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I didn't read this, but his interviews have been pretty interesting... I only love his first movie, but one is good enough.
https://www.avclub.com/vincent-gallo-1798208372
https://www.avclub.com/vincent-gallo-1798208372
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A pretty kewl video essay on Western genre.
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Look, I'm not judging you - after all, I'm posting here myself, but maybe, just maybe, if you spent less time here and more time watching films, maybe, and I stress, maybe your taste would be of some value. Just a thought, ya know.
Look, I'm not judging you - after all, I'm posting here myself, but maybe, just maybe, if you spent less time here and more time watching films, maybe, and I stress, maybe your taste would be of some value. Just a thought, ya know.
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Fellini Playboy Interview 1966
Playboy: Among your friends, you have a reputation as a teller of tall tales. One of them, in fact, has gone so far as to call you “a colossal, compulsive, consummate liar.” What’s your reaction?
Fellini: At least he gives me credit for being consummate. Anyone who lives, as I do, in a world of imagination must make an enormous and unnatural effort to be factual in the ordinary sense. I confess I would be a horrible witness in court because of this—and a terrible journalist. I feel compelled to tell a story the way I see it, and this is seldom the way it actually happened, in all its documentary detail.
Playboy: You’ve been accused of embroidering the truth outrageously even in recounting the story of your own life. One friend says you’ve told him four completely different versions of your breakup with your first sweetheart. Why?
Fellini: Why not? She’s worth even more versions. Che bella ragazza! People are worth much more than truth, even when they don’t look as great as she did. If you want to call me a liar in this sense, then I reply that it’s indispensable to let a storyteller color a story, expand it, deepen it, depending on the way he feels it has to be told. In my films, I do the same with life.
Playboy: Is that how you see yourself—as a storyteller rather than as a “conjurer,” “modern moralist,” “social satirist” or “ringmaster of a cinematic circus,” as you’ve been variously described?
Fellini: Those are impressive-sounding occupations, but as far as I’m concerned, I’m just a storyteller, and the cinema happens to be my medium. I like it because it re-creates life in movement, enlarges it, enhances it, distills it. For me, it’s far closer to the miraculous creation of life itself than, say, painting or music or even literature. It’s not just an art form; it’s actually a new form of life, with its own rhythms, cadences, perspectives and transparencies. It’s my way of telling a story.
Playboy: Most critics agree that your storytelling technique is uniquely compelling: but they disagree, for the most part, on the moral and meaning of your films. Does this concern you?
Fellini: Do the critics have to understand my films? Isn’t it enough that the public enjoys them?
Playboy: Are your films intended primarily as entertainment, then, or is their box-office appeal secondary to philosophic intent?
Fellini: I’m not concerned with popularity, and it’s pointless to speak of philosophic intent. After each picture I often don’t recall what my intentions were. Intentions are only instruments to put you into condition to do something, to start you off. Many great works are done well despite their original intent. Pascal, for example, wrote the Pensées to demonstrate the nonexistence of God—and ended up doing just the opposite. Take La Dolce Vita. What I intended was to show the state of Rome’s soul, a way of being of a people. What it became was a scandalous report, a fresco of a street and a society. But I never go to Via Veneto—it isn’t my street. And I never attend festas of aristocrats—I don’t know any. The left-wing press played it up as headline reportage on Rome, but it didn’t have to be Rome: it could have been Bangkok or a thousand other cities. I intended it as a report on Sodom and Gomorrah, a trip into anguish and despair. I intended for it to be a document, not a documentary.
Playboy: Still, if we confine ourselves to the original impulse that inspired them, is there a common theme linking your films?
Fellini: My work can’t be anything other than a testimony of what I am looking for in life. It is a mirror of my searching.
Playboy: Searching for what?
Fellini: For myself freed. In this respect, I think, there is no cleavage or difference of content or style in all my films. From first to last, I have struggled to free myself—always from the past, from the education laid upon me as a child. That is what I’m seeking, though through different characters and with changing tempo and images.
Playboy: In what sense do you want to escape your past?
Fellini: I became burdened in childhood with useless baggage that I now want off my back. I want to uneducate myself of these worthless concepts, so that I may return to a virginal personality—to a rebirth of real intent and of real self. Then I won’t be lost in a collective whole that fits nobody because it’s made to fit everybody. Wherever I go, from the corner of my eye I see young people moving in groups, like schools of fish. When I was young, we all moved in separate directions. Are we developing a society like ants, in blocs and colonies? This is one of the things I fear more than anything else. I loathe collectivity. Man’s greatness and nobility consist in standing free of the mass. How he extricates himself from it is his own personal problem and private struggle. This is what my films describe.
Playboy: Can you give us an actual example from one of your films?
Fellini: In 8½, society’s norms and rules imprisoned Guido in his boyhood with a sense of guilt and frustration. From childhood many of us are conditioned by a similar education. Then, growing up, we find ourselves in profound conflict—a conflict created by having been taught to idealize our lives, to pursue aesthetic and ethical ideals of absolute good or evil. This imposes impossible standards and unattainable aspirations that can only impede the spontaneous growth of a normal human being, and may conceivably destroy him. You must have experienced this yourself. There arrives a moment in life when you discover that what you’ve been told at home, in school or in church is simply not true. You discover that it binds your authentic self, your instinct, your true growth. And this opens up a schism, creates a conflict that must eventually be resolved—or succumbed to. In all forms of neurosis there is this clash between certain forms of idealization in a moral sense and a contrary aesthetic form. It all started with the Greeks when they enshrined a classical standard of physical beauty. A man who did not correspond to that type of beauty felt himself excluded, inferior, an outsider. Then came Christianity, which established an ethical beauty. This doubled man’s problems by creating the dual possibility that he was neither beautiful as a Greek god nor holy as a Catholic one. Inevitably, you were guilty of either nonbeauty or unsaintliness, and probably both. So you lived in disgrace: Man did not love you, nor did God; thus you remained outside of life.
Playboy: And today?
Fellini: In a modified form, this same ethic-aesthetic still prevails, and there is no escape from it through mere denial, though many have tried. You can escape very simply, however: by realizing that if you are not beautiful, it’s all right anyway; and if you’re not a saint, that’s all right, too—because reality is not ideality. But this self-acceptance can occur only when you’ve grasped one fundamental fact of life: that the only thing which exists is yourself, your true individual self in depth, which wants to grow spontaneously, but which is fettered by inoperative lies, myths and fantasies proposing an unattainable morality or sanctity or perfection—all of it brainwashed into us during our defenseless childhood.
Playboy: Once you’ve liberated yourself from the past, what then?
Fellini: Then you are free to live in the present, and not seek cowardly flight toward the past—or toward the future, either.
Playboy: In what way toward the future?
Fellini: I mean that we must cease projecting ourselves into the future as though it were plannable, foreseeable, tangible, controllable—it’s not; or as though it were a dimension existing outside and beyond ourselves. We must learn to deal with matters as they are, not as we hope or fear they may eventuate. We must cope with them as they exist now, today, at this moment. We must awaken to the fact that the future is already here, to be lived in the present. In short, wake up and live!
Playboy: Though most of your protagonists, at the end of their spiritual odysseys, do learn to live with themselves as they are and with life as it is, some interpreters have seen their awakening as little more than a fatalistic resignation to the human condition.
Fellini: No, no! Not a fatalistic resignation, but an affirmative acceptance of life, a burgeoning of love for life. The return of Guido to life in 8½ is not a defeat. Rather, it is the return of a victor. When he finally realizes that he will never be able to resolve his problems, only to live with them—when he realizes that life itself is a continuous refutation of resolution—he experiences an exhilarating resurgence of energy, a return of profound religious sentiment. “I have faith,” he says, “that I am inserted into a design of Providence whose end I don’t and can’t and will never comprehend—and wouldn’t want to even if I cold. There’s nothing for me to do but pass through this panorama of joy and pain—with all my energy, all my enthusiasm, all my love, accepting it for what it is, without expecting an explanation that does not concern me, that does not involve me, that I am not called upon to give.” He is at peace with himself at last—free to accept himself as he is, not as he wished he were or might have been. That is the optimistic finale to 8½.
Playboy: Doesn’t Juliet of the Spirits have essentially the same moral?
Fellini: Essentially, yes—only carried along another, deeper plane, with more decadent undertones, and told in a less realistic way. Juliet touches on myths within human psychology; its images, therefore, are those of a fable. But it treats of a profound human reality: the institution of marriage, and the need within it for individual liberation. It’s the portrait of an Italian woman, conditioned by our modern society, yet a product of misshapen religious training and ancient dogmas—like the one about getting married and living happily ever alter. When she grows up and finds it hasn’t come true, she can neither face nor understand it; and so she escapes into a private world of remembered yesterdays and mythical tomorrows. Whatever she does is influenced by her childhood, which she recaptures in otherworldly visions; and by the future, which she brings to life in bizarre and lively fantasies. The present exists for her only in the electronic unreality of television commercials. She is finally awakened from these visions by a grim reality: the desertion of her husband; but this fulfillment of her worst fear becomes the most positive episode of her life, for it forces her to find herself, to seek her free identity as an individual. And this gives her the insight to realize that all the fears—the phantoms that lived around her—were monsters of her own creation, bred of misshapen education and misread religion. She realizes that the spirits have been necessary, even useful, and deserve to be thanked; and the moment she thanks them, she no longer fears and hates them, and they turn into positive, pleasant beings.
Playboy: Is there some specific message in this for all of us?
Fellini: A lesson—a lesson we must all learn—as Juliet finally did: that marriage, if it is to survive, must be treated as the beginning, not as the happy ending; that it’s something you have to work at; but that it’s also not the alpha and omega of human existence; and that it must not be something you accept from the outside, like an inviolate taboo, never to be shattered. Why not admit it? Marriage as an institution needs re-examining. We live with too many nonfunctioning ideologies. Modern man needs richer relationships.
Playboy: What kind?
Fellini: Extramarital and premarital. Man is not basically a monogamous animal. Marriage is tyranny, a violation and mortification of his natural instincts. A woman, on the other hand, tends to create a world around one man. The tragedy of modern man is that he needs a multiplicity of individual relationships, whereas, at least in the culture in which I live, he is still forced into a single-mated mold. Without it, his life could develop into something interesting, into a higher evolution. Curiously enough, the multiple roles of infidelity seem to bring out the best in some men; were it not for self-negating guilt, it might in most men.
Playboy: What you’re suggesting, of course, is completely contrary to the teachings of the Catholic Church. Aren’t you a Catholic?
Fellini: It’s difficult biologically and geographically not to be a Catholic in Italy. It’s like a creature born beneath the sea—how can it not be a fish? For one born in Italy, it’s difficult not to breathe, from childhood onward, this Catholic atmosphere. One who comes from Italian parents passes a childhood in Italy, enters the Church as a baby, makes his Communion, witnesses Catholic funerals—how can he not be a Catholic? Still, I have a great admiration for those who declare themselves a detached laity—but I don’t see how this can happen in Italy. Sooner or later, however—even in Italy—every man must take stock of himself, to determine to what point he is really a Catholic, or perhaps not one at all.
Playboy: Your unsparing caricatures of Catholic clerics, particularly in 8½, have led some Church theologians to the latter conclusion about you. Are they right?
Fellini: Let them say what they want. In a noncategorized form, I think I’m deeply religious, even profoundly so—because I accept life’s infinite mysteries without knowing its finite borders, accept them with joy and wonder. Is that being anti-Catholic or anti-religious? When I speak in a polemical manner about deforming our children with Catholic dogma, I’m speaking about an inhuman, inflexible application of Counter Reformation Catholicism. Guido’s Catholic teachers in 8½ were monstrous and unfeeling, but they have nothing to do with Pope John XXIII, for example, who sought to wipe away all such ignorance and help us to rediscover the true Christian faith. If a false and misguided type of Catholic education creates guilts, inhibitions and complexes, then I say it’s not only right but necessary to identify it—and, if possible, to eradicate it.
Playboy: Would you include the so called double standard of morality toward women—which divides them into “good” girls and “bad” girls—among the Church-bred afflictions that ought to be eradicated?
Fellini: Absolutely. Particularly for us Catholics, woman is seen as either the spirit or the flesh, as either the embodiment of virtue, motherhood and saintliness or the incarnation of vice, whoredom and wickedness. Either we dress her up as an ideal, a snow-white inspiration such as Dante’s Beatrice, or she becomes the lewd, laboring beast that devours her newborn son. The problem is to find the link between these opposites. But this is difficult, because we don’t really know who woman is. She remains in that precise place within man where darkness begins. Talking about women means talking about the darkest part of ourselves, the undeveloped part, the true mystery within. In the beginning, I believe that man was complete and androgynous—both male and female, or neither, like the angels. Then came the division, and Eve was taken from him. So the problem for man is to reunite himself with the other half of his being, to find the woman who is right for him—right because she is simply a projection, a mirror of himself. A man can’t become whole or free until he has set woman free—his woman. It’s his responsibility, not hers. He can’t be complete, truly alive, until he makes her his sexual companion, and not a slave for libidinous acts or a saint with a halo.
Playboy: Your spectacular exhibition of Anita Ekberg’s larger-than-life endowments on a block-long billboard in Boccaccio ’70 has been called a caricature of woman’s role, not as man’s sexual slave but as a Gargantuan goddess of eroticism. Was that your purpose?
Fellini: Yes. In the mind of that repressed little man who spies on the billboard every night, of course, she’s anything but a caricature; she becomes a mountainous creature of flesh and blood, a living embodiment of the grotesquely exaggerated image of female sexuality that stalks his stifled libido—that pressure cooker of puritan sexual inhibitions—and finally escapes to stalk him. I wanted to show metaphorically how man’s imprisoned appetites can finally burst their bonds and bloat into an erotic fantasy that comes to life, takes possession of its creator and ultimately devours him.
Playboy: Can we conclude, then, that you welcome as a healthy trend the increasing sexual freedom currently enjoyed by movies, magazines and night clubs—and the nudity on display in them?
Fellini: It’s all to the good, because it lifts the veil of mystery and obscurity, the clandestine aspect of sex which deforms it. Think what a woman must look like to a man in prison, how gross some parts of her body must appear to him. Set free, he hurries home to his girl with deformed visions. Ravenously, he re-explores the forgotten country of the woman’s body; but the monstrous desires are soon pacified, and the female myth becomes a normality once again.
Playboy: Do you agree with those who feel that a totally undraped woman loses much of her mystery?
Fellini: Only her visual mystery. Inasmuch as woman represents that hidden half of us, the religious mystery of coupling in birth, the mystical, erotical fusion that integrates the whole man, it’s clear she will always possess unfathomable secrets invisible even to the inner eye. So I see no reason to keep her covered outwardly, to keep her worldly riches buried like a pirate’s treasure in the viscera of the earth.
Playboy: The women in your films—whether prey or predator, saint or sensualist—all seem to be far more vibrantly and affirmatively alive than your self-immobilized male protagonists. Why?
Fellini: I find my women figures—like Anita Ekberg and Sandra Milo—more exciting to create, perhaps because woman is more intriguing than man, more elusive, more erotic, more stimulating.
Playboy: What inspired you to star Ekberg, whose career was in eclipse, as the voluptuous female in La Dolce Vita?
Fellini: She embodied in every detail my mental image of the role; it’s as simple as that. Her previous screenwork was irrelevant.
Playboy: How did you manage to transform her with this one role into the international sex symbol she had failed to become in Hollywood?
Fellini: I just provided her with the perfect part to elicit, perhaps for the first time, the full impact of her extravagant sensuality. I performed no mysterious alchemy. I did no more to bring out the best in her than I do with all my other actors.
Playboy: And how much is that?
Fellini: Well, once I find the flesh-and-blood incarnation of my fantasy characters—and it doesn’t matter whether they’re picked from the street or are professional actors and actresses—the next thing I try to do is to put them at ease, to strip them of their inhibitions, to make them forget technique, to transport them into a climate that allows them to laugh and cry and behave naturally. In other words, I endeavor to coax out the natural talents they already possess. If I have a method, it is to get their most spontaneous reaction. Every human being has his own irrevocable truth, which is authentic and precious and unique; and the truth of Anita Ekberg or Sandra Milo is no different from anyone else’s. If the atmosphere is right, anybody can be made to express his joys, his sadnesses, his hostilities, everything—entirely of his own accord, honestly and openly. I don’t ever want to make the mistake of forcing someone into a given character, or of limiting him in any way. Instead, I try to let him re-create his own character for the role. Because of this, I think, my results are richer and more satisfactory; the spectator finds himself in the presence of a creature of unique truth.
Playboy: Most actors are trained to create a role, to impersonate someone else, a fictional character. Yet you say you want them to portray themselves. Doesn’t this create a conflict of interests?
Fellini: Not really. Once they get used to the idea of turning inward rather than outward, most find that it comes more naturally, that it enables them to bring far more authenticity to their portrayals. For most roles, of course, only part of the actor’s own character will be germane to the character he’s playing, so I ask him to be less than completely open and spontaneous, to be only selectively self-revealing. But even where there is a deep personal identification between an actor and his role, he doesn’t simply play himself; he doesn’t strip himself bare. Complete self-exposure can be both dangerous and irrelevant to the role. I ask him instead to expose himself gradually, layer by layer, until he reaches the level where he merges and meshes completely with the character. Though his subconscious motivations and reactions will now be those of the man he’s portraying—and vice versa—the identity of player and part must remain a dramatic illusion, his seeming spontaneity must be studied, his naturalness premeditated. Despite his rapport with the role, all of his acting skills and disciplines will be necessary to bring the character believably to life. Though there may be severe labor pains, the issue of this unlikely union between instinct and technique can be beautiful, indeed. A perfect example is Marcello Mastroianni’s wonderfully sensitive performance as Guido in 8½, a part with which he deeply identified.
Playboy: So did you, if one can believe reports that the picture was your own spiritual autobiography.
Fellini: I did and it was. I wrote a story dealing with myself and my deepest secrets—or at least an idealistic approximation of me. Then I found a man who could become inhabited with all that had been inside me, and I made him the incarnation of an imaginary person closely resembling me. A mysterious air arose on the set; I found myself ordering myself around like a disembodied spirit in limbo.
Playboy: Are you as close to Mastroianni in private life?
Fellini: Almost symbiotically so. Even though we seldom see each other outside of our work periods, we have such a profound rapport that it is like a mirror before me saying, “It’s me. It’s not me…” and so on. It’s uncanny. This is the basic bond of our friendship; but he’s also very humanly simpatico. I see in him a charge of enthusiasm, innocence and charlatanry—like a smaller brother. And I’m no less an admirer of his professionalism. He’s a very gifted actor.
Playboy: Are you as deeply involved with any other actors?
Fellini: Not so intensely, though I become terribly fond of all my actors, out of all proportion—because they are my puppets, creations of my fantasy. I claim they are the world’s greatest actors and become ferociously defensive about them.
Playboy: Your wife, Giulietta Masina, has starred in several of your films. Does your personal relationship make it easy or difficult to direct her?
Fellini: Both. When I work with her, she seems the ideal actress: patient, docile, obedient, serious. She’s not difficult—I am. I’m more impatient with her than with other actors. I get irritated if she doesn’t immediately do what I have in mind. It seems incredible to me when she doesn’t respond promptly just the way I want. You see, Giulietta is the first character I think about when I do a film with her. The others come slowly to mind, many months afterward, but always around her as the central figure. So when I get impatient and irritated with her, I feel like saying, “Giulietta! You were born first and the others came after you. You’ve lived in my mind so much longer than the others; why aren’t you quicker?” I know that’s unjust, but somehow it always goes that way. But I do like to work with her.
Playboy: Is she a good actress, in your opinion?
Fellini: Excellent. I think that she would have interested me as such even if she hadn’t been my wife. Her mimicry, for example, and that little round face which can express happiness or sadness with such poignant simplicity. That little figure, with its tenderness, its delicacy, fascinates me no end. Her type is crystallized, even stylized for me. As an actress, she represents a special type, a very specific humanity.
Playboy: And as a wife?
Fellini: So many things. I’ll try to be objective, but it isn’t easy. We’ve lived together so long. The other day on the set, we celebrated our twenty-first anniversary. Twenty-one years. It doesn’t really seem that long. There are still things to discover. Where were we?
Playboy: Discussing Giulietta as a wife.
Fellini: And such a wife—tender, affectionate, eternally solicitous. She always wants to know if I feel cold or if I want to eat. When we’re shooting outdoors, she asks if my socks are wet. You know how women are. But she is not only my wife; she is also the one who inspires me. Over the years, she has become a stimulant for me, a symbol of certain feelings, certain moods, certain behavior. Our life together has been sprinkled with tragedy and joy, with tears and laughter, and this has given me material, inspiration for my work.
Playboy: Does she make any actual creative contribution?
Fellini: Only in the sense that she provides the sun and the rain that warms and waters the soil in which the seeds I sow eventually sprout—and occasionally flower into films.
Playboy: To continue your imagery, where do the seeds come from?
Fellini: I don’t always know, but somehow, from somewhere, an idea arrives, and I carry it within me like an embryo for weeks, months, years—until finally it reaches the fetal stage and begins to assume a vague but tangible shape. Then, very tentatively, I begin to work on the first rough pieces of a script.
Playboy: You’ve said that looking at portrait photos of potential characters is a stimulant to the creative process at this stage. Why?
Fellini: It’s a ritual form with me, a habit, a psychological conditioning to begin work. When I’m planning a picture, I see literally thousands of people in hundreds of mass auditions, and I keep all their photographs. I’m searching for faces to fit the characters I’m creating—or may create.
Playboy: You have a reputation for dragging out this preparatory period for month after month, as though it were a drug, until finally you must be pulled away and forced into actual shooting.
Fellini: Well, it’s not quite that addictive, and it’s not always my fault for taking so long at it. Often these protracted preparations are caused by external factors—such as not finding a producer, or a producer who loses faith, or something else beyond my control. But postponements serve the positive purpose of giving me more time to create the right atmosphere for filming—time to create a kind of oxygen tent that will allow my creatures to live. This is made from many things—the script, costumes, photographs, a trip, a meeting with a girl, a fight with a producer, a change of office, an aimless walk around the house. All of this helps create a tent with enough air for the birth of this thing. That, for me, is the real effort: to take these steps that create the condition for the birth of the work. The film I make may not turn out to be the one I had in mind, but the main point is to see if, in the first two or three weeks of shooting, this thing is actually born alive. After that, it becomes self-sustaining—as though I were no longer directing, but rather that the film were directing me, pulling me onward.
Playboy: Is there any truth to the prevalent notion that you begin shooting with little more than the outline of a script; that, in effect, you direct your films off the top of your head, improvising scenes and dialog as you go along?
Fellini: If I wanted to commit artistic and economic suicide, that would be a beautiful and spectacular way to go. But since I don’t, I arrive on the set with a script in hand—though it doesn’t really mean that much, except as a pacifier for actors who fear improvisation, and for producers who crave reassurance that the structure for a film story has been created. What does matter is that I have a very precise idea of where I want to go in the film and how I want to get there long before the camera starts to roll. Once it does, of course, I try to remain flexible enough to amend and adorn the action as the need arises—rather than adhere blindly and fanatically to the original scenario as though it were Holy Scripture.
You can’t say, “I want a baby with blue eyes, pink ears, blonde hair, that weighs seven pounds, three ounces, and with fingers just so.” No, you take a woman, make her pregnant, assist in the childbirth, and the baby is what it is, and you’re stuck with it. At the moment of parturition you can’t say, “No, no, it doesn’t have blue eyes, back it goes!” A film is the same. What does it mean to be faithful to ten pages of dialog, written five months previous, without knowing the actors or what language would be used? You don’t even know where it will be shot. You might conceive of the scene in a park, but when you get there you realize your actor with his face would not have spoken that way in a park. Or the actress wears a dress that prevents her from saying a certain line. Also, instead of filming two actors talking, you may discover while you’re filming that a close-up of a fountain or a panning shot of the rare furnishings in a drawing room will say more than the entire ten pages of dialog. In this sense I make myself available to adaptation; but I do not extemporize.
Playboy: How do you feel after completing a film? Do you ever worry about going stale, or encountering what’s called artistic paralysis?
Fellini: What a strange question. A film never ends abruptly for me. It leaves an echo, a trail, and I live with it. Even after I’ve finished shooting and cutting, it’s still with me, I still hear it, feel it, sense it. When it isn’t with me anymore, when I feel it’s finally extinguished, then another atmosphere enters, like the arrival of spring. It’s the new film—with its new personages, and its undeveloped story. You see, I don’t experience blank periods. It seems that ever since I started as a director, it’s been the same day—the same long, wonderful day. But am I at all preoccupied with failure or professional impotence? Naturally. As you know, 8½ dealt with this preoccupation. But I don’t feel the day is near when I will be empty. When it happens, I hope I’ll have the humility and good sense to stop chattering. Meanwhile, I am still filled with enthusiasm and with a consuming urge to do things.
Playboy: Is it true that you go to the movies hardly at all—even to see your own pictures?
Fellini: Very true. When I finish a film, as I said, I’m possessed by the shaping vision of my next one; and it’s always a jealous mistress. Besides, I want to live in the present, not linger in the past. As for other people’s films, I go very, very seldom. I’d rather make films than watch them.
Playboy: Surely you’ve seen a few of your contemporaries’ pictures.
Fellini: Enough to form a few impressions.
Playboy: Have you seen any of Kurosawa’s films?
Fellini: Only his Seven Samurai, but I think he is the greatest living example of all that an author of the cinema should be. I feel a fraternal affinity with his way of telling a story.
Playboy: How about Ingmar Bergman?
Fellini: I have a profound admiration for him and for his work, even though I haven’t seen all of his films. First of all, he is a master of his métier. Secondly, he is able to make things mysterious, compelling, colorful and, at times, repulsive. Because of that, he has the right to talk about other people and to be listened to by other people. Like a medieval troubadour, he can sit in the middle of the room and hold his audience by telling stories, singing, playing the guitar, reading poetry, doing sleight of hand. He has the seductive quality of mesmerizing your attention. Even if you’re not in full agreement with what he says, you enjoy the way he says it, his way of seeing the world with such intensity. He is one of the most complete cinematographic creators I have ever seen.
Playboy: Antonioni?
Fellini: I have respect for his constancy, his fanatical integrity and his refusal to compromise. Antonioni had a very difficult professional beginning. His films for many years were not accepted, and another man, less honest, less strong, would have made retreats. But Antonioni kept on his solitary road, doing what he believed he should do until he was recognized as a great creator. This has always made an enormous impression on me. He is an artist who knows what he wants to say, and that’s a lot.
Playboy: Truffaut?
Fellini: I’m terribly embarrassed, but I haven’t seen anything of his. Sorry.
Playboy: DeSica?
Fellini: Great power of achievement, and a master of his actors. He stems from our marvelous era of neorealism. He is a very good director, someone almost untouchable, because of the special place he occupied after the War.
Playboy: Some critics have drawn parallels between your work and that of the neorealistic school. Do you think there’s any validity to the comparison?
Fellini: Indeed, yes. But mine is the neorealism of the Sixties—a very different breed of cat from the neorealism of the Forties, when many of us began with great ideals, but which finally tore itself apart in social polemics and drifted off into nonpolemical comedy. By the time that happened, however, neorealism had lifted film making to the dignified level of an autonomous art, freed the film maker from the enslaved conditioning in which cinema was imprisoned—a secondary art subordinate to the mood of the public. The greatness of early neorealism consisted in giving cinema liberty, so that we could finally express ourselves in films as freely as others could with a brush or a pen.
Playboy: Since La Dolce Vita, you’ve been inundated with movie offers from America. Do you think you could express yourself freely as a film maker in Hollywood?
Fellini: Probably not, but I’ve been sorely tempted to try it anyway. I’d love to do a film there on what caught my imagination during my visits to America. But even if I had a clear idea of what to say, the practical realization of it, the actual translation of this idea into images would embarrass and probably defeat me.
Playboy: Why?
Fellini: In Italy, I know what I’m doing. I know how to handle my actors, how to dress them, how to make them believable in the surroundings I’ve created for them. I know what I want them to express because I know what I am talking about myself. Even if I throw in an extra with one line, she has a reason to be there and she’ll give truth to that one line and authenticity to those few seconds she’s on screen. But how could I do this in a strange country with strange people? How would I know, for example, what a Boston taxi driver would wear at home on Sunday afternoon? How does a cashier from a Bronx drugstore dress, smile, or react to a man insulting her? I’d be lost a thousand times a day, and that would be fatal, because cinematography, at least in my opinion, needs an absolute mastery, complete control of everything and everyone—the female star’s underwear, the leading man’s mustache, the way matches are placed on the left side of the table. This is a true and deep obstacle. It’s why an author must stay with the language that has nourished him since childhood, that has left with him a cultural deposit and a bagful of customs and traditions. So you see, the idea of a radical uprooting to work in America—or anywhere else beyond these borders—would be inconceivable to me.
Playboy: Could the right price make you change your mind?
Fellini: Money doesn’t interest me. It’s useful and good to have, but it’s not an obsession with me, and it wasn’t even when I didn’t have it. When I first came to Rome at 18, I worked on a newspaper, and at times I didn’t have enough money for lunch. But it was food I desired—not money. I have no money with me at this very moment; I never have. I even borrow for coffee from friends. Maybe I’ve been able to make money because of this. Money goes to those who don’t court it.
Playboy: And fame, too, in your case. Are you as indifferent to that?
Fellini: I would be, only it’s not as easy to ignore. It keeps impinging on one’s time and privacy. Though I’ve managed to preserve a few small sanctuaries from the unblinking eye of publicity, there are more and more invasions, especially since 8½. When I went to America, I was besieged by women who thought I had the key to happiness, some sort of recipe for joining life. They phoned at all hours and even waited for me in hotel corridors. I told them I had no answers, no amulets, no elixirs, no nothing for them, but they wouldn’t believe me. I’m a director, not a seer or a psychiatrist. What I have to say, I say in my work.
Playboy: And your work, as you said earlier, has been an attempt to escape from your past. Do you think you’ve succeeded?
Fellini: To some extent. I feel less guilty now about the things my childhood education made me feel guilty about.
Playboy: Such as sex?
Fellini: Or any intelligent use of the senses that takes you beyond the confines of puritan morality. So I feel more robust, less defenseless. But then, it’s high time for maturation, don’t you think? At my age a man should be somewhat mature. Occasionally, though, I feel that this calm understanding could be destroyed by a single, sudden, violent, unexpected emotional confrontation.
Playboy: With a woman?
Fellini: I don’t know with what or whom. But certainly it’s always possible in life, and most possible when you’re most sure of yourself.
Playboy: Are you sure of yourself?
Fellini: Not in an egotistical sense; but I feel less emotional, more collected, more at peace with myself than ever before. Though I’ve lost some of my power and potential in the process—along with my youthful pugnacity—I feel that a religious sentiment, profound but authentic, has been born within me. But I’ve had a rather fortunate life, so it’s possible that my optimism may stem from not having known much sorrow or pain.
Playboy: Do you fear growing old?
Fellini: No—probably for the same reason.
Playboy: How about death?
Fellini: Death is such a strange thought, so contrary to what we think of in our physical life, that it’s difficult to speak about it. We don’t know what it is, so a vague terror tends to seize us. It’s like a legendary continent, a faraway land that you’ve heard spoken about in contradictory terms. Some say it exists, others that it doesn’t. Some say it’s most beautiful, others that it’s horrible. Some say it’s better than this world, while others claim that nothing is as beautiful as life, that death is only silence and a forgetting. But let’s face it: There is this country, and sooner or later we’re all going there.
Playboy: Do you dread it?
Fellini: Yes. No. I don’t know. One should face death as he embraces life: with a consuming curiosity—but without fear. Nor should he delude himself by approaching either with hope; for hope is a way of idealizing the other side of the coin of fear. Faith is what is needed, not hope. You must feel that all is sacred, that all is necessary, that all is useful, that all goes well. I can’t understand an artist who seeks to show life as sterile and doomed, that we are alone and abandoned, that there is nothing left. If you deny everything, then you deny art itself, so why create it?
Playboy: Are faith and curiosity, then, your prescriptions for a happy life?
Fellini: Let’s say a full life. Happiness is simply a temporary condition that precedes unhappiness. Fortunately for us, it works the other way around as well. But it’s all a part of the carnival, isn’t it?
Playboy, 13, no. 2, February 1966; pp. 55-66
https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/2017/1...nterview-1966/
Playboy: Among your friends, you have a reputation as a teller of tall tales. One of them, in fact, has gone so far as to call you “a colossal, compulsive, consummate liar.” What’s your reaction?
Fellini: At least he gives me credit for being consummate. Anyone who lives, as I do, in a world of imagination must make an enormous and unnatural effort to be factual in the ordinary sense. I confess I would be a horrible witness in court because of this—and a terrible journalist. I feel compelled to tell a story the way I see it, and this is seldom the way it actually happened, in all its documentary detail.
Playboy: You’ve been accused of embroidering the truth outrageously even in recounting the story of your own life. One friend says you’ve told him four completely different versions of your breakup with your first sweetheart. Why?
Fellini: Why not? She’s worth even more versions. Che bella ragazza! People are worth much more than truth, even when they don’t look as great as she did. If you want to call me a liar in this sense, then I reply that it’s indispensable to let a storyteller color a story, expand it, deepen it, depending on the way he feels it has to be told. In my films, I do the same with life.
Playboy: Is that how you see yourself—as a storyteller rather than as a “conjurer,” “modern moralist,” “social satirist” or “ringmaster of a cinematic circus,” as you’ve been variously described?
Fellini: Those are impressive-sounding occupations, but as far as I’m concerned, I’m just a storyteller, and the cinema happens to be my medium. I like it because it re-creates life in movement, enlarges it, enhances it, distills it. For me, it’s far closer to the miraculous creation of life itself than, say, painting or music or even literature. It’s not just an art form; it’s actually a new form of life, with its own rhythms, cadences, perspectives and transparencies. It’s my way of telling a story.
Playboy: Most critics agree that your storytelling technique is uniquely compelling: but they disagree, for the most part, on the moral and meaning of your films. Does this concern you?
Fellini: Do the critics have to understand my films? Isn’t it enough that the public enjoys them?
Playboy: Are your films intended primarily as entertainment, then, or is their box-office appeal secondary to philosophic intent?
Fellini: I’m not concerned with popularity, and it’s pointless to speak of philosophic intent. After each picture I often don’t recall what my intentions were. Intentions are only instruments to put you into condition to do something, to start you off. Many great works are done well despite their original intent. Pascal, for example, wrote the Pensées to demonstrate the nonexistence of God—and ended up doing just the opposite. Take La Dolce Vita. What I intended was to show the state of Rome’s soul, a way of being of a people. What it became was a scandalous report, a fresco of a street and a society. But I never go to Via Veneto—it isn’t my street. And I never attend festas of aristocrats—I don’t know any. The left-wing press played it up as headline reportage on Rome, but it didn’t have to be Rome: it could have been Bangkok or a thousand other cities. I intended it as a report on Sodom and Gomorrah, a trip into anguish and despair. I intended for it to be a document, not a documentary.
Playboy: Still, if we confine ourselves to the original impulse that inspired them, is there a common theme linking your films?
Fellini: My work can’t be anything other than a testimony of what I am looking for in life. It is a mirror of my searching.
Playboy: Searching for what?
Fellini: For myself freed. In this respect, I think, there is no cleavage or difference of content or style in all my films. From first to last, I have struggled to free myself—always from the past, from the education laid upon me as a child. That is what I’m seeking, though through different characters and with changing tempo and images.
Playboy: In what sense do you want to escape your past?
Fellini: I became burdened in childhood with useless baggage that I now want off my back. I want to uneducate myself of these worthless concepts, so that I may return to a virginal personality—to a rebirth of real intent and of real self. Then I won’t be lost in a collective whole that fits nobody because it’s made to fit everybody. Wherever I go, from the corner of my eye I see young people moving in groups, like schools of fish. When I was young, we all moved in separate directions. Are we developing a society like ants, in blocs and colonies? This is one of the things I fear more than anything else. I loathe collectivity. Man’s greatness and nobility consist in standing free of the mass. How he extricates himself from it is his own personal problem and private struggle. This is what my films describe.
Playboy: Can you give us an actual example from one of your films?
Fellini: In 8½, society’s norms and rules imprisoned Guido in his boyhood with a sense of guilt and frustration. From childhood many of us are conditioned by a similar education. Then, growing up, we find ourselves in profound conflict—a conflict created by having been taught to idealize our lives, to pursue aesthetic and ethical ideals of absolute good or evil. This imposes impossible standards and unattainable aspirations that can only impede the spontaneous growth of a normal human being, and may conceivably destroy him. You must have experienced this yourself. There arrives a moment in life when you discover that what you’ve been told at home, in school or in church is simply not true. You discover that it binds your authentic self, your instinct, your true growth. And this opens up a schism, creates a conflict that must eventually be resolved—or succumbed to. In all forms of neurosis there is this clash between certain forms of idealization in a moral sense and a contrary aesthetic form. It all started with the Greeks when they enshrined a classical standard of physical beauty. A man who did not correspond to that type of beauty felt himself excluded, inferior, an outsider. Then came Christianity, which established an ethical beauty. This doubled man’s problems by creating the dual possibility that he was neither beautiful as a Greek god nor holy as a Catholic one. Inevitably, you were guilty of either nonbeauty or unsaintliness, and probably both. So you lived in disgrace: Man did not love you, nor did God; thus you remained outside of life.
Playboy: And today?
Fellini: In a modified form, this same ethic-aesthetic still prevails, and there is no escape from it through mere denial, though many have tried. You can escape very simply, however: by realizing that if you are not beautiful, it’s all right anyway; and if you’re not a saint, that’s all right, too—because reality is not ideality. But this self-acceptance can occur only when you’ve grasped one fundamental fact of life: that the only thing which exists is yourself, your true individual self in depth, which wants to grow spontaneously, but which is fettered by inoperative lies, myths and fantasies proposing an unattainable morality or sanctity or perfection—all of it brainwashed into us during our defenseless childhood.
Playboy: Once you’ve liberated yourself from the past, what then?
Fellini: Then you are free to live in the present, and not seek cowardly flight toward the past—or toward the future, either.
Playboy: In what way toward the future?
Fellini: I mean that we must cease projecting ourselves into the future as though it were plannable, foreseeable, tangible, controllable—it’s not; or as though it were a dimension existing outside and beyond ourselves. We must learn to deal with matters as they are, not as we hope or fear they may eventuate. We must cope with them as they exist now, today, at this moment. We must awaken to the fact that the future is already here, to be lived in the present. In short, wake up and live!
Playboy: Though most of your protagonists, at the end of their spiritual odysseys, do learn to live with themselves as they are and with life as it is, some interpreters have seen their awakening as little more than a fatalistic resignation to the human condition.
Fellini: No, no! Not a fatalistic resignation, but an affirmative acceptance of life, a burgeoning of love for life. The return of Guido to life in 8½ is not a defeat. Rather, it is the return of a victor. When he finally realizes that he will never be able to resolve his problems, only to live with them—when he realizes that life itself is a continuous refutation of resolution—he experiences an exhilarating resurgence of energy, a return of profound religious sentiment. “I have faith,” he says, “that I am inserted into a design of Providence whose end I don’t and can’t and will never comprehend—and wouldn’t want to even if I cold. There’s nothing for me to do but pass through this panorama of joy and pain—with all my energy, all my enthusiasm, all my love, accepting it for what it is, without expecting an explanation that does not concern me, that does not involve me, that I am not called upon to give.” He is at peace with himself at last—free to accept himself as he is, not as he wished he were or might have been. That is the optimistic finale to 8½.
Playboy: Doesn’t Juliet of the Spirits have essentially the same moral?
Fellini: Essentially, yes—only carried along another, deeper plane, with more decadent undertones, and told in a less realistic way. Juliet touches on myths within human psychology; its images, therefore, are those of a fable. But it treats of a profound human reality: the institution of marriage, and the need within it for individual liberation. It’s the portrait of an Italian woman, conditioned by our modern society, yet a product of misshapen religious training and ancient dogmas—like the one about getting married and living happily ever alter. When she grows up and finds it hasn’t come true, she can neither face nor understand it; and so she escapes into a private world of remembered yesterdays and mythical tomorrows. Whatever she does is influenced by her childhood, which she recaptures in otherworldly visions; and by the future, which she brings to life in bizarre and lively fantasies. The present exists for her only in the electronic unreality of television commercials. She is finally awakened from these visions by a grim reality: the desertion of her husband; but this fulfillment of her worst fear becomes the most positive episode of her life, for it forces her to find herself, to seek her free identity as an individual. And this gives her the insight to realize that all the fears—the phantoms that lived around her—were monsters of her own creation, bred of misshapen education and misread religion. She realizes that the spirits have been necessary, even useful, and deserve to be thanked; and the moment she thanks them, she no longer fears and hates them, and they turn into positive, pleasant beings.
Playboy: Is there some specific message in this for all of us?
Fellini: A lesson—a lesson we must all learn—as Juliet finally did: that marriage, if it is to survive, must be treated as the beginning, not as the happy ending; that it’s something you have to work at; but that it’s also not the alpha and omega of human existence; and that it must not be something you accept from the outside, like an inviolate taboo, never to be shattered. Why not admit it? Marriage as an institution needs re-examining. We live with too many nonfunctioning ideologies. Modern man needs richer relationships.
Playboy: What kind?
Fellini: Extramarital and premarital. Man is not basically a monogamous animal. Marriage is tyranny, a violation and mortification of his natural instincts. A woman, on the other hand, tends to create a world around one man. The tragedy of modern man is that he needs a multiplicity of individual relationships, whereas, at least in the culture in which I live, he is still forced into a single-mated mold. Without it, his life could develop into something interesting, into a higher evolution. Curiously enough, the multiple roles of infidelity seem to bring out the best in some men; were it not for self-negating guilt, it might in most men.
Playboy: What you’re suggesting, of course, is completely contrary to the teachings of the Catholic Church. Aren’t you a Catholic?
Fellini: It’s difficult biologically and geographically not to be a Catholic in Italy. It’s like a creature born beneath the sea—how can it not be a fish? For one born in Italy, it’s difficult not to breathe, from childhood onward, this Catholic atmosphere. One who comes from Italian parents passes a childhood in Italy, enters the Church as a baby, makes his Communion, witnesses Catholic funerals—how can he not be a Catholic? Still, I have a great admiration for those who declare themselves a detached laity—but I don’t see how this can happen in Italy. Sooner or later, however—even in Italy—every man must take stock of himself, to determine to what point he is really a Catholic, or perhaps not one at all.
Playboy: Your unsparing caricatures of Catholic clerics, particularly in 8½, have led some Church theologians to the latter conclusion about you. Are they right?
Fellini: Let them say what they want. In a noncategorized form, I think I’m deeply religious, even profoundly so—because I accept life’s infinite mysteries without knowing its finite borders, accept them with joy and wonder. Is that being anti-Catholic or anti-religious? When I speak in a polemical manner about deforming our children with Catholic dogma, I’m speaking about an inhuman, inflexible application of Counter Reformation Catholicism. Guido’s Catholic teachers in 8½ were monstrous and unfeeling, but they have nothing to do with Pope John XXIII, for example, who sought to wipe away all such ignorance and help us to rediscover the true Christian faith. If a false and misguided type of Catholic education creates guilts, inhibitions and complexes, then I say it’s not only right but necessary to identify it—and, if possible, to eradicate it.
Playboy: Would you include the so called double standard of morality toward women—which divides them into “good” girls and “bad” girls—among the Church-bred afflictions that ought to be eradicated?
Fellini: Absolutely. Particularly for us Catholics, woman is seen as either the spirit or the flesh, as either the embodiment of virtue, motherhood and saintliness or the incarnation of vice, whoredom and wickedness. Either we dress her up as an ideal, a snow-white inspiration such as Dante’s Beatrice, or she becomes the lewd, laboring beast that devours her newborn son. The problem is to find the link between these opposites. But this is difficult, because we don’t really know who woman is. She remains in that precise place within man where darkness begins. Talking about women means talking about the darkest part of ourselves, the undeveloped part, the true mystery within. In the beginning, I believe that man was complete and androgynous—both male and female, or neither, like the angels. Then came the division, and Eve was taken from him. So the problem for man is to reunite himself with the other half of his being, to find the woman who is right for him—right because she is simply a projection, a mirror of himself. A man can’t become whole or free until he has set woman free—his woman. It’s his responsibility, not hers. He can’t be complete, truly alive, until he makes her his sexual companion, and not a slave for libidinous acts or a saint with a halo.
Playboy: Your spectacular exhibition of Anita Ekberg’s larger-than-life endowments on a block-long billboard in Boccaccio ’70 has been called a caricature of woman’s role, not as man’s sexual slave but as a Gargantuan goddess of eroticism. Was that your purpose?
Fellini: Yes. In the mind of that repressed little man who spies on the billboard every night, of course, she’s anything but a caricature; she becomes a mountainous creature of flesh and blood, a living embodiment of the grotesquely exaggerated image of female sexuality that stalks his stifled libido—that pressure cooker of puritan sexual inhibitions—and finally escapes to stalk him. I wanted to show metaphorically how man’s imprisoned appetites can finally burst their bonds and bloat into an erotic fantasy that comes to life, takes possession of its creator and ultimately devours him.
Playboy: Can we conclude, then, that you welcome as a healthy trend the increasing sexual freedom currently enjoyed by movies, magazines and night clubs—and the nudity on display in them?
Fellini: It’s all to the good, because it lifts the veil of mystery and obscurity, the clandestine aspect of sex which deforms it. Think what a woman must look like to a man in prison, how gross some parts of her body must appear to him. Set free, he hurries home to his girl with deformed visions. Ravenously, he re-explores the forgotten country of the woman’s body; but the monstrous desires are soon pacified, and the female myth becomes a normality once again.
Playboy: Do you agree with those who feel that a totally undraped woman loses much of her mystery?
Fellini: Only her visual mystery. Inasmuch as woman represents that hidden half of us, the religious mystery of coupling in birth, the mystical, erotical fusion that integrates the whole man, it’s clear she will always possess unfathomable secrets invisible even to the inner eye. So I see no reason to keep her covered outwardly, to keep her worldly riches buried like a pirate’s treasure in the viscera of the earth.
Playboy: The women in your films—whether prey or predator, saint or sensualist—all seem to be far more vibrantly and affirmatively alive than your self-immobilized male protagonists. Why?
Fellini: I find my women figures—like Anita Ekberg and Sandra Milo—more exciting to create, perhaps because woman is more intriguing than man, more elusive, more erotic, more stimulating.
Playboy: What inspired you to star Ekberg, whose career was in eclipse, as the voluptuous female in La Dolce Vita?
Fellini: She embodied in every detail my mental image of the role; it’s as simple as that. Her previous screenwork was irrelevant.
Playboy: How did you manage to transform her with this one role into the international sex symbol she had failed to become in Hollywood?
Fellini: I just provided her with the perfect part to elicit, perhaps for the first time, the full impact of her extravagant sensuality. I performed no mysterious alchemy. I did no more to bring out the best in her than I do with all my other actors.
Playboy: And how much is that?
Fellini: Well, once I find the flesh-and-blood incarnation of my fantasy characters—and it doesn’t matter whether they’re picked from the street or are professional actors and actresses—the next thing I try to do is to put them at ease, to strip them of their inhibitions, to make them forget technique, to transport them into a climate that allows them to laugh and cry and behave naturally. In other words, I endeavor to coax out the natural talents they already possess. If I have a method, it is to get their most spontaneous reaction. Every human being has his own irrevocable truth, which is authentic and precious and unique; and the truth of Anita Ekberg or Sandra Milo is no different from anyone else’s. If the atmosphere is right, anybody can be made to express his joys, his sadnesses, his hostilities, everything—entirely of his own accord, honestly and openly. I don’t ever want to make the mistake of forcing someone into a given character, or of limiting him in any way. Instead, I try to let him re-create his own character for the role. Because of this, I think, my results are richer and more satisfactory; the spectator finds himself in the presence of a creature of unique truth.
Playboy: Most actors are trained to create a role, to impersonate someone else, a fictional character. Yet you say you want them to portray themselves. Doesn’t this create a conflict of interests?
Fellini: Not really. Once they get used to the idea of turning inward rather than outward, most find that it comes more naturally, that it enables them to bring far more authenticity to their portrayals. For most roles, of course, only part of the actor’s own character will be germane to the character he’s playing, so I ask him to be less than completely open and spontaneous, to be only selectively self-revealing. But even where there is a deep personal identification between an actor and his role, he doesn’t simply play himself; he doesn’t strip himself bare. Complete self-exposure can be both dangerous and irrelevant to the role. I ask him instead to expose himself gradually, layer by layer, until he reaches the level where he merges and meshes completely with the character. Though his subconscious motivations and reactions will now be those of the man he’s portraying—and vice versa—the identity of player and part must remain a dramatic illusion, his seeming spontaneity must be studied, his naturalness premeditated. Despite his rapport with the role, all of his acting skills and disciplines will be necessary to bring the character believably to life. Though there may be severe labor pains, the issue of this unlikely union between instinct and technique can be beautiful, indeed. A perfect example is Marcello Mastroianni’s wonderfully sensitive performance as Guido in 8½, a part with which he deeply identified.
Playboy: So did you, if one can believe reports that the picture was your own spiritual autobiography.
Fellini: I did and it was. I wrote a story dealing with myself and my deepest secrets—or at least an idealistic approximation of me. Then I found a man who could become inhabited with all that had been inside me, and I made him the incarnation of an imaginary person closely resembling me. A mysterious air arose on the set; I found myself ordering myself around like a disembodied spirit in limbo.
Playboy: Are you as close to Mastroianni in private life?
Fellini: Almost symbiotically so. Even though we seldom see each other outside of our work periods, we have such a profound rapport that it is like a mirror before me saying, “It’s me. It’s not me…” and so on. It’s uncanny. This is the basic bond of our friendship; but he’s also very humanly simpatico. I see in him a charge of enthusiasm, innocence and charlatanry—like a smaller brother. And I’m no less an admirer of his professionalism. He’s a very gifted actor.
Playboy: Are you as deeply involved with any other actors?
Fellini: Not so intensely, though I become terribly fond of all my actors, out of all proportion—because they are my puppets, creations of my fantasy. I claim they are the world’s greatest actors and become ferociously defensive about them.
Playboy: Your wife, Giulietta Masina, has starred in several of your films. Does your personal relationship make it easy or difficult to direct her?
Fellini: Both. When I work with her, she seems the ideal actress: patient, docile, obedient, serious. She’s not difficult—I am. I’m more impatient with her than with other actors. I get irritated if she doesn’t immediately do what I have in mind. It seems incredible to me when she doesn’t respond promptly just the way I want. You see, Giulietta is the first character I think about when I do a film with her. The others come slowly to mind, many months afterward, but always around her as the central figure. So when I get impatient and irritated with her, I feel like saying, “Giulietta! You were born first and the others came after you. You’ve lived in my mind so much longer than the others; why aren’t you quicker?” I know that’s unjust, but somehow it always goes that way. But I do like to work with her.
Playboy: Is she a good actress, in your opinion?
Fellini: Excellent. I think that she would have interested me as such even if she hadn’t been my wife. Her mimicry, for example, and that little round face which can express happiness or sadness with such poignant simplicity. That little figure, with its tenderness, its delicacy, fascinates me no end. Her type is crystallized, even stylized for me. As an actress, she represents a special type, a very specific humanity.
Playboy: And as a wife?
Fellini: So many things. I’ll try to be objective, but it isn’t easy. We’ve lived together so long. The other day on the set, we celebrated our twenty-first anniversary. Twenty-one years. It doesn’t really seem that long. There are still things to discover. Where were we?
Playboy: Discussing Giulietta as a wife.
Fellini: And such a wife—tender, affectionate, eternally solicitous. She always wants to know if I feel cold or if I want to eat. When we’re shooting outdoors, she asks if my socks are wet. You know how women are. But she is not only my wife; she is also the one who inspires me. Over the years, she has become a stimulant for me, a symbol of certain feelings, certain moods, certain behavior. Our life together has been sprinkled with tragedy and joy, with tears and laughter, and this has given me material, inspiration for my work.
Playboy: Does she make any actual creative contribution?
Fellini: Only in the sense that she provides the sun and the rain that warms and waters the soil in which the seeds I sow eventually sprout—and occasionally flower into films.
Playboy: To continue your imagery, where do the seeds come from?
Fellini: I don’t always know, but somehow, from somewhere, an idea arrives, and I carry it within me like an embryo for weeks, months, years—until finally it reaches the fetal stage and begins to assume a vague but tangible shape. Then, very tentatively, I begin to work on the first rough pieces of a script.
Playboy: You’ve said that looking at portrait photos of potential characters is a stimulant to the creative process at this stage. Why?
Fellini: It’s a ritual form with me, a habit, a psychological conditioning to begin work. When I’m planning a picture, I see literally thousands of people in hundreds of mass auditions, and I keep all their photographs. I’m searching for faces to fit the characters I’m creating—or may create.
Playboy: You have a reputation for dragging out this preparatory period for month after month, as though it were a drug, until finally you must be pulled away and forced into actual shooting.
Fellini: Well, it’s not quite that addictive, and it’s not always my fault for taking so long at it. Often these protracted preparations are caused by external factors—such as not finding a producer, or a producer who loses faith, or something else beyond my control. But postponements serve the positive purpose of giving me more time to create the right atmosphere for filming—time to create a kind of oxygen tent that will allow my creatures to live. This is made from many things—the script, costumes, photographs, a trip, a meeting with a girl, a fight with a producer, a change of office, an aimless walk around the house. All of this helps create a tent with enough air for the birth of this thing. That, for me, is the real effort: to take these steps that create the condition for the birth of the work. The film I make may not turn out to be the one I had in mind, but the main point is to see if, in the first two or three weeks of shooting, this thing is actually born alive. After that, it becomes self-sustaining—as though I were no longer directing, but rather that the film were directing me, pulling me onward.
Playboy: Is there any truth to the prevalent notion that you begin shooting with little more than the outline of a script; that, in effect, you direct your films off the top of your head, improvising scenes and dialog as you go along?
Fellini: If I wanted to commit artistic and economic suicide, that would be a beautiful and spectacular way to go. But since I don’t, I arrive on the set with a script in hand—though it doesn’t really mean that much, except as a pacifier for actors who fear improvisation, and for producers who crave reassurance that the structure for a film story has been created. What does matter is that I have a very precise idea of where I want to go in the film and how I want to get there long before the camera starts to roll. Once it does, of course, I try to remain flexible enough to amend and adorn the action as the need arises—rather than adhere blindly and fanatically to the original scenario as though it were Holy Scripture.
You can’t say, “I want a baby with blue eyes, pink ears, blonde hair, that weighs seven pounds, three ounces, and with fingers just so.” No, you take a woman, make her pregnant, assist in the childbirth, and the baby is what it is, and you’re stuck with it. At the moment of parturition you can’t say, “No, no, it doesn’t have blue eyes, back it goes!” A film is the same. What does it mean to be faithful to ten pages of dialog, written five months previous, without knowing the actors or what language would be used? You don’t even know where it will be shot. You might conceive of the scene in a park, but when you get there you realize your actor with his face would not have spoken that way in a park. Or the actress wears a dress that prevents her from saying a certain line. Also, instead of filming two actors talking, you may discover while you’re filming that a close-up of a fountain or a panning shot of the rare furnishings in a drawing room will say more than the entire ten pages of dialog. In this sense I make myself available to adaptation; but I do not extemporize.
Playboy: How do you feel after completing a film? Do you ever worry about going stale, or encountering what’s called artistic paralysis?
Fellini: What a strange question. A film never ends abruptly for me. It leaves an echo, a trail, and I live with it. Even after I’ve finished shooting and cutting, it’s still with me, I still hear it, feel it, sense it. When it isn’t with me anymore, when I feel it’s finally extinguished, then another atmosphere enters, like the arrival of spring. It’s the new film—with its new personages, and its undeveloped story. You see, I don’t experience blank periods. It seems that ever since I started as a director, it’s been the same day—the same long, wonderful day. But am I at all preoccupied with failure or professional impotence? Naturally. As you know, 8½ dealt with this preoccupation. But I don’t feel the day is near when I will be empty. When it happens, I hope I’ll have the humility and good sense to stop chattering. Meanwhile, I am still filled with enthusiasm and with a consuming urge to do things.
Playboy: Is it true that you go to the movies hardly at all—even to see your own pictures?
Fellini: Very true. When I finish a film, as I said, I’m possessed by the shaping vision of my next one; and it’s always a jealous mistress. Besides, I want to live in the present, not linger in the past. As for other people’s films, I go very, very seldom. I’d rather make films than watch them.
Playboy: Surely you’ve seen a few of your contemporaries’ pictures.
Fellini: Enough to form a few impressions.
Playboy: Have you seen any of Kurosawa’s films?
Fellini: Only his Seven Samurai, but I think he is the greatest living example of all that an author of the cinema should be. I feel a fraternal affinity with his way of telling a story.
Playboy: How about Ingmar Bergman?
Fellini: I have a profound admiration for him and for his work, even though I haven’t seen all of his films. First of all, he is a master of his métier. Secondly, he is able to make things mysterious, compelling, colorful and, at times, repulsive. Because of that, he has the right to talk about other people and to be listened to by other people. Like a medieval troubadour, he can sit in the middle of the room and hold his audience by telling stories, singing, playing the guitar, reading poetry, doing sleight of hand. He has the seductive quality of mesmerizing your attention. Even if you’re not in full agreement with what he says, you enjoy the way he says it, his way of seeing the world with such intensity. He is one of the most complete cinematographic creators I have ever seen.
Playboy: Antonioni?
Fellini: I have respect for his constancy, his fanatical integrity and his refusal to compromise. Antonioni had a very difficult professional beginning. His films for many years were not accepted, and another man, less honest, less strong, would have made retreats. But Antonioni kept on his solitary road, doing what he believed he should do until he was recognized as a great creator. This has always made an enormous impression on me. He is an artist who knows what he wants to say, and that’s a lot.
Playboy: Truffaut?
Fellini: I’m terribly embarrassed, but I haven’t seen anything of his. Sorry.
Playboy: DeSica?
Fellini: Great power of achievement, and a master of his actors. He stems from our marvelous era of neorealism. He is a very good director, someone almost untouchable, because of the special place he occupied after the War.
Playboy: Some critics have drawn parallels between your work and that of the neorealistic school. Do you think there’s any validity to the comparison?
Fellini: Indeed, yes. But mine is the neorealism of the Sixties—a very different breed of cat from the neorealism of the Forties, when many of us began with great ideals, but which finally tore itself apart in social polemics and drifted off into nonpolemical comedy. By the time that happened, however, neorealism had lifted film making to the dignified level of an autonomous art, freed the film maker from the enslaved conditioning in which cinema was imprisoned—a secondary art subordinate to the mood of the public. The greatness of early neorealism consisted in giving cinema liberty, so that we could finally express ourselves in films as freely as others could with a brush or a pen.
Playboy: Since La Dolce Vita, you’ve been inundated with movie offers from America. Do you think you could express yourself freely as a film maker in Hollywood?
Fellini: Probably not, but I’ve been sorely tempted to try it anyway. I’d love to do a film there on what caught my imagination during my visits to America. But even if I had a clear idea of what to say, the practical realization of it, the actual translation of this idea into images would embarrass and probably defeat me.
Playboy: Why?
Fellini: In Italy, I know what I’m doing. I know how to handle my actors, how to dress them, how to make them believable in the surroundings I’ve created for them. I know what I want them to express because I know what I am talking about myself. Even if I throw in an extra with one line, she has a reason to be there and she’ll give truth to that one line and authenticity to those few seconds she’s on screen. But how could I do this in a strange country with strange people? How would I know, for example, what a Boston taxi driver would wear at home on Sunday afternoon? How does a cashier from a Bronx drugstore dress, smile, or react to a man insulting her? I’d be lost a thousand times a day, and that would be fatal, because cinematography, at least in my opinion, needs an absolute mastery, complete control of everything and everyone—the female star’s underwear, the leading man’s mustache, the way matches are placed on the left side of the table. This is a true and deep obstacle. It’s why an author must stay with the language that has nourished him since childhood, that has left with him a cultural deposit and a bagful of customs and traditions. So you see, the idea of a radical uprooting to work in America—or anywhere else beyond these borders—would be inconceivable to me.
Playboy: Could the right price make you change your mind?
Fellini: Money doesn’t interest me. It’s useful and good to have, but it’s not an obsession with me, and it wasn’t even when I didn’t have it. When I first came to Rome at 18, I worked on a newspaper, and at times I didn’t have enough money for lunch. But it was food I desired—not money. I have no money with me at this very moment; I never have. I even borrow for coffee from friends. Maybe I’ve been able to make money because of this. Money goes to those who don’t court it.
Playboy: And fame, too, in your case. Are you as indifferent to that?
Fellini: I would be, only it’s not as easy to ignore. It keeps impinging on one’s time and privacy. Though I’ve managed to preserve a few small sanctuaries from the unblinking eye of publicity, there are more and more invasions, especially since 8½. When I went to America, I was besieged by women who thought I had the key to happiness, some sort of recipe for joining life. They phoned at all hours and even waited for me in hotel corridors. I told them I had no answers, no amulets, no elixirs, no nothing for them, but they wouldn’t believe me. I’m a director, not a seer or a psychiatrist. What I have to say, I say in my work.
Playboy: And your work, as you said earlier, has been an attempt to escape from your past. Do you think you’ve succeeded?
Fellini: To some extent. I feel less guilty now about the things my childhood education made me feel guilty about.
Playboy: Such as sex?
Fellini: Or any intelligent use of the senses that takes you beyond the confines of puritan morality. So I feel more robust, less defenseless. But then, it’s high time for maturation, don’t you think? At my age a man should be somewhat mature. Occasionally, though, I feel that this calm understanding could be destroyed by a single, sudden, violent, unexpected emotional confrontation.
Playboy: With a woman?
Fellini: I don’t know with what or whom. But certainly it’s always possible in life, and most possible when you’re most sure of yourself.
Playboy: Are you sure of yourself?
Fellini: Not in an egotistical sense; but I feel less emotional, more collected, more at peace with myself than ever before. Though I’ve lost some of my power and potential in the process—along with my youthful pugnacity—I feel that a religious sentiment, profound but authentic, has been born within me. But I’ve had a rather fortunate life, so it’s possible that my optimism may stem from not having known much sorrow or pain.
Playboy: Do you fear growing old?
Fellini: No—probably for the same reason.
Playboy: How about death?
Fellini: Death is such a strange thought, so contrary to what we think of in our physical life, that it’s difficult to speak about it. We don’t know what it is, so a vague terror tends to seize us. It’s like a legendary continent, a faraway land that you’ve heard spoken about in contradictory terms. Some say it exists, others that it doesn’t. Some say it’s most beautiful, others that it’s horrible. Some say it’s better than this world, while others claim that nothing is as beautiful as life, that death is only silence and a forgetting. But let’s face it: There is this country, and sooner or later we’re all going there.
Playboy: Do you dread it?
Fellini: Yes. No. I don’t know. One should face death as he embraces life: with a consuming curiosity—but without fear. Nor should he delude himself by approaching either with hope; for hope is a way of idealizing the other side of the coin of fear. Faith is what is needed, not hope. You must feel that all is sacred, that all is necessary, that all is useful, that all goes well. I can’t understand an artist who seeks to show life as sterile and doomed, that we are alone and abandoned, that there is nothing left. If you deny everything, then you deny art itself, so why create it?
Playboy: Are faith and curiosity, then, your prescriptions for a happy life?
Fellini: Let’s say a full life. Happiness is simply a temporary condition that precedes unhappiness. Fortunately for us, it works the other way around as well. But it’s all a part of the carnival, isn’t it?
Playboy, 13, no. 2, February 1966; pp. 55-66
https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/2017/1...nterview-1966/
Last edited by matt72582; 08-30-18 at 06:55 PM.
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A pretty kewl video essay on Western genre.
On the other hand, if I or others stick to the great westerns, they're not dead. There's always an underrated movie waiting to be watched. But for probability's sake, I'll stick to the 1930-70s.
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A short critical essay From The Criterion website
The Graduate: Intimations of a Revolution
By Frank Rich On Film / Essays — Feb 23, 2016
Before there was “the Sixties,” there was the relatively more tranquil 1960s. To appreciate the cultural excitement whipped up by The Graduate, it’s useful to recall that it belongs to that quieter part of the decade before the apocalypse. At the time of the film’s Christmas week release in 1967, the national divisions over civil rights and the Vietnam War were raging, but the explosions of 1968—Lyndon Johnson’s abdication, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the Chicago riots—were still months away. Yet somehow this movie, technically a romantic comedy with a nominally happy ending, caught the drift of the boomer generation’s growing alienation from the status quo and captured a new zeitgeist that was in the air but had yet to fully take hold. That it did so is all the more impressive given that The Graduate contains not a single reference to a contemporary headline. The characters are uniformly upper-middle-class (or wealthier) and white. The protagonist, Benjamin Braddock, may have just graduated from college but he seems not to have heard of pot, and his many anxieties do not include a fear of the draft. When plot complications propel him from Los Angeles to the University of California in Berkeley, we don’t meet that campus’s radicals but instead some unreconstructed frat guys who seem to have been living in a bubble since the Eisenhower fifties. Just the same, intimations of a brewing youth rebellion ripple through the entire film. The Graduate, an elegant exemplar of old-school high-end Hollywood filmmaking,anticipates the counterculture without ever enlisting in it.
By sheer happenstance, I saw The Graduate as a college freshman some weeks before its actual premiere, at a sneak preview at the old Esquire Theater on Oak Street in Chicago, back in a day when sneak previews were truly “sneak”: ticket buyers weren’t told the title in advance and risked wasting an evening on a bomb. Once the opening credits revealed the movie’s identity that night, there was no uptick in anticipation. The film’s generic title promised little. Two of its stars, Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross, were complete unknowns. (Hoffman had just a few off-Broadway stage credits, and Ross was a young Universal contract player who had yet to land a significant role.) The Hollywood career of the third star, Anne Bancroft, had plateaued after the triumph of her Oscar for best actress as Annie Sullivan in The Miracle Worker (1962).
The real marquee name of the project was its director, Mike Nichols, who, though only in his midthirties, had already launched three brilliant careers—as the performing partner of Elaine May in one of the funniest and most influential improvisational comedy acts ever; as the director of Neil Simon’s first two smash hits on Broadway, Barefoot in the Park and The Odd Couple; and as a filmmaker whose first directorial undertaking, an adaptation of Edward Albee’s landmark drama Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, released a year earlier, had won Oscar nominations for all four of its main actors (among a total of thirteen nominations), two of whom, Elizabeth Taylor and Sandy Dennis, won. It was Nichols’s comic voice—urbane, sardonic, witty, and somewhat remote—and its amplification by Hoffman’s performance that gave The Graduate its unsettling tone. The sneak-preview audience left the theater with the exhilarating sense that it had been present at the birth of a phenomenon and the ascent of a star. But if you told friends about it, they’d be incredulous (“Dustin who?”)—until, that is, the moviebecame a sensation immediately upon its release.
The genesis of the film predated Virginia Woolf. A producer unknown to Nichols, Lawrence Turman, sent him The Graduate, a first novel by Charles Webb published in 1963, suggesting it “would make a good movie.” As Nichols would later recall, “It’s the only time in my whole life that that ever happened successfully.” The director thought the adaptation would be straightforward, but there were two unsuccessful attempts (one of them by Calder Willingham, who would share the screenplay credit) before he turned the job over to Buck Henry. Nichols and Henry had known each other, in passing, as seven-year-olds at the Dalton School in New York, but their real connection was in their artistic apprenticeships: like Nichols, whose partnership with May was nurtured by the Compass Players, the legendary comedy troupe in Chicago, Henry had begun his career in improvisational comedy, with a similar troupe, the Premise, in New York.
The third pass on the script proved to be the charm, because by then Nichols had found the focus of his adaptation: “A boy who was drowning in things, in objects, in affluence, fighting, and then finding there’s no way he could fight his way out of it except madness. And madness was what he found to save him.” With no firm postcollegiate plans, Benjamin returns to his parents’ luxe, Beverly Hills–ish home, where he idles away the summer floating in the pool and brooding in silence. The “madness” that rescues him arrives when he is seduced, not unwillingly, into a soulless clandestine affair with a middle-aged married friend of his parents’, Mrs. Robinson (Bancroft, who was in actuality only thirty-five when the film was made). That liaison is soon complicated by Benjamin’s infatuation with a young woman of his own generation—the Robinsons’ daughter, Elaine (Ross).
Though The Graduate upholds some of the classic tropes of Hollywood romantic comedy dating back to the 1930s—especially in its climactic deployment of a runaway bride—Benjamin’s paralyzing emotional disconnect from the world around him is what makes his story both fresh and particular to its own time. If “The Sounds of Silence,” the hit Simon & Garfunkel song that Nichols repurposed for the film’s soundtrack, indelibly captures the dehumanizing atmosphere of the affluent L.A. where Benjamin is marooned, the riddle of his profound anxiety may be aptly captured by a lyric from Bob Dylan’s 1965 “Ballad of a Thin Man”: “Something is happening here / But you don’t know what it is.” Even at the end of the film, when Benjamin has finally won what he thinks he wants, Hoffman’s suite of contradictory expressions tells us that he still doesn’t know what is happening, let alone what will happen next.
The Graduate was not an easy film to get made. “Nobody had any great hopes for it,” Nichols recalled in 2014, “and I wasn’t going to use big stars.” He had toyed early on with some known quantities, including Robert Redford and Candice Bergen, but ultimately decided to give a strenuous screen test to Hoffman, whom he’d caught playing “a transvestite Russian fishwife” off-Broadway. As the actor would later tell the writer Mark Harris for his book Pictures at a Revolution, “Nichols was wrong. I was not in any way right for that part . . . The guy’s name is Benjamin Braddock, he’s like six feet tall, he’s a track runner.” Hoffman was Jewish, nearing thirty, and nowhere near six feet. But Nichols’s instinct was right, and the actor, though not conforming to Webb’s Benjamin, made the character his own. Nichols saw that Hoffman had a quality he’d also found in Elizabeth Taylor: “What you see on the floor when you’re shooting is good, but what you see on the screen the next day is quite a lot better,” as if there were “a deal with the lab that they get better in the bath overnight.” It’s also likely that the director saw in this unknown actor the ability to portray an outsider—a fiercely smart, sharply observant onlooker always standing at a remove and stockpiling astringent judgments about everything happening around him. In a way, this description could also apply to Nichols, who was marked for life by his childhood emigration from Nazi Germany to New York, where he too found himself an outsider, unable to speak English and blend in.
The major studios all turned down The Graduate. The film was financed instead by an independent producer, Joseph Levine, who grew impatient as the shooting ran over schedule, into a fourth month. Levine exhibited scant optimism about the movie’s prospects, and some of the most influential critics, including Pauline Kael and John Simon, dismissed it, as later would a writer at the New Yorker, Jacob Brackman, whose screed went on for some twenty pages. But prodded by some favorable reviews and word of mouth, audiences embraced The Graduate wholeheartedly, particularly the huge boomer audience that had started to wield its enormous box-office clout.
This was the second time in 1967 that an iconoclastic American movie tapping into the incipient late-sixties mood had overridden some critical-establishment disdain to win large young audiences and Oscar nominations. The first was Bonnie and Clyde, whose director, Arthur Penn, and screenwriters, David Newman and Robert Benton, were openly inspired by France’s New Wave cinema; it would be hard to imagine their neo–gangster movie without antecedents like Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless. That was not the style of The Graduate. While there is some bravura filmmaking along the way—a long montage capturing the alternately carnal and catatonic interludes of Benjamin’s lost summer, a final sequence that has become an icon of American movies—what would prove to be Nichols’s enduring directorial strengths are to be found in his movie’s crisp and witty screenplay, unerring casting, and the strong performances he elicited from the entire cast. Every role is memorably etched: William Daniels and Elizabeth Wilson as Benjamin’s parents, Murray Hamilton as Mr. Robinson, Norman Fell as an agitated Berkeley landlord, and even Buck Henry in a cameo as a hotel clerk. Nichols often cited Elia Kazan as a role model, and he shared Kazan’s zeal for prioritizing the casting and directing of actors, as well as Kazan’s ability to bring off the usually hopeless task of translating great plays to film. It could be argued that, along with The Graduate, the most enduring works of Nichols’s long career are both stage adaptations: Virginia Woolf and Angels in America (2003).
It was for The Graduate that Nichols, then thirty-six, won his only Academy Award for best director, in 1968. While both The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde were nominated for best picture, they lost to a more conventional Hollywood slice of social realism, the Norman Jewison–directed In the Heat of the Night, a racial drama set in a small Southern town. Portentously enough, Oscar night that April had to be postponed two days because of the King assassination. Before long, American movies would more explicitly reflect a nation in the throes of tumult and sweeping change: Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Brian De Palma’s Greetings, and Richard Lester’s Petulia arrived in 1968, followed by Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider, Robert Downey Sr.’s Putney Swope, Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool, and Penn’s Alice’s Restaurant in 1969. The next year would bring Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H, Michael Wadleigh’s Woodstock, Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces, and Nichols’s own Catch-22.
Next to these films and those of the Coppola-Scorsese-Lucas-Spielberg New Wave soon to follow, The Graduate might seem to belong to another age. But in truth it straddles both the old and the new. It survives not just as a peerless Hollywood entertainment but as a one-of-a-kind cinematic portrait of America when it, like Benjamin Braddock at the edge of his parents’ swimming pool, teetered on the brink.
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Dr. Strangelove: The Darkest Room
By David Bromwich
On Film / Essays — Jun 28, 2016
When Stanley Kubrick bought the motion picture rights to the 1958 thriller Red Alert, by the retired Royal Air Force navigator Peter George, he meant to direct an action film about a nuclear war triggered by a solitary madman. Some way into his work on the script, however, Kubrick realized the story was too appalling for serious treatment and decided to recast it as an out-and-out satire. He had begun rewriting with George along those lines when he decided to call up Terry Southern, a Texas writer known for fiction with a dark deadpan humor. As Southern would recall, Kubrick thought he could detect in Southern’s novel The Magic Christian “certain indications” of the approach he was aiming for. “He told me he was going to make a film about ‘our failure to understand the dangers of nuclear war.’ He said he could only see it now as ‘some kind of hideous joke.’ ” Southern went to work accordingly, and the process remained collaborative. In the end, he and Kubrick revised the scenes for each day’s shooting on their limousine ride from London to Shepperton Studios, near Heathrow Airport.Historically, Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb registers the terrifying impact of the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, which brought the world to the brink of nuclear destruction. A more particular stimulus came from scholastic arguments in the 1960 presidential campaign regarding the peril of a “missile gap” that was supposed to have yielded advantage to the Soviet Union in the manufacture and deployment of intercontinental ballistic missiles. John Kennedy ran to the right of his opponent, Richard Nixon, on that issue then, but the missile gap turned out to be a sham, just as Kubrick and many others suspected. Another nonfictional element was critical to the plot: Kennedy’s predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower, had approved U.S. contingency plans for an all-out nuclear attack. As Eric Schlosser points out in his 2013 book Command and Control, President Eisenhower saw the dangers but declined to obstruct the completion of the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP), which specified the conditions for massive retaliation by the military acting in the absence of civilian leadership. Once triggered, such an attack could never be recalled. This was the basis for Wing Attack Plan R—the command issued in Dr. Strangelove in a surge of psychotic inspiration by Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper.
Dr. Strangelove was Kubrick’s seventh feature film. His career had begun in his teens, when he worked as a staff photographer for Look magazine, and he said once in an interview that setting up a darkroom was good practice for making movies: the right preparation for any line of work was to organize a whole project and see it through. Writing, photographing, and editing his first films on a shoestring budget, Kubrick turned himself into a director whom the studios would back to do whatever he pleased. He made no large claims for his early work and would later disavow all of the big-studio epic Spartacus (1960) except the scene of gladiatorial training, but he took some well-earned pride in The Killing (1956), a crime story about a robbery during a horse race; Paths of Glory (1957), a film of the First World War that is centered on a court-martial after a defeat in battle; and Lolita (1962), which he transformed from a dandyish satire into an unsettling romantic drama. Two traits marked all of these films, and distinguished them from the work of most of Kubrick’s contemporaries: an insistence on grown-up subject matter and a disquieting portrayal of abstract space, with a correspondingly diminished emphasis on character. The man behind the camera was possessed of uncanny powers of detachment. This gave his films a style at once formal, rigorous, and unfamiliar.
Kubrick’s cinematic intelligence never shone more brightly than in his summoning of the cast and crew for Dr. Strangelove. Peter Sellers, a major supporting actor in Lolita the year before, had agreed to play four parts here, including the Texan pilot of the B-52 that eludes Russian radar and air defenses. Accounts vary regarding the change of plan that followed, but if we can credit Southern’s version, Sellers sprained his ankle badly in an accident off the set and reinjured it in an effort to negotiate the difficult space of the fuselage. The studio insurers then forbade him to play any part that required athletic movement under stress, and at this point Kubrick decided the famous actor’s replacement as the bomber pilot ought to be a real Texan, and preferably an unknown face. He brought in Slim Pickens—a former rodeo clown, relatively new to acting—and Pickens carried to perfection the role of Major Kong.
A constant strength of the movie is the way that incidents, characters, or particular lines of dialogue straddle the boundary between the fantastic and the all too real. Pickens, as Major Kong, is pathetically convincing when he delivers his speech to a crew poised on the brink of “nucular combat, toe-to-toe with the Rooskies.” With instinctive fatherly grace, choked up by empathy, he says, “I got a fair idea the kinda personal emotions that some of you fellas may be thinkin’. Heck, I reckon you wouldn’t even be human bein’s if you didn’t have some pretty strong personal feelin’s about nucular combat.” The rest of the crew—among them, James Earl Jones in an early role—are the ethnic mix required in every war movie since Shakespeare wrote Henry V. They listen to his speech with due sobriety, and go on with their work.
Human beings for Kubrick possess something of the quality of mobile dolls or mannequins. (It seems plausible to describe this unclassifiable director as, among other things, an intellectual cartoonist in the manner of Wyndham Lewis or Saul Steinberg.) Human actions, in his view, are governed by determinations beyond our grasp. Our own approval of our actions is so finely self-deceived that the best thing an artist can do is to photograph them and let the pictures show what is happening. The hidden mover operates through orders or instructions, but also by means of verbal formulas that seem to explain the world. Consider the paranoid declaration by General Ripper against the national menace of fluoridated water: “I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.” Sterling Hayden, as Ripper, plays the line for as clear and rigorous a dedication to duty as the generals must have felt who urged Kennedy to bomb Cuba in October 1962. And Kubrick prepares for this speech by photographing Hayden’s opening monologue at a sheer monumental angle, from under his granite jaw—a camera setup reminiscent of fascist propaganda, which the film never outwardly mocks. Indeed, the shading of all the scenes with Ripper is sustained just this side of cartooning; he is at once an absurdity and a terrifying father-commander, every inch of him dead with purpose. The magnificent performance is carried off with just one prop, a cigar.
Hayden’s is a realistic rendition, within type, of a grotesque model—a kind of representation Kubrick would continue to favor, in A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Full Metal Jacket (1987). Yet Kubrick loved adventurous acting of a more idiosyncratic sort when it drove to the edge. He cherished the improvisations of Sellers in Lolita and Jack Nicholson in The Shining (1980); and he gave Sellers plenty of scope for invention in two of his three roles in Dr. Strangelove: as the ex-Nazi physicist Strangelove, who in moments of passion calls the president “Mein Führer,” and as the president himself, Merkin Muffley (who looks a good deal like Adlai Stevenson, the symbol, for conservatives, of everything intellectual and unmanly about American liberalism).
The central role of General Buck Turgidson went to a talent quite distinct in kind from the protean Sellers. Kubrick had admired George C. Scott as Shylock in a New York production of The Merchant of Venice, and Scott makes both a credible portrait and a convincing caricature of the normal general with a normal love of war. His strut, his snarl, his guttural laugh and grunt, his way of slapping his hard belly as he runs through the options in the emergency, the hunch of his shoulders as he cups the phone so his presence will be undetected in a hotline conference call—in every one of General Turgidson’s postures, his mouth is wide open, to advise, confide, exhort, or placate. As he talks and listens, a huddle of America’s military and diplomatic elite can be glimpsed in the throes of crisis management. The room they are in, cavernous and marmoreal, is photographed flat.
The extraordinary war room set was built 100 feet by 130 feet, with a ceiling 35 feet high, to the specifications of Kubrick and Ken Adam—the set designer for Dr. No (1962), who would go on to many subsequent Bond movies as well as Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975). Nobody had ever seen anything like it. (There has never been a darker place.) Yet anyone who thought about these things in the early 1960s must have imagined there was such a chamber inside or underneath the Pentagon. One comes to know the war room in Dr. Strangelove as an immaculate profane sanctum, an object of wonder alike for its polished black Formica floor, its enormous circular table, and its suspended halo of fluorescent light. The president, his advisers, the Russian ambassador, and an impressive array of generals sit comfortably around the table as if it were their natural habitat. In little stacks in front of the generals are strategic studies with titles you can read if you try. One of them is called World Targets in Megadeaths.
The dialogue in every scene is keyed to the setting. Only the war room could have yielded a suitable environment for the gravely therapeutic phone call by the American president to the Soviet premier: “Of course I like to speak with you—of course I like to say hello! Not now but anytime, Dimitri. I’m just calling up to tell you something terrible has happened.” General Ripper’s bunkerlike office appears made to order for the unraveling of his cadenza on fluoride—“the most monstrously conceived and dangerous Communist plot we have ever had to face”—whose effects he says he first became aware of “during the physical act of love.” Back in the war room, between the phone calls, Dr. Strangelove speaks with obvious warmth and aptitude of the feasibility of creating a postnuclear super race, to be preserved underground from further nuclear attack—a race that would of course include specimens of the military command and top government officials.
Kubrick worked hand in hand, too, with his cinematographer, Gilbert Taylor. Wide and medium shots of the war room keep the mysterious background of hollow space forever present in our mind’s eye, while a regular counterpoint against these indoor expanses is provided by the eerie footage of the B-52 pursuing its long trajectory over arctic wastes. Still another stroke of craft, as vital as the alternations of majestic indoor and outdoor landscape, was Kubrick’s choice of a handheld camera for the conventional combat between the rival American troops at Ripper’s air base. With the juddering frame, and bumps and bruises on the soundtrack, we are made to feel the texture of the older way of battle that the generals love. At the same time, we are held back from intoxication by the startling violence of the fight.
Dr. Strangelove is one of the masterpieces of filmmaking. And though photographed in England by an expatriate who would never return, it is very much an American masterpiece, brimful of American types and stereotypes, American madness and ingenuity, every species of American idiolect, from regional slang to institutional euphemism. The rotating episodes in the Strategic Air Command base, the war room, and the cockpit of the rogue B-52 move forward in punctual succession, but individually the scenes have all the slowness of a bureaucratic process. The deep preoccupation of Dr. Strangelove is, in fact, not war itself but rather the political development of which modern war has been the largest symptom: the bureaucratization of terror.
The black-and-white medium imparts a quality suggestive of documentary treatment, which goes with the visual style of matter-of-fact sublimity. But stretches of the film turn out to be literally black. Before the bomb is ridden down to its destination by Major Kong, we are with him inside the bomb bay, a closetlike gloom, barely illuminated by a flashlight and the sparks from a short circuit. General Ripper’s office is dark at midday, the blinds shut tight, the desk lamp shattered by bullets, the fluorescent ceiling lights doused for security. Go back to the war room for a final look and you notice that the only bright thing is Dr. Strangelove; and even he wears tinted glasses. This genius of destruction—who bears a strong physical likeness to the young Henry Kissinger—has hair that is wavy and white, Aryan white, polar white; and as we learn, close to the polar ice cap will be found the Doomsday Machine that the Russians have built in secret. On hearing of that development, the prudent remnant in the war room are aghast—or rather, all are except Dr. Strangelove.
What seems most unusual about the film, considered as a comedy, is that it prompts a kind of laughter that may lead back to thought. Like every great satire, it contains a germ of sympathy that takes us to the brink of compassion before it pulls us back. As 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) would show, Kubrick looks on people as something other than the earnest strivers and helpers we like to imagine we are. In all of his films, individuals are photographed almost neutrally, without flattering close-ups. He would no more deliver these than he would enforce a pointed cut to elicit a predictable laugh or a groan. His is an abstract method, depopulated to the largest practicable extent, so as to approach a geometrical purity.
His early film Killer’s Kiss (1955) has a remarkable sustained shot of a fugitive clambering up a fire escape and running across the flats of a New York rooftop. The camera halts at the edge of the roof to observe the crazy weavings as the man grows smaller in the distance, then larger as he comes close again. The shot seems to say: Here is the horizon on which this creature will live and die. It implies a morality of art that Kubrick found equally suited to the men in the war room and the B-52 crew strapped in to their miniature posts on their world-annihilating mission.
A canonical satire that Dr. Strangelove holds steadily in view is Gulliver’s Travels. Jonathan Swift, in his impersonation of an eighteenth-century explorer memoirist, offered a point-by-point negation of Enlightenment humanism, and Kubrick aimed for an approach just as unsparing toward the optimism of mass democracy and modern technology: the little-guy heroes of Dr. Strangelove are slated to bomb “the missile complex at Laputa.” What Swift’s novel did for the age of the orrery, Kubrick doubtless hoped his film would do for the age of the cyclotron. Yet Swift elsewhere added a reservation about the mode in which he worked: “Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own”—a pertinent warning about how cheaply satire may buoy up the complacency of the spectator. Only by a masterly deployment of cinematic realism, grafted onto a plot and characters of the grossest extravagance, was Kubrick able to construct a mirror in which we discover a face that resembles our own.
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Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the BombStanley Kubrick View Comments (0)
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