[nortis]

The Master speaks on life, art,
and Carlos Castaneda

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INTERVIEW BY TONI MARAINI
Translated by A. K. Bierman

Federico Fellini's fantasy world, which has become more dreamlike over the years, shows us the spectacle of life. Yet, paradoxically, the most surreal of Italian directors invites us to reflect on reality.

What is this reality, which contains everything that happens? Where is it? In us? Outside of us? In our memory, which turns into myth? In the real events that seem like dreams or in dreams that materialize in an immense farce wherein existence is the tragicomic appearance? Like Pirandello before him, Fellini meditates on the ease with which we cross the borders that supposedly mark the difference between reality and appearance.

As in the short film The Interview, which he made for Italian television, Fellini identities a film director with the demiurge of a Great Spectacle. "My films are not for understanding. They are for seeing," Fellini reminds anyone who persists in undervaluing the aim of his aesthetic orientation.

I talked about this and other things with Fellini in his Rome studio sometime after his last film, La Voce della Luna (The Voice of the Moon). Courteous, cordial, gifted with a good sense of humor, Fellini, who is mistrustful of journalists — and who loves paradox and ambiguity — kindly tried not to talk about this mistrust. "Really, we should chat about other things," he told me.


You don't like to give interviews and it's difficult for a journalist to get one. You should know I'm more a poet than a journalist.


Splendid.

Here's something that will amuse you. Because of the anxiety I had about doing this interview, I woke up voiceless this morning, unable to make a sound!


Perfect. I love journalists who don't talk much.

I'm reluctant to give interviews because I believe we should avoid them and I'm trying to hold to this sane decision. But in certain cases I end up by accepting, because there are friends who insist I do interviews. Then there's the curiosity of meeting somebody new. Also it's flattering; so out of an indecent vanity and a shameless desire to prattle about myself, I consent.

I've given a lot of interviews; so, I don't trust what I say. I repeat myself. I try to remember what I've already said and what I still haven't said. For fear of repeating something I've already said, I invent other things.

You mistrust yourself, then?

Yes, that's right. I mistrust myself, not the journalist, even if for fifty years I've had the feeling that journalists asked me stupid questions.

An interview is a halfway point between a psychoanalytical sitting and a competitive examination. So, I experience a slight uneasiness about all the interviews I've given. I try to rethink myself rather than repeat myself. And besides, I have some embarrassing limits. Sometimes I don't have answers.


Giuletta Masina, Anthony Quinn,
and clown friend in La Strada



Your answers are already in your films, by having created them.

That's right. The author's most important answer is the work itself, and in my work people have found the few things I tried to say. Despite that, the author generally is the least suited to talk about his work.

Those who see the film want to ask questions, and, after all, this need is stimulated by creation. In order to try to understand your last film, for example, I reread some paragraphs from Krishnamurti, whom you know as a thinker.

Yes, yes. In which book did you find these paragraphs? I'd like to see them.

Nevertheless, I don't think that an author, when he creates, poses "others" problems. Really, when I'm working, I don't think of others. Certainly, the author is conscious of the, as we say, "craft" side of his own creation, of the how to express what he wants to say. But I don't think he worries too much about the problem of why and who to tell.

Yet, even if you don't tell it "to others," like every creator you tell it to yourself. In this self-telling, doesn't reevaluation go on, a gradual, revelatory consciousness of self?

As in life generally, the experience of working brings a greater mastery at the technical level, and, therefore, better reasoning about choices and how to carry them out. But in the deeper sense of knowing to which you alluded, the idea that through my work I may have a greater knowledge of myself, I will tell you I don't think there has been an evolution. On my last birthday, a friend asked me what it meant for me to be seventy, and my spontaneous response was, "Seventy? It seems to me I've always been seventy!"

So you see, my answer reflects my true feeling. For me, at seventy, I'm not much different from what I was at forty, thirty-five, twenty-five, or even earlier.

This doesn't so much mean you've always had the feeling of being seventy, but rather — if I understand you — that reaching this age and looking back you have the feeling of always having had the same age from youth on.


Yes, the adolescent age. Exactly. It's totally an adolescent age. Whoever has created knows this state that I would call "motionless time."

But it's precisely this state of pure consciousness and spontaneity that anyone who creates tries to conquer or rather to safeguard.

You're referring still to our Krishnamurti!

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

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

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

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

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

This was the most exhausting one, you said.

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

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

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