Yes, and to the importance of existential time, so typical of your film creations, in contrast with time understood as a historical, straight, linear sequence in which facts, chronologies, and so forth pile up.

It's true. Unfortunately, because of our goal-oriented training, we Westerners have a vision of ourselves living through a continuous time line that requires steps, changes, conclusions, and a goal one must reach.

I’d like to ask you something. Some say that all your films are the same. Furthermore, you seem to agree that your fantasies have this circular repetitive motion. Yet to me, over the course of years, this movement travels in a spiral, as if each time a new element shifts the problem to a higher level.

In your last film, The Voice of the Moon, the ingredients are as always the world as a stage for visions and appearances, fragmentation, the reality/dream conflict, but the questions posed in the course of the film seem to me to announce a final, symbolic, almost whispered reconciliation with death, nature's energy, women and love, the generational conflict.

Maybe. I haven't been able to see the difference in this film. I always seem to make the same film.

This was the most exhausting one, you said.

I get exhausted when I'm trying any way I can to put off starting a film. It's an honest to goodness matter of a "starting neurosis," this attitude of total aversion, like someone who puts off the moment when he'll have to look at himself in the mirror, an image he wants to disown. It's worsened in these last years.

I have a tendency to hold off starting a film until I feel myself forced to begin in order to see where I want to go, where I will take myself.

I wrote about this in my book Making a Film (Fare un film), about La Strada. At the beginning I had only a confused feeling, a kind of tone that lurked, which made me melancholy and gave me a diffused sense of guilt, like a shadow hanging over me. This feeling suggested two people who stay together, although it will be fatal, and they don't know why. But once this feeling crystallized, the story came easily, as if it had been there waiting to be found.

What crystallized your feeling?

Giuletta [Masina]. I'd wanted for some time to make a film for her. She's singularly able to express astonishment, dismay, frenetic happiness, the comic somberness of a clown. For me a clownesque talent in an actor is the most precious gift she can have. Giuletta's the kind of actress who's very congenial with what I want to do, with my taste.

My slowness in starting a film is certainly unacceptable in a profession that requires planning, but I confess to needing this climate in order to begin a film. When I've begun, I try to find a lighthearted mood, that unfathomable poise of story telling, that pleasure I experienced in filming The Interview.

That short movie was filmed day by day while making it up. I'm aiming more and more toward this kind of film. So, for La Voce della Luna, my latest film, I tried to do the same thing, to do like the circus people do: create a scene, a spectacle for nothing. I need to construct the scenario from life — with buildings, lights, situations, seasons — as a premise in order to see how things are going.

For this film, I designed and created everything, from buildings to the publicity. Then every once in a while I visited the set, saw it empty, saw the dust invading, some windows shattered by the wind, and I asked myself, "What's happening?" At the risk of appearing romantic, I'll tell you that something in me said, "You'll see, the piazza will come alive, the sacristan will appear at the church's portico, someone will go into a store to buy something.. ."

And so it was. As if by necessity, the set came alive. I let the film happen; important things were tossed off as banalities, and casual things seemed important. I wanted to achieve the naturalness of The Interview.

The director dolls up on the set of Fellini's Casanova

The Interview is autobiographical. We see a young Fellini, an adolescent journalist, who one day in 1941 visits Cinecitta. He is seduced by the Spectacle, by its imaginary games, and by the almost supernatural power of the director who constructs and deconstructs the story of life.

When, as a young man, I went to Cinecitta and saw the directors filming, I admired their power — to shout, scream, make beautiful actresses weep — I remember in particular having seen Blasetti make the very beautiful and very famous Isa Pola cry — but I also found them boorish, overbearing, vulgar, arrogant.

I tried to catch this picture of the tyrant director in The Interview. He was a figure that seduced me despite everything. But at that time I never thought I'd be a director; I lacked the temperament, the voice, the authority, the arrogance.... I thought that I would be a writer or a painter, or, better, a "special correspondent." But it turns out that I had all those defects! Because I became a director ... for a kind of pleasure. Out of an entomologist's curiosity. My films are films of expression.

I agreed to direct The Interview in order to keep a contract. I see in myself an artist of the 1400s, one who needed a client, which at that time was often the church. In its deep understanding of the human soul, the need for being lured and at the same time threatened, the church understood the adolescent nature of the artist. But today this aspect is no longer taken into consideration. Yet I, for example, need a client.

For The Interview, I had a commitment to TV, a contract for a Special. Since I had an upbringing that respects the rules of a pledge, I wanted to keep it. So, this TV film came about in this way, by itself, without traumas, because it offered the freedom of lightheartedness, the seductive aspect of something that doesn't build up expectations.

Making a film is an adventurous journey, above all for producers. Looking back, I can't say I complain. Every film has its troubles, its delays, but the obstacles on a journey represent part of the journey itself. The trip is enriched by difficulties that reveal mysterious, even providential expressions of friendship. For The Interview, I didn't have these problems of getting started, of setting off on the film's journey. But for my last film, The Voice from the Moon, yes.

I covered this last film with insults, I tried to kick it away like one does with an illness you don't want to catch. In order not to catch pneumonia, what do you do? You try to defend yourself.

Marcello Mastroianni in Fellini's 8 1/2

You declared once, long ago, in 1969, that "a film is like an illness that is expelled from the body."

No doubt there's a connection between pathology and creation, we can't deny it. Yet I view with pleasure the work of film professionals I love, such as Bunuel, Kurosawa, Kubrick, Bergman.

I'm perhaps a special type of spectator. I experience pleasure when I find myself in front of something that is the absolute truth, not because it resembles life, but because it's true as an image for itself, as a gesture. And therefore vital. It's the vitality that makes me appreciate and feel that the action succeeded. I think the expression of an artist's work finds consensus when, whoever enjoys it feels as if they're receiving a charge of energy, like a growing plant does, of something pulsing, mysterious, vibrant with life.

Going back to the difficulty of starting your Voice ... film, from documents it would seem that these difficulties started with shooting the first scene in your first film as director The White Sheik. And then there was that long business of completing The City of Women.

Yes, perhaps, but sometimes the problems aren't caused by me but by producers. However, when I'm in the harrowing phase and feel restless, it means I'm ready to start, that I must start, that I can begin the film. And initially I need to observe, to meet people with simplicity, as happens on a bus or a train; I need to sketch. I reflect, observe some details, a tic, a gesture, a color, a face.

An "entomologist's curiosity," you said. Also toward women?

Woman is a marvel; woman is a universe. This may be a tantric conception: Woman is the alien part of man, but she is higher than he, because women are born adults, ancient. You're born knowing everything. As mothers, you're superior. For survival, an archetypal rebellion exists in women's memory, because man has invented for himself an intellectual supremacy, a violence he uses to dominate her. But the struggle is unequal.

You smile. You really don't seem to believe me! Or maybe you're asking me how it was done, because I still haven't written a beautiful love story for my films.

But the story of Zampano and Gelsomina in La Strada is a love story, even if unusual and terrible.

Yes, it was. But I, and I'm embarrassed to share this confidence, I have to confess that I've never identified myself with excesses of passion and love. I seem never to have been in love in that sense. I don't understand the desperation of love as an irreparable loss.

I'd like to ask you a question concerning the costumes you draw for your films, which sometimes are particularly elegant, as if they were from a different era than ours. What does this mean?

In certain films like Satyricon or Casanova, the costumes of the era were necessary because the films were historical. That's obvious. I have the habit of looking back to styles of the '20s and '30s, because this unconscious reference goes back to an emotional reality when I discovered and noticed things. Lights, colors, attitudes, moods, usages, rhythms belong to this emotional reality.

In addition, there is another fact. A person's clothes make up part of his character. I draw the character with his costume. I suggest it to the stylists with my drawings; the drawings translate some of my emotional impressions. For me elegance happens when there is a correspondence between a person's personality and how she dresses herself Finally, don't forget that costumes, like dreams, are symbolic communication. Dreams teach us that a language for everything exists — for every object, every color worn, every clothing detail. Hence, costumes provide an aesthetic objectification that helps to tell the character's story.

You talk about a certain "first impression," which is tied to the play of memory and nostalgia. Is it perhaps a flight from the present era?

Our times are extraordinary and marvelous; everything has happened and continues to happen. After the Berlin Wall fell, the people on either "side" were no longer enemies, and ideologies stopped being barriers to truth. All of politics is up for rethinking.

But you know, I never managed to follow the route of neorealism, the problems of the working class.

Yet there are so many social critiques in your films.

Certainly! If metalworkers didn't dream, there would be only a hunk of metal.

NEXT PAGE: Strange dealings with the mysterious Carlos Castaneda

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