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From a 1990 Interview by Toni Maraini 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! 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. For
me a clownesque talent in an actor is the most precious gift she can
have. Giuletta's the kind of actress who's very congenial with what
I want to do, with my taste. My
slowness in starting a film is certainly unacceptable in a profession
that requires planning, but I confess to needing this climate in order
to begin a film. When I've begun, I try to find a lighthearted mood,
that unfathomable poise of story telling, that pleasure I experienced
in filming The Interview. That
short movie was filmed day by day while making it up. I'm aiming more
and more toward this kind of film. So, for La Voce della Luna,
my latest film, I tried to do the same thing, to do like the circus
people do: create a scene, a spectacle for nothing. I need to construct
the scenario from life — with buildings, lights, situations, seasons
— as a premise in order to see how things are going. For
this film, I designed and created everything, from buildings to the
publicity. Then every once in a while I visited the set, saw it empty,
saw the dust invading, some windows shattered by the wind, and I asked
myself, "What's happening?" At the risk of appearing romantic,
I'll tell you that something in me said, "You'll see, the piazza
will come alive, the sacristan will appear at the church's portico,
someone will go into a store to buy something." And
so it was. As if by necessity, the set came alive. I let the film happen;
important things were tossed off as banalities, and casual things seemed
important. I wanted to achieve the naturalness of The Interview.
Making
a film is an adventurous journey. Every film has its troubles, its delays,
but the obstacles on a journey represent part of the journey itself.
The trip is enriched by difficulties that reveal mysterious, even providential
expressions of friendship. I
experience pleasure when I find myself in front of something that is
the absolute truth, not because it resembles life, but because it's
true as an image for itself, as a gesture. And therefore vital. It's
the vitality that makes me appreciate and feel that the action succeeded.
I think the expression of an artist's work finds consensus when, whoever
enjoys it feels as if they're receiving a charge of energy, like a growing
plant does, of something pulsing, mysterious, vibrant with life... Woman
is a marvel; woman is a universe. This may be a tantric conception:
Woman is the alien part of man, but she is higher than he, because women
are born adults, ancient. You're born knowing everything. As mothers,
you're superior. For survival, an archetypal rebellion exists in women's
memory, because man has invented for himself an intellectual supremacy,
a violence he uses to dominate her. But the struggle is unequal.
About a film Fellini never started, the one about Carlos Castañeda. It’s
a very complicated story. I
first looked for Castañeda through his publishers. I talked with
the publisher, who gave me the address of Castañeda’s agent,
a Ned Brown in New York. The publisher told me it would be easy for
Brown to give me Castañeda’s address. Once a year a Mexican
boy brought the publisher manuscripts. Ned Brown told me he had never
met Castañeda. Persisting
in my search, I was told that Castañeda was in an insane asylum,
even that he was dead. Someone else said he’d met him and that
he was alive, that he had seen him at a lecture Castañeda gave.
Then, in Rome, there was a Mrs. Ioghi who put me in contact with him.
And I finally met Castañeda. Castañeda’s
personality is quite different from what you might imagine. He seemed
like a Sicilian — a cordial, easygoing, smiling Sicilian host.
Brown skin, black eyes, a very white smile. He has the effusiveness
of a Latin, a Mediterranean. He’s Peruvian, not Mexican. This
likable gentleman, who had seen all my films, told me that one day with
Don Juan, thirty or forty years ago, he had seen my film, La Strada
— which was made in 1952. Don Juan had told him, "You will
have to meet the director of this film." He said that Don Juan
had prophesied this meeting. That’s what Castañeda told
me. I told you that he came to find me, here, in this living room, seated
right here. From
the beginning I was fascinated by his book The Teachings of Don
Juan, a book about esoteric, parapsychological ventures. Then
I was fascinated by the overall idea: that of a scientific man, an anthropologist,
who starts with a speculative, scientific purpose, a man who keeps his
feet on the ground, watches where he’s going and literally looks
at the ground, in fields, in vegetable gardens, in glades, toward the
hills — where mushrooms grow. This man of science then finds himself,
after initiation, following a path that brings him into contact with
some ancient Toltecs. I
like the route supplied by a scientific, rational curiosity, a route
that he took with a rational attention and which, at the same time,
led him toward the mysterious world, a world we define in a vague way
as "irrational." This
relation between science and a supernatural world seems especially interesting.
In this connection, you talked about your experience with LSD, your
belief in Jung’s psychoanalysis, and your friendship with Roll,
the most famous Italian clairvoyant. Yes,
this seems to me the end point of true science. The more it advances,
protected by its parameters, its mode of inquiry, its certainties, and
its doubts, also its distrust, the closer it comes to something that
is "the mystery." And, therefore, it approaches a religious
vision of the phenomenon it’s investigating. The
one thing that fascinated and also somewhat alienated me — an Italian,
a Latin, a Mediterranean, conditioned by a Catholic education —
was Castañeda’s and Don Juan’s particular vision of
the world. I saw something inhuman there. Independently of Don Juan,
who is charming in a literary way and whom we are made to see as an
old sage, I couldn’t help being invaded at times by a feeling of
strangeness. As if I were confronted with a vision of a world dictated
by a quartz! Or a green lizard! What
I found fascinating was that you felt transported to a point of view
never before imagined, never suspected, that truly had you breathing
outside yourself, outside of your humanity, and that for an instant
gave you an unfamiliar shiver of belonging to other elements, to elements
of the vegetable world, animal world, even the mineral world. A feeling,
that is, of silences, of extraterrestrial, extra-planetary colors. This
was what seduced my propensity for the fantastic, the visionary, the
unknown, the enigmatic. In
Don Juan’s vision of the world, there was no comfort, nothing of
what so many other texts can give you or that other esoteric authors
like Rudolph Steiner or the Templars give. In short, Castañeda’s
stories, unlike so many other esoteric or initiatory texts that try
to tell you about other dimensions, offered a vision lacking any psychological
comfort. This was what made them terrible and fascinating for me. Yet
I seemed to find myself in an asphyxiated world. You
told me once that from the moment you arrived in Los Angeles, where
Castañeda was waiting for you, some strange events began. Phenomena
and wonders popped up. When he came to my hotel, he brought along some
women. I never saw him again, but after that I found strange messages
in my room and objects moved around. I think it was black magic. His
women, but not Castañeda, went with me to Tulun, and the same
things happened there. You
felt threatened, and Castañeda disappeared. It’s
been some years — that was in 1986 — and I still haven’t
been able to figure out what really happened. Maybe Castañeda
was sorry to have brought me there and worked out a series of phenomena
that discouraged me from making my film. Or maybe his associates didn’t
want me to make a film and did these things. Anyway, it was all too
strange, so I decided not to make the film. I
was able to translate sounds into colors, an experience that happened
to me afterward. I could chromatize sounds. It’s a faculty that
can surprise us, but which seems natural to me, given that life is a
single thing, a totality that we have learned to divide, file, separate,
tying different sensations together in different ways. Here
I was seated under that poplar at Gambettola, and I heard the ox lowing
in the stable. At the same time, I saw coming out of the stable’s
wall something fibrillating, like an enormous tongue, a mat, a carpet,
a flying carpet moving slowly in the air. I
was sitting with my back to the stall, but I could see everything around
me and behind me, 360 degrees. And this wave dissolved, passing through
me, like a huge fan of very tiny, microscopic rubies that shimmered
in the sun. Then it disappeared. This
phenomenon of translating sounds into colors, the chromatic equivalent
of sound, stayed with me for many years. I could tell you about other
such episodes that happened when I was a child, and also when I was
twenty and had come to Rome. But let’s go back to what happened under the poplar. At a certain moment, while I was playing, I seemed to see myself up above, very high, I seemed to be swinging there, and to hear a light wind in my hair. Then I felt — it’s difficult for me to describe it — that I was solidly planted in the ground. And that little boy I saw — which was me — now had his legs sunk in the ground, so far that I felt I had roots. And the whole body was covered by a kind of hot, thick blood that rose, rose, rose up to the head because of the sound that I was making ("whooo") while I was playing. I heard this sound with a different organ, magnificent, more... Like
a mantra! It
was a mantra, yes, like "ommm." And then this feeling of rapture,
of lightness, of lightness and power, power in the roots and lightness
above in the branches shaking in the sky. I had become the poplar! These
are the great intuitions and feelings, the great visionary wisdom of
childhood that one has to tell later as fantasies. Let’s say they
need to assume the form of fables. The fable is always the more human,
and also the more faithful, way of recounting. My grandmother could
have been a character in a fable herself. She was an old peasant woman;
she was capable of great tenderness. She was an old, tall, thin woman
with many petticoats. I
still live on the fantasy income from those summers spent with my grandmother.
Even La Strada lifted a little from memories of those
summer endings and autumn beginnings in the country, from that almost
spiritual contact with the animals, smells, places. I remember the first
veglia in the stable. Peasant
men got together in the stable at night to drink, and eat bread and
cheese. It was a way for them to be together for some hours, even up
to eleven at night, which was late for them because they had to get
up at four in the morning. Besides
telling stories, they laughed, joked; they laughed talking about women.
The laughs were a way of exorcising, of defending themselves, a form
of nervousness. And I, still a young boy, didn’t understand very
well why, when the men were talking about women, they poked each other
with their elbows and laughed. As if they were alluding to something
vaguely comic, but also indecent, something from which they defended
each other, protected each other, conspiring to create a solidarity... I
lend my body, my common sense, or talent to something that is a stream,
a stream that invites me, obliges me, forces me to personify myself
in so many things, persons, thoughts, attitudes. And there, just at
the moment in which I’m not there — since I’m in so many
places taken up by so many details — is, I believe, my pivot point. I
believe that for me this is happiness — to lose one’s memory,
to forget the self, the part you call yourself, which is really just
a superstructure. This is the part you forget in order to be inhabited
by an energy that borrows your body and your nervous system. It’s
important to put yourself in a condition to be everlastingly born. In
any case, I consider myself particularly fortunate because of my profession.
Which isn’t a profession, but only a path, a route for amusement,
for levity. It can lead you to have — in a free, nonschematic,
nondogmatic way — intuitions that others have had with more sacrifices
and in a more dramatic way. It’s a game that puts you in touch
with other territories, intuitions of different possibilities. Perhaps
these intuitions are paler, less colorful than those earned more dramatically
and knowingly, with more sacrifices. I’m
embarrassed to confess, no, I don’t go to the movies much. I’ve
never gone much. As a boy in Rimini, they let me go to the movies once
a week. No,
no, it wasn’t a matter of cost. Our family was petit bourgeois.
My father was a sales representative. My brother and I went to the movies
accompanied by Alfredo, a handyman who worked in my father’s warehouse. When
I came to Rome, at eighteen, I began to go more often. There were two
cinemas on the street where I lived, San Giovanni. But I went most of
all because I was fascinated by the crude variety shows. First there
was the film and immediately after it the variety shows. I was taken by those colored posters. The theater put photos of the film outside and also the huge playbills for the variety shows that had pictures of these beautiful fat women with naked thighs and piggish faces. If I saw some films then, I owe it to the attraction of these playbills. What kind of films did Fellini see in his youth? American.
There were only American films then. The Italian films were either about
war or Romans; and there was always fascist propaganda — these
were the early forties. They weren’t very seductive. For
my generation, born in the twenties, movies were essentially American
— a cinema supported by the most powerful press office that the
history of film may have ever had. Even today, the sympathy Americans
enjoy is due to their movies, movies that have always told us —
and during those times in Italy, this was perceived more yearningly
and strikingly than today — that there was another country, another
dimension to life, a dimension more fanciful than the Italian priests’
Sunday sermons about paradise. American
movies were more effective, more seductive. They really showed a paradise
on earth, a paradise in a country they called America. For our generation,
this was an inexhaustible source of admiration for a country, a people,
movie personalities, for a nonchalant way of acting, without rhetoric. Even
the Americans’ military rhetoric was acceptable, because the heroes
were Gary Cooper, Clark Gable. They were cheerful guys who had nothing
to do with the obligatory sadness of our soldiers. In our films from
that time, our soldiers had to be mangled, starved, ragged. In order
to get people interested, the Italian soldier had to die or be seriously
wounded! Meanwhile, everything went swimmingly for the American soldier,
who got married, maybe to a beautiful actress like Myrna Loy. However,
I didn’t go to movies much. But I loved them. I loved seeing the
variety show from the stalls like holds of pirate ships, seething with
spectators. Take Sunday afternoon, for example. It seemed like going
into a big, hot potbelly — a potbelly of rascally humanity —
that consummated a magic rite, which was to dream together. In
the little towns in winter, the movie theater was like a tiny galaxy,
a planet under a spell, a grand passion that seems forgotten today.
Or that no longer seems to have the same seductiveness it had when I
was young. Now the people stay home to watch television. Until
seven or eight years ago, we made around 100 to 150 pictures each year.
Today, it’s a miracle if there are ten in production. That’s
really okay, but it’s always with or for television. And these
are films made under reduced, censored circumstances, a castrating way
of dealing with a fable that needs telling. Almost
all the studios, Elios, Incom, and so forth, have closed down. Half
of Cinecitta has been sold, turned into Cinecitta II, which is a commercial
center. Now it looks like they’re also selling the other half.
The only place that’s left is where I made my last film, at Pontina,
which was created by Dino De Laurentis in 1960. But it’s having
continued failure. Americans often give us impeccable films, very well directed, with splendid actors, with stories that tell about their own country. The whole American show keeps something in mind that we, in our conceit as spoiled children, look at almost with distaste. They keep in mind a Master of Ceremonies’ fundamental fact. He knows that to tell something to someone he has to seduce his audience with entertainment. Journalists, writers, poets, playwrights, directors are consistent in this sense. |