portrait of the melancholy faces hidden behind the masks of mirth worn by a troupe of wandering vaudevillians—and, in a larger sense, by most of mankind on an aimless road of life. Though he shared in its creation, even this first directorial effort bears the distinctive imprint of Fellini's potent personality—and of his checkered past, echoing as it does the picaresque period of his own experience as an itinerant entertainer. Then, in 1951, with his debut as a full-fledged director, came the first mature expression of the multileveled, metaphoric vision that has become the trademark of a Fellini film. A serio-comic satire on the fumetti—those far-fetched photographic comic strips in which impossibly handsome heroes perform impossibly dashing deeds of derring-do and rescue ladies in impossible extremities of distress—it was called The White Sheik, after one of the Valentino-like paladins from this daydream world of Italian pulp-interviews pictorials. On one level, it tells the story of a newlywed fumetti fan so steeped in rosy romantic reveries that she finds it impossible to reconcile herself to the mundane reality of marriage. On a deeper level, the picture warns of the desolation and despair that await those who pursue ideality rather than reality, who hope to hide from the harsh task of finding out who they really are.

Alienation of a more subtle and hopeless kind was the somber theme of I Vitelloni, Fellini's next film. Outwardly, it's the chronicle of a bunch of young loafers—unemployed and unmotivated, believing in and belonging to nothing—who bum around the empty streets and beaches of a seaside resort during the dead winter months in a listless, futile search for nothing more meaningful than something to pass the time. But it can also be seen as an allegory of man's vain quest for a purpose and pattern larger than and beyond his own.

With La Strada, his next picture, Fellini emerged, at 34, into the full flower of his creative powers as a lyrical cinematic poet. Universally applauded not merely as a tragic masterpiece but as one of the screen's authentic classics, it won dozens of distinguished film awards—including an Oscar—and earned its creator his first international recognition. It was also the picture in which Fellini's wife, Giulietta Masina, established her credentials as a Chaplinesque genius of comic pathos with her deeply touching performance as Gelsomina, a simple-minded waif whose childlike love of life is trampled and finally snuffed out by Zampano, a half-human, half-animal circus strong man (played by Anthony Quinn) who buys her, uses her cruelly and finally abandons her, sick and broken, by the roadside. Repenting later, he wants Gelsomina back and goes looking for her—only to learn that she has died. Thunderstruck, he staggers numbly to the beach in the film's final scene and falls weeping to his knees. Shaking his fists in impotent rage and grief at the indifferent stars, he is a mutely eloquent embodiment of man's loneliness, folly and despair.

Equally poetic justice is meted out to the protagonist of Fellini's fifth film, Il Bidone (1955), a merciless indictment of confidence men who prey on other people's illusions—and by extension, of all who knowingly exploit their fellow man. At the end, an aging swindler (Broderick Crawford) is beaten, betrayed and left to die in a ditch by his equally unscrupulous accomplices—after repenting too late, like Zampano, for the error of his ways. Seldom shown in this country, Il Bidone was perhaps Fellini's most humorless and least successful film, both artistically and commercially. Back at the top of his form in 1957, however, with Nights of Cabiria, he took home a sizable sum of box-office booty and a mantelpieceful of international prizes, including his second Academy Award. Another tour-de-force vehicle for the talents of Mrs. Fellini, the film starred her as a dumpy, gullible, good-natured prostitute who unknowingly allows herself to be bilked out of her hard-earned little hoard of earnings. But no retribution, in this case, is visited upon the exploiter; the bitter lesson is that wrongdoers, in the real world, don't always pay the piper. The film's last scene, however, as a group of young musicians serenades Cabiria home after learning of her loss, sounds a final note of hope restored and faith instilled—that a crippling loss, even of a limb or a loved one, need not be as tragic as it seems; that a cruel humiliation need not breed disillusionment.

But disillusionment, abject and all-encompassing, provided both theme and variations for Fellini's next creation, in 1960, an epicurean smorgasbord of despair and degeneracy that proferred an eye-filling feast for millions of scandal-hungry moviegoers throughout the world: La Dolce Vita, starring Marcello Mastroianni (interviewed by Playboy last July). A brilliantly conceived, graphically etched, bitterly sardonic and morbidly fascinating panorama of Rome's decadent café society, it was seen by Fellini as "an attempt to take the temperature of a sick society." In the opinion of Church spokesmen, censorship groups and even a few reviewers, however, it was little more than a sensational tabloid exposé that exploited as well as indicted the objects of its satire.

Except for his contribution of a brief segment to Boccaccio '70 in 1961, nothing was heard from Fellini for the next three years; but then came another Oscar winner: 8½, a creation even more extravagant than the public's expectations, a radical departure from everything he'd ever done before, in a style so unconventional that it can be said to have introduced an entirely new genre of cinematic storytelling. The leading man—again portrayed by Mastroianni—is really a modified mirror image of Fellini: Guido, a self-searching 43-year-old Italian movie director with graying temples. And the story line is a highly impressionistic mosaic of larger-than-life memories, self-indulgent fantasies, bizarre dreams and idealized visions that somehow coalesce into a coherent, deeply insightful and introspective spiritual autobiography. At the end of the film, Guido finally extricates himself from the self-created labyrinth of irrational guilts, fears, hopes and expectations that has immobilized him—and learns to accept himself as he is, not as he might wish he were or hoped he might have been.

The identity crisis, and the epiphany of self-acceptance experienced by the heroine in Juliet of the Spirits, Fellini's most recent and precocious brain child, are essentially the same as Guido's. But the dreams, fantasies and memories each summons up perform the opposite functions. In Guido's case, they're actually way stations on his search for self-fulfillment in reality; while for Juliet they're magic carpets of escape from the real world. Setting Juliet even farther apart from 8½ is the simple fact that it's in Technicolor, Fellini's first; and the further fact that it was blessed with a multimillion-dollar production budget, a great rarity in European films. Bedaubing and bedizening his cinematic canvas with giddy abandon, Fellini has created for his heroine a dreamworld of eye-drenching and Byzantine extravagance.

To the consternation of his actors, producers, technicians and almost everybody else who works with him, the process of creating these resplendent spectacles of the spirit takes place almost entirely without such traditional prerequisites as finished dialog and a detailed shooting script; Fellini considers them not only unnecessary but inhibiting to optimum creativity. The outlines of the plot and the drift of the dialog are jotted down ahead of time, mostly for the record; but all the rest—from the selection of the leading lady's shade of eye shadow to the designation of locations for each scene—is decided on the set, often on the day of the shooting only a moment before the cameras start to roll; and all of it, needless to mention, in every detail, is decreed by Fellini himself and no one else. The compleat filmmaker, he feels, must be not only the creator of his own heaven and earth and all the beasts thereof, but also the benevolent despot of all he surveys on set, with final and absolute authority over everything and everyone within his private realm. In the heat of this omnipotent role as god-king, amid the all-consuming throes of filming, Fellini is a man possessed—tireless, foodless, drinkless, oblivious to all else but the birth of the film as a living entity. "Though he's miraculously talented, sensitive and intuitive," says a co-worker, "Federico can also be cruel, childish and destructive to those around him at these times." Considering the issue of his prodigious labors, most are willing to forgive such moods.

When he finished filming Juliet of the Spirits late last year, we waited a few weeks, on the advice of friends, "for his brain to cool," then telephoned Fellini at his beach house in nearby Fregene, on the Tyrrhenian coast—where he was still recovering from "the exquisite ordeal," as he called it—with our request for an exclusive interview at his leisure. We had heard he'd be wearily reluctant to talk at first, but expansively garrulous once persuaded, which we were told would take no more than a modicum of urging. And so it proved. The following week, at his unpretentious provincial home in Fregene, he received us with warm hospitality for the first of our conversations. Later chats took place on the run, in his black Mercedes sedan en route to the studio from the beach; at his comfortably un-chic apartment in Rome's Parioli district; and at work in the dubbing room, where he supervised the lipsynching of Juliet into English. A rumpled, heavy six-footer with a penetrating gaze and a shaggy leonine mane of graying hair, he often wore a heavy black scarf over his shoulders—and a floppy black cloth hat of the Black Bart variety. Punctuating his every sentence with sweepingly expressive gestures and a flashing succession of pantomimic facial expressions to match, he spoke to us (in English and Italian) for a total of ten hours, his conversation alternately colloquial and poetically baroque, richly metaphorical and metaphysical, laced with a cheerful sense of irony, and marked throughout by an engaging candor about himself. We began the interview with a candid, if less than engaging, personal question.