Well, there was this young man from a very old family in Siena, Guidarino Guidi. I met him early on, like the first week I was in Rome. I don’t remember how I met him; somehow I just knew him the minute I was in Rome. He was a friend of a friend; maybe William Fense Weaver introduced him to me. He was at every party in Rome. Anyway, he was casting director for Fellini. He was also casting director for Vincente Minnelli’s
Two Weeks in Another Town.
He was casting director for all kinds of things. He had perfect English and French and a little German, and he knew everybody on earth. It was he who first asked Ginny Becker to invite Fellini for the marionettes when Fellini was contemplating a film on the high life and low life in Rome. He had told Fellini, “You’ve got to see this.” Of course, Fellini loved marionettes. Only a fool would not like marionettes. The more intelligent the person, the more they enjoy things that are miniature. Everybody of intelligence has something that is miniature. And all the Mediterranean world loves puppets or marionettes or enormous carnival figures. That’s a hangover from the pre-Christians. I suppose that on long winter nights in those caves, somebody would take dinosaur bones and make a figure that danced. You know. And see, when Fellini and his brother were too young to be soldiers in the Second World War, they were able to get permission to set up in a vacant shop in Milano, and they did caricatures. People would come in and have a caricature done for a dollar or something. But then later they had this van, and they did marionette productions. They both loved marionettes. So I met Fellini at a marionette performance that Ginny Becker and I gave when he was brought by Guidarino.
He then wanted Ginny and me to do our marionettes in
La Dolce Vita.
He said, “I’ve got this episode I want you to do your marionettes for.” I said I was terribly sorry, but I had to see
Botteghe Oscure’s
autumn number through the press while the princess was in Paris. Ginny had visitors from Louisiana she was taking to her summer place down in Ostia. We were probably the only people in Rome who refused him. Everybody who lived in Rome at that moment was in
La Dolce Vita.
Everybody is in it.
He was being inspired by real life in making
La Dolce Vita.
So much so that he was inspired by some real happening or some real personality. And he wanted to put us in. Well, as it turned out, he used the idea of the Becker family as the Steiner family in the film. Copied their apartment. Steiner, who kills his children and commits suicide, is Johnny Becker. Not that Johnny would ever do that. Fellini saw that Johnny Becker, who is a sensitive, intellectual, immensely wealthy Jew from Chicago, was overly protective of those children. The boy was Ginny’s child by an actor in New York, her first marriage. Johnny was even more careful with him since it wasn’t his child.
Their apartment had been reproduced. Ginny is a very good painter, and Fellini went to the gallery that represented her and rented some of her paintings to dress the set. He reproduced the hooded thing that Ginny Becker always wore. You see, Ginny is one of those people with very little hair. And the older she grows, the less there is of it. She has about three hairs on her head now. She did get a wig once, but then she just said to hell with it. So she always wore those hoods, like the actress playing Mrs. Steiner is wearing in the film. So there is everything. And a lot of the people at the Steiner party are people who went to Becker parties. Iris Tree plays herself. There is an awful Irish poet that I hate who plays me. Fellini wanted us to do the marionettes in that episode, not telling us that he’d done the Steiner episode.
Ginny was quite shocked when she saw it. I think total shock: pleasant, unpleasant, flattered, insulted. She never acknowledged to anybody that she’d even seen the film. No comment, you know.
But there was no viciousness in it. Fellini is not vicious. Now, if a set’s not ready when he comes on it in the morning, and it’s supposed to have been ready, or if somebody repeatedly gets something wrong, he would lose his patience and slam his script down and all that. After all, he is Italian. But he was never vicious with anybody. Fellini on his off days is real cranky, but he is mostly good cranky. There is good cranky and bad cranky and everything in between. But very seldom have I seen him cranky and directorial. He really is a sweet, gentle, kind, slightly demented gentleman. I think he just needed a story like that as one of his episodes.
*
Since I was the only one in Rome who refused to be in
La Dolce Vita,
I was the third person cast for
8½.
I was doing a weekly column for the Rome
Daily American,
and I was always asking him for an interview. He finally called me and said, “Well, do you want to come out to the studio today? We’ll talk about that interview.” So I went out to see him at the studio. He said, “How are you? Are you still doing the marionettes?” Yes. “Are you still a writer?” Yes. Then he said, “What are you doing this summer?” I said, “Well, you know, in the summer I stay very close to Rome because I have to see the autumn number of
Botteghe Oscure
through the press. That was the reason I couldn’t be in
La Dolce Vita.”
He said, “Well, I’ve got this film coming up and I thought maybe you could do a little part in it. It’s only a few days’ work, but you’d have to be available. If you’re going to be in Rome, you’ll be available. We could do the interview while we are working on the film. Run over and see Guidarino and sign up.”
Three films later, we still had not done an interview. So I just sat down one morning and made one up whole hog and published it in the
Transatlantic Review.
I described the party at his place at the beach in Fregene, where he fed all the cats in the garden first, then his servants ate, then the guests at the party ate. A Fellinian reversal. Now, every bit of that is fact. I was there at that party; we played charades. It’s all his dialogue that I invented. I have him saying all kinds of things about films like “Cinema is just an old whore. They’ve got her propped up in the parlor with Freud in one hand and Ovid in the other, but she’s just an old whore.” And I have him say, “Anybody can have
la dolce vita.
All you need is hats and wigs.” It’s not the image of Fellini as the cranky maestro, the oh-so-sensitive, hard-to-talk-to artist, the surly imperialist, that is usually projected by journalists or reviewers. But even though he didn’t say any of that, it’s more his attitude. When it was published, I took it to him and said, “Thanks for the interview.” He read it and laughed and laughed and laughed. He loved it. Then later when he came back from when
Juliet
—I think it was—opened in New York, he gave me a clipping of an interview he’d done with the
New York Times,
where he’d quoted all this I’d invented—quoted himself, so to speak. He said, “Thanks for the interview.”
In
8½
I was playing an American journalist interviewing Marcello Mastroianni. So, oh, my God, I was in a state. My first major film. It wasn’t my first film: I had worked with Edward G. Robinson in
Two Weeks in Another Town.
I had two lines. Then I’d done this
Teenagers in the Sun
because I could dance the new dance from America called the twist. I learned it from the black actor Roscoe Lee Brown, who came to Rome I think the year the twist began. So although I was a tired old thirty-seven, they glued up my jowls with fish glue, painted me with suntan makeup, and I danced with a Hindu girl doing a Hindu twist as a teenager in the sun.
But
8½
was my first major film, and I was very nervous about my lines. Not so much memory as pronunciation, since I’d been such a short time in Italy. There were no coaches or anything. And I’d only been given the lines when I came out of makeup, because since everybody had revealed the story of
La Dolce Vita
before it opened, nobody saw the script for
8½,
except the lighting man, the casting director, the makeup artist, and the designer. And of course, there had been riots in the street when
La Dolce Vita
opened. Nobody had seen it, but it had been preinterpreted by the press and given a bad name while he was making it. Word got out that this film was going to be an embarrassment to Italy. That it was obscene. That it was this, that, and the other. Then, of course, the film was a world success and they saw it as something else. But when Fellini was making
8½,
a lot of people were thinking it was going to be even more this, that, and the other. It was the lower orders of intelligence. And there was a terrible scandal at that moment because a girl had been found dead at the beach who had died at some party, overdrugged, overdosed. Some people had taken her to the beach and left her. So the Vatican was doing a moral thing, and the police were doing a moral thing. So Fellini didn’t let anybody see the script of
8½.
There were armed guards at the entrance of the set to keep journalists out. None of the actors saw the script until they started shooting. You were given your lines a few minutes before you went on the set. And for somebody who was shaky in Italian, I was very nervous.
After I did that film, I could see why everything was dubbed in afterwards. They don’t depend on live sound, as Hollywood does. Hollywood has a siren and a buzzer, and the assistant directors all yell “Silence!” and they do live sound. Well, if you have two Italians within a mile of each other, there is no way to have silence. They do record the live sound, but when you hear that sound track, it sounds like a riot in a prison. Like Mobile at Mardi Gras.
But I was so enchanted with everything. Everybody loves being in a Fellini film. It’s not like work. It’s like Carnival. It was one big cocktail party. When he began shooting
8½,
he took a little piece of brown paper and taped it near the viewer of the camera. It said REMEMBER THIS IS A COMIC FLIM.
What I loved was that he—alone above all the directors I’ve worked with, and I’ve worked with a great many highly interesting, famous directors—was always watching everybody on the set. While the lighting people are doing what he told them to do—brighter over there, get rid of that backlighting here—he’s watching somebody on the set over there talking. And he’ll make them reproduce a gesture when they are on camera that he saw them do. “Now when you came on the set, you were fiddling with your necklace. You kept pulling it around and pulling it around. Let’s do that at the beginning of this scene.” There is a scene that I love in
8½,
one of the moments everybody notices. There are these three ladies in sequined dresses all crossing the yard going to their table at the spa, and one of them is carrying this huge palm leaf. Well, those actresses had come back from having their midnight picnic, and one of these ladies was dragging this philodendron leaf. She was fanning with it, fanning the mosquitoes away on this place where we filmed that scene. When it came time to tell her what to do on the scene, he said, “Well, where is your philodendron leaf? What did you do with it?” She said, “I threw it over there.” So he sent the prop boy to go and get it. “Is this your philodrendron leaf?” he said. “Hold it and drag it along exactly as you did coming back from your midnight meal.” So this lady is twirling it and dragging it in the scene; you see her just for an instant.
Quite often he’d rehearse something eight or ten times, until the actor was really relaxed and doing it precisely. Then as he shot it, in this soft gentle voice, he would say, “Now this time, look over to the fireplace.” So it became a little bit startled and a lot more natural. “All right, Alberto, instead of sitting down in that chair, go to the red chair next to it.” Over and over he’d do that. “In this scene, instead of sitting down at that moment, walk over to the window.” They’ll shoot that, and that would be what he wanted all along. But he wanted that freshness of the unrehearsed detail. He would rehearse until he got the actors out of their camera fright. Then when they relaxed, he just put in one new detail. Or he would whisper to the cameraman, “When the action is over, keep shooting.” So the person would wait for him to say “Cut,” and they would not know what to do, and that would become part of the film.
There’s one scene we rehearsed two days to make it look unrehearsed. The doorman holds open the door of the hotel. In comes a grand lady. She’s dressed in black and white, and she has two black-and-white Dalmatians. The bellboy takes them from her and goes toward the elevator. She stops at the desk and goes to the elevator. The elevator door opens, and an old priest and a young priest get out, arguing. In the background you see a famous leitmotiv of Fellini—workers plastering a wall. In every important scene in every film, he has somebody tearing something down or building something. It’s like the set is never really finished. The priests move over to the foot of the stairs. Coming down the stairs is Guido Alberti, who was this big Italian industrialist. He was a friend of Fellini’s and absolutely screen-struck. He played the movie mogul in the film. So he’s coming down the stairs with a blond floozy on his arm, and then a blond lady journalist sees him and runs to him with her journalist husband. Right away he’s doing a blah, blah, blah. Then the camera follows them over to the desk. That’s all one shot. The camera was in the middle on a rotating platform. We rehearsed two days.
It wasn’t like work. Working for Hollywood films—that was work. It’s so hierarchied within a production. You know, the producer speaks only to the director. The director speaks only to the star. The star speaks only to her hairdresser. Well, in Italy they’re still working as though they’re all on the same project. With the Italians, the costume people are friends with the electricians. The electricians are friends with the actors. It’s everybody working together, like an old-time stock company. The technicians, lighting people, sound people, and camera people are a team. It was like Hollywood must have been in the twenties and thirties. It wasn’t all powerful unions. If they wanted to finish on that set and strike it tonight to build a new one for tomorrow, you went on and worked until midnight, sometimes without extra pay. But then the director was always nice, and so he’d give you an afternoon off. Whereas in Hollywood, the unions are all-powerful and the actors are gods. Some of the greatest Italian actors, like Marcello, will be the first one on the set always, even if he wasn’t going to be filmed until the next day. He wants to see where the bright lights are coming from, to know whether to look this way or that way, to see where the chair was, where the ashtray was. He wasn’t the egotistical “Oh, how I enjoy seeing my face in the mirror when I shave every morning” movie star. It was a rare experience, seeing that aspect of filmmaking in the sixties and seventies in Italy. It was a whole other world.