Hi all you hardcore Fellini fans,

I attended the lecture by Gianfranco Angelucci, and I'll share with you some of the highlights...

(First, a side note, Mr. Angelucci is an impeccable dresser. I was most impressed.)

Angelucci was Fellini's aid and friend for the last 20 years of Fellini's life. Angelucci started the lecture with, "Fellini was my life."
It was clear that Angelucci adored Fellini and had nothing but praise for him.

During the question and answer session, a man asked what Fellini's daily inspirations were. Angelucci said Fellini was in love with everything, that he was in love with life, and he found beauty in everything. He said Fellini was "profoundly religious," but not in the church-going sense. Rather, he was religious in the "meta" sense, in the love-for-life sense. (A very Italian perspective, isn't it?)

Someone else asked whether Fellini took inspiration from other directors. Angelucci said he liked only two: Kurosawa and Kubric. Angelucci also shared an anecdote about Fellini on this topic. When Fellini was asked why he doesn't go to the cinema, he replied, "I have better things to do - screw, for example." Fellini didn't like his contemporary Italian colleagues. He recommended that most of them become wedding photographers.

When asked about Nino Rota, Fellini’s composer, Angelucci said that Fellini saw Rota as an angel, that the two worked together as if they had only one mind. Fellini had only very kind things to say about Rota, and attributed some of his success to Rota.

Angelucci also talked about Fellini’s obsession with getting the right face and the right character. Fellini would send out scouts on the streets of Rome to find the most audacious and/or freakish people. For example, in “Cassanova,” he hired the tallest woman in the world to appear with two dwarfs, and the woman with the largest breasts. (Apparently Fellini really liked breasts – again, very Italian, isn’t it?)

Lastly, when asked if Fellini ever collaborated with anyone, Angelucci said there was a plan to have a Fellini/Kurosawa/Bergman film, but it was only Fellini and Kurosawa who could come for the filming. Fellini said he got along very well with Kurosawa because Kurosawa only spoke Japanese and Fellini didn’t. Fellini said he would speak to Kurosawa in Italian and Kurosawa would speak to him in Japanese and, therefore, they got along very well. In other words, each director were very independent and original. It would have been impossible to come to consensus on anything… Moreover, according Angelucci, Fellini intentionally didn’t make a “school of Fellini,” or a “Fellini movement.” He didn’t do this for a couple reasons:

1) He saw himself as “Pinoccio” – a bad little boy shaking up the system, not the father of an art movement.
2) He didn’t see his style as being replicable.


That's pretty much it... Unfortunately, I couldn't stay for the screening of Angelucci's film that was co-written by Fellini. But, I hope to rent it or buy it off amazon.