"How did you meet Fellini?" "It was a sort of fairy tale for me." "I've told the story many times, and so has Fellini, but we each told completely different stories." "I'll tell you my story." "It was in Venice in 1954 at the screening of La Strada." "I had a voracious appetite for films." "I went to the festivals at Cannes and Venice to see as many films as possible." "I saw four or five a day." "I had no right of admission." "I was very shy but somehow I managed to get tickets for the films." "So on the evening La Strada was shown - I knew nothing about Fellini " "I was in one of the front rows and from the first images, I was completely amazed, enraptured..." "I was captivated by this world into which Fellini drew me and it was a great shock for me as a cinephile." "I mean, I still feel this way." "So I was overwhelmed and I did not realise that the film had not been well received." "As I was at the front, I wasn't really aware of it." "I was so captivated by the screen, in the front row, that I did not realise what was happening." "At the end, the film was booed." "Everyone walked out." "So I came brutally down to earth from the world of La Strada into this hostile auditorium." "And I had an idea, which could be taken for a calculated opportunity but which wasn't at all." "I said to myself, somewhere in the middle of this rout, this catastrophe, there must be a very unhappy man, Fellini." "So perhaps it would be a good idea to tell him that at least one person liked his film." "So I asked to be shown where he was and I saw a man with a woman in a rather ridiculous ballerina costume" " Giulietta - and the poor unhappy pair were going back to their hotel." "I ran to catch up with Giulietta and I saw a face which was the very picture of suffering." "She looked a bit ridiculous in her white party dress and she had two black tears which ran down to her neckline." "I said, "Is that Mr Fellini?" She said, "Yes, that's him."" "So I approached Fellini again." "He was like an elephant, a great man utterly dejected." "I said, "Do you speak French?" He said no, rather harshly." "I plucked up the courage to say, "Listen, I'll tell you anyway."" ""It is the most beautiful film in the festival." "Thank you."" "And then I left, what else could I do?" "It was a little embarrassing." "I turned round and saw these two people going back to their hotel alone." "It really was a picture of desolation." "It reminded me of Masaccio's painting of Adam and Eve banished from paradise at the Carmines in Florence." "The very picture of dereliction." "Because he was walking fast and she was trying to catch up in her stiletto heels, 2 metres behind, not quite able to reach him." "That's the picture I have." "Afterwards I spoke about it with Fellini, because we saw each other again, and I knew he was telling this story in his own "Felliniesque" way." "He said, "Yes, I saw a little Frenchman who accosted me, and he had tears in his eyes and he said things which I didn't understand."" ""And I was so astounded that I bumped into a lamppost and bruised myself."" "What an imagination!" "That was how I met Fellini." "I saw him again and he took me on as his assistant for his next film, which was Il Bidone." "You didn't have any experience?" "Yes, I had done some training on a dreadful commercial film in France." "So with Fellini, I rose to a high level in cinema, to the "piano nobile"" "and I stayed with him for five years." "I made three films with him:" "Il Bidone, Le Notti di Cabiria and La Dolce Vita." "And his method of film-making?" "Completely disconcerting compared with the idea I had of a film director." "I had read in books that René Clair storyboarded his shots so that the actor was 1.5 metres from a particular piece of furniture, that everything was organised." "The storyboard - of course, with Fellini there was no such thing." "There was a script which was the story." "For an assistant it was very awkward because you could not prepare anything from the script because what we shot was different from the script, the screenplay, and even the dialogue changed and it was my job, when the actors were French, to quickly translate the new text" "and to make sure the actors knew it." "It was supposed to be improvisation but it wasn't true improvisation." "Because Fellini had in his head the overall picture of his film... but he did not want to write it down because writing is already creating and he didn't want to do the creative work twice." "He wanted to keep that until the last moment for that burst of creativity... the spark which has to pass between the director, the actors, the technicians." "So he delayed the unveiling of his project, which I understand." "So it was difficult for the actors, especially the foreign actors?" "Yes, but they were so captivated." "He had such charm, he was a great seducer." "He played on that so they were happy." "To start with, they were disconcerted but I never knew an actor to rebel against this method which was, of course, a kind of negation of their knowledge, of their science of acting." "I know that Donald Sutherland, for example, was completely put out and did not play the game in Casanova." "But the actors I saw in the three films were delighted and it didn't feel like work." "It was like being the guests of a gentleman who created a certain ambience, a feeling, and we were not really sure when we were working and when we weren't." "It was completely exhilarating." "And the filming was done in Italian or...?" "Well, that depended on the actors." "We shot in the language of the actors." "And even in the dialects of some of them." "So it was a real Tower of Babel." "In Il Bidone, for example, Giulietta Masina... speaks in Italian to Broderick Crawford who speaks in English." "She couldn't speak English, he couldn't speak Italian." "In any case, that is all sorted out in the editing and the dubbing." "In Italy films are dubbed." "They keep the audio guide track - not just with Fellini, certainly at that time - and afterwards they dub, and sometimes with other actors, even for the Italians." "Because film actors were not really considered capable... were not considered to be true actors." "They had to use actors from the theatre to make it a more respectable art form." "I'm not speaking of Fellini but of Italian cinema in general at that time." "It added something more polished to the delivery, to the intonation." "And Broderick Crawford is very good in the film but perhaps it isn't him." "Broderick Crawford was a problem." "I witnessed the drama with Broderick Crawford from the day I arrived." "It took place in a little fishing village near Rome." "They were night scenes with Broderick Crawford," "Richard Basehart and Franco, the third thief." "We had laid the track and we were waiting for Fellini and the actors." "Everything was ready, the lights and everything." "It was my first day there." "Suddenly I heard shouting." "It was Fellini who was screaming in Italian:" ""Scoundrels!" "Drunkards!" "I'm leaving." "All this is shit."" "I had never seen Fellini swearing." "I was shocked." "I wondered what was going on." "He said, "I'm leaving."" ""Good night." "I'm going home." "I've had enough of these bastards."" "When he'd arrived, he had found Broderick Crawford blind drunk and he had got Dick Basehart drunk as well." "They were both completely incapable of filming." "So we put out the lights, put away the track." "I asked the others if this happened every time and they said, "Not quite."" "And from that day on, Broderick Crawford was accompanied by a bodyguard, a very strong man, who was there solely to stop him from going to the café to drink alcohol until we'd finished filming." "That's how we managed..." "But it was rather unusual." "He doesn't change his expression very much." "Not at all." "He was..." "Broderick Crawford..." "He didn't act." "In my opinion, he was what he was - despondent, bad tempered, roguish." "He mumbled in American, it was barely intelligible." "And afterwards he was dubbed by a theatre actor, as I said." "One of these theatre actors who do dubbing to save the situation." "He was called Arnoldo Forro, he had performed in Shakespeare and when you hear the voice in the so-called original version of Il Bidone, it is Arnoldo Forro's voice not Broderick Crawford's." "Basehart was..." "Basehart was much easier." "He was charming." "I remember him being really pleasant to deal with." "He often came with his wife Valentina Cortese, a marvellous theatre and cinema actress, whom he met in Hollywood where she had made a film with Dassin." "Valentina was good friends with Giulietta Masina." "The two couples, the Baseharts and the Fellinis, were very close." "They often invited me to join them." "I was the fifth wheel." "I was often invited to dinner at one or other of their houses." "I could hardly believe their hospitality and kindness towards me, this inhibited, shy, little Frenchman who didn't speak much Italian, hardly any in fact." "I was projected into this galaxy of stars and they treated me as an equal." "I was completely..." "It was a sort of paradise." "And almost all of the film was shot on location?" "Almost all of the film." "There was one scene which wasn't." "It's the party scene, the orgy at the house of this nouveau riche type, also a kind of mafioso, who was called Goffredo." "The party scene is very elaborate." "You get the feeling that Fellini worked to produce a very sophisticated scene with complicated editing." "That is to say..." "I think this is the director's scene, the most elaborately worked-on scene in the whole film." "It's a long scene with a kind of crescendo, rather orchestral, symphonic, and we spent a long time shooting it." "And we were shooting the same things all the time." "It's a kind of rotation." "We would film a whole sequence, then start again almost from the beginning with different shots so as to have several options in the editing." "We had a huge quantity of material in the editing and I was daunted by the amount of stock we used because it was ten times what we needed." "But it was his way of working." "He didn't know how it would be edited." "He wanted to have the material and then proceed with the creative, artistic editing using all the different elements." "This is most apparent in that particular scene." "So we shot it in the studio at Farmesina." "It was in black and white." "We took two weeks to shoot this scene which lasts perhaps 20 minutes." "It's very interesting." "With many non-actors." "Goffredo, the owner of the house, was not an actor." "He was a dubious character whom Fellini knew." "Well, he was one of the people we met at the Caffè Canova." "There was a scene in the Caffè Canova, Piazza del Popolo, which was a meeting place for swindlers." "But the actual Caffè Canova really was full of shady characters, black marketeers, who were involved in "bidoni"." "That's where he met him." "There were other real crooks... in the cast." "There was Lupaccio in the film, who was a known criminal and who had been in prison." "And he's really the one who inspired the character of Augusto played by Crawford." "The part really is drawn from this character whom Fellini knew." "It was after the Liberation, the war, which created a situation of chaos in Italy." "We didn't experience that in France, which was liberated in three months." "Whereas in Italy it took two years." "So this created political chaos and poverty." "People stole, as we saw in the cinema of the neorealists, which shows that people had to steal in order to eat." "So this created a whole society of crooks, of swindlers - we flippantly call them swindlers, but really they were crooks." "So, there was this character Lupaccio." "I can still see him." "He even looked like a wolf, because Lupaccio means...wolf." "Big Bad Wolf." "From Walt Disney." "Exactly." "So there were lots of people from that world there - parvenus, if you like, so it was a very dubious milieu." "Among the scams which they undertook, some are very cruel..." "Indeed." "Some are quite funny." "One of the most cruel is the one we called the "case abusive" " "Illicit houses, in other words..." "It was right after the war and it is a testimony to the poverty of Italian people, many of whom didn't have a roof over their heads." "So there was this particularly unpleasant, annoying "bidone"" "where they go into this area where people are living in caves, under the Claudius Aqueduct." "People are living like animals in their dens." "And they come with fake contracts to get decent apartments." "Then they get these poor people to pay for apartments which do not exist." "So it's a scam." "These are the scenes which the Italians really disliked because they mirrored their own poverty." "By then it was the beginning, in 1955, of the economic miracle." "But this depicted Italy as it had been, with all the destitution depicted by the neorealists " "Rossellini and Visconti." "That's what they didn't like." "Italy was just emerging..." "It was almost the Third World." "In fact, when you see these films, you are shocked " "I was and I knew the reality behind them - by the landscape and the social context." "You have the feeling you are in Kosovo, it is so poor, so terrible." "I do not remember Italy being so poor at that time." "That's how Fellini chose to depict it." "So anyway, there's this scam..." "It was not the sociological side, the denunciation, which interested Fellini, and in this he was in disagreement with the confirmed neorealists who would have made a film about social issues out of this subject." "What Fellini liked was to dive in, to mingle with the masses, to make his way as a film director in this..." "in this magma which theoretically you can't control." "The nature of magma is that it cannot be contained." "As a director, he found it very exciting to dive into this shapeless world and to bring something structured out of this impossible situation." "This excited him very much." "You find this in all his early films." "There are always crowd scenes because he was excited by the difficulty for a master, an organiser - which is what a director must be, he has to bring in structure - of immersing himself in a chaotic situation." "And he pulled it off." "That's what he enjoyed, not denouncing political iniquity." "He must have learnt something from Rossellini, perhaps, about this world, when he made Paisà, for example." "Yes, and I, in the midst of this, was the antithesis, the complete contradiction because I had come from France and knew nothing of this world and I was stunned by the ease with which Fellini passed from highly intellectual people" "to people like that." "I think I was a sort of lucky charm." "I wondered why I was there, why he wanted me there because I wasn't a great help in the practical sense." "So why was I there?" "I served as a kind of talisman, a lucky charm, you know, which you stick up in the car to stop you falling into the ravine." "I was that for him." "He even called me "l'angelo del Bidone"." "When he drew a caricature of me, because he drew many caricatures, his drawings were amazing, he could have been a painter." "You could see this in his films - he allowed the decorative element to take precedence over the story in his later films." "He did lots of drawings and I have kept some." "He drew me with wings and a little halo." "He liked having close to him a touch of something which he couldn't find anywhere else." "That's why I was there." "In the film, one cannot distinguish between the people from the street and the actors." "It is well blended." "The only real actor was Giulietta because she dubbed herself." "All the rest were American actors who were dubbed and Italian non-actors, so a very strange soup." "This allowed him to remake the film after shooting." "He mixed it all up, he took voices, he changed the dialogue and gave the film its meaning right at the very end." "With established actors, the film would have been made in the shooting." "So with all the different elements... of varying quality, with that he could..." "It was like a puzzle - he had the pieces of the puzzle and then he made the picture after the shooting." "And the film takes place in winter but it was shot in summer, wasn't it?" "Yes, we filmed in the summer." "We suffered a great deal from the heat." "Everything was shot between April and July." "In the scene of the last "bidone"..." "Or the first "bidone"?" "The first "bidone" in the farm, he wanted... to show the passage of time, he wanted it to be winter." "We shot the scene near Rome in the mountains." "It was freezing cold." "There were no leaves on the trees." "The ground was completely parched." "And he wanted snow so he asked Otello Martelli, his beloved cinematographer, whom he could not do without." "Fellini needed people like this." "He was very intuitive and believed in favours." "There were people he disliked and others he liked very much." "He was completely irrational in that respect." "He needed Otello Martelli." "He had great confidence in him." "Otello Martelli was very talented, a simple man with very little education but an artist and he understood Fellini." "He asked him to make snow." "We spent ages on it." "There were snow machines and the dried out trees and ground were covered in snow." "And we also needed mud so we had to wait for it to get muddy." "So there was a bit of snow and a bit of mud." "It took a long time." "This creates a very effective atmosphere, a bit like in La Strada." "Yes, the snow in La Strada was also fake." "It often was." "I didn't work on La Strada but I know it often was." "Fellini is a painter;" "he took great care over his images." "He devoted a great deal of time to getting the image he wanted." "In this he wasn't at all like the neorealists, who take things as they are." "He did not take nature as it was but how he wanted it to be." "You could say it was the beginning of his surrealism, transforming nature." "Later on he wanted nothing to do with nature, it was too constraining." "More and more, he made all his films in the studio with their extravagant décors." "With Il Bidone, he began to move away from nature." "Notti di Cabiria was still quite natural." "And with La Dolce Vita, he began this megalomania of décors and rebuilt the Via Veneto in the studio, which was staggering because it must have cost a lot of money and it created problems with the producers." "He always had problems with producers because he always asked for a little bit more than they had promised." "It was a kind of blackmail to have more." "So of course he was very unhappy because he always wanted more and the producers resisted." "They could not ruin themselves financially because of him." "And the filming took longer than planned?" "Il Bidone?" "Yes." "But no more than normal." "It was in La Dolce Vita that it went crazy because it was weeks late, then months late." "On some days he did not even come to the set because he was having a crisis of inspiration so this posed terrible problems." "Fortunately, La Dolce Vita was a worldwide success because otherwise, if it had been a flop, he would never have been able to film again." "He had a terrible reputation for spending too much." "And the film was due to be shown at Venice and you were still filming in July." "Yes, that was very interesting." "We found out in July while we were still filming that the film had been selected for Venice." "You know how the selection process works." "No-one had seen the film and it was already selected so we were exceptionally lucky." "We were overjoyed." "But how to finish in time?" "We began editing." "I say "we" because I helped." "I wanted to be as close as possible to everything to see how a film was edited." "We worked day and night and we took on..." "Fellini had his usual editor, Giuseppe Vari, quite a good editor." "Perhaps Fellini did not need a great editor because he knew very well what he wanted." "Titanus told him he would never be ready so they assigned him a second editor, a second team, in the next room so they could edit a sequence while another was being edited." "It was Mario Serandrei who was a great Italian editor with a good reputation because he was the editor for Visconti on Ossessione, before the Liberation, and also for Rossellini." "So he was the editor of neorealism." "It was he who..." "He was a great theorist, a very cultured man, on the left politically, and it was he who coined the phrase "neorealism"." "So we had this great editor." "I went from one editing room to the other;" "it was like a dream." "I was a bit like a squatter, going from one to the other." "Serandrei had an influence on the editing because he did not entirely agree with Fellini's vision of the world." "Serandrei was a confirmed neorealist, left-wing, who wanted to make neorealist cinema - social and political." "He could see that Fellini was off on a tangent with this film, and he would be so increasingly." "Often he would say this doesn't work, we must change that, we must cut that." "There are some scenes which were cut under Serandrei's influence." "There was too much material." "The film was too long like all Fellini's films." "There were some scenes which were lost, which were cut." "His vision was so far-reaching that it didn't fit with the standard way of working." "There was one scene between Giulietta Masina and Broderick Crawford." "Augusto, Crawford's character, comes out of prison and by chance meets Iris in the street with the little girl." "She was Basehart's wife in the film." "So this was a very bitter scene." "Masina reproaches Crawford for being a bad influence on her husband." "The little girl is there, listening." "It is rather a moralistic scene." "She represents good, he bad." "He says to her, "You don't understand." "That's life."" ""Life is animals biting each other and people have to defend themselves."" "The struggle for life, if you like." "And she says, "No, not at all, there is love."" "Serandrei did not like this at all." "He found it too much like Christian humanism, and we cut the scene." "And at the end of the film, too, he wanted..." "For the final shot he wanted..." "Serandrei was in favour of..." "I don't know if you remember the end of the film." "Augusto lies dying." "Abandoned by his friends, he lies dying on an embankment, all alone." "A procession of children and peasants carrying wood passes on the road above him." "Pictorially, it was very beautiful but Serandrei said, "But what does it mean? "" ""It's just aestheticism."" "Fellini said, "No, it's not aestheticism." "This procession of children has a meaning."" ""It means..."" ""It is a response to the despair of Augusto, it means come with us."" ""It's as if angels are passing above him."" "Serandrei did not like it at all." "And I had the nerve to butt in, saying," ""Yes, the film absolutely must end on the shot of the children."" "Serandrei said, "Who does he think he is? "" "I said, "Because it's very beautiful."" "He said, "Beauty has got nothing to do with the cinema."" "And I was thinking, "What have I said? "" "Fellini came to my defence, saying, "But it's not just beauty, it is significant beauty."" ""It's beauty as Dostoyevsky described it when he said beauty would save the world."" "In the end, the shot stayed in." "The film ended not with the dying Augusto but with the children on the road and they are singing." "He can't see them." "He can't see the children, but..." "The two shots are completely separate from each other." "Fellini was not always very kind to actors?" "He was very kind to actors." "Always?" "Not always, but it is important not to think that Fellini was a tyrant with actors." "He adored actors and was adored by actors." "He was hardest on Giulietta because he did not want her to take advantage of her position as the director's wife so he was very tough on her, but fair." "But there were times when he could not get what he wanted from the actors, especially when they were not real actors." "I remember, for example, in the scene where Augusto is arrested in the cinema, he is recognised by somebody he has swindled and the cops come and arrest him in front of his daughter whom he had abandoned but found again." "She was a pretty little girl and he was happy to have found her." "She knows nothing about his life." "She realises he is a bad person." "So in this scene, she sees her father arrested and she needs to cry but Fellini had chosen an actress without experience, who was very young." "He chose her for her youth so she would be the picture of fragility but she was not up to doing this." "She could not cry, she was completely inert." "Fellini, not out of unkindness at all, would stop at nothing to make her react so he tightened the shot to a close-up, knelt at the girl's feet, held her arms and shook her so that it appeared she was trembling with sadness." "And he called her names, worse than I'd ever heard before, to frighten her and in this way she was able vaguely to express something." "But it had nothing to do with the situation with her father but rather her problem with this man who was shaking her and insulting her." "This was very like Fellini." "I remember the scene very well." "I can't tell you the words he used because they were very coarse." "And the music?" "Yes, the music was very important." "But Fellini was not at all a musician." "He was a man of pictures, images, colours, lines." "He had no musical..." "I only say that because I admire him so much." "He had no musical culture." "For him the most refined music was from Fantasia by Walt Disney." "He knew..." "Paul Dukas..." "I don't know what it's called in English." "It's called..." "The Sorcerer's Apprentice." "He knew that piece and he loved it." "He thought it was the height of good music." "And he liked Bach." "A prelude, a Bach fugue..." "He thought this was wonderful." "And four or five pieces like that, that was all." "But he was very lucky to have by his side Nino Rota, a musical genius, with whom he made all his films until Nino Rota died, and it was a great loss for him." "So I knew Nino Rota." "A few days after my arrival, he came to the Farnesina where we were shooting the party scene, the orgy." "And after shooting Il Bidone, you returned to France." "I returned feeling very sad for two reasons:" "because I was leaving Fellini, I no longer had any reason to stay there, but especially because it was in Venice and the film was booed by the festival audience." "The film was very badly received and during the projection we could hear, "Shameful!" "Enough!"" "It was awful." "I had been living a dream," "I felt that I had made a monument, that I had been a very small stone in a cathedral." "Il Bidone had the least success but when one sees it now, one can see that it is a great Fellini film which links the other two in the trilogy." "Yes." "Except for the theme of remorse and redemption." "If you choose to see it through a spiritualistic filter, that is." "The little girl who is paralysed... the scene of the last "bidone" in the farm with the little girl who is paralysed, there is a conversation in which she asks him to perform a miracle, if you remember." "But how could he?" "He is a crook." "But it is she who performs the miracle on him at the end, if we're choosing to see things from that angle." "And yet he takes the money." "Yes, he takes the money." "Eventually." "She saves him in the end." "The conversion doesn't work on his hands, it only works on his head." "And there is still some doubt." "In particular there is a mixing of the real and the imagined, or the imaginary." "Yes, poetics you could say." "He was a poet." "He deals with it like a poet." "He dives... ..in with the masses, into poverty." "And he treats it a little..." "It's curious because he loved people." "He had a feeling of..." "But he treats it globally." "Not with disdain, not at all, but..." "He was criticised for making fun of...poverty." "And of people's faith." "Yes, that's it, superstition and all that." "He made fun but with affection." "That's what's difficult to understand." "With great affection and much..." "He liked ridiculous people, that was it." "He loved people..." "He had tenderness for human ridiculousness." "It's difficult." "His tenderness softened the severity..." "I think that's his viewpoint." "Also with Masina." "Yes, to have married..." "To have married Masina, who was really a character from a comic strip." "That is how he met her." "She was doing a radio programme, it was 1945." "She was doing some sketches and he was the scriptwriter." "He drew her long before he filmed her." "He did sketches of..." "I don't know what it was called." "They were characters in illustrated magazines." "But his type of woman was the opposite, she was the buxom goddess." "It's strange." "And the marriage lasted." "The marriage lasted, with a lot of love." "A true marriage, which had its ups and downs, but an Italian marriage, a real one." "That is..." "When I spoke to him about divorce, he said, "No, in Italy we don't divorce."" "His love for Giulietta really was "until death do us part"." "They had their own secrets." "It was very strong and very deep." "He had great respect for her."