Essential Fellini

“Fellini box set. When Criterion came out with this, it made my year. I was so happy. This is the first movie I actually saw someone masturbating, and not in the theater, but like in the actual movie. Great movie.”

“Oh, they’ve got a box set, the Essential Fellini. Look how pretty it is. Every movie is more beautiful than the next. Juliet of the Spirits, Satyricon, Roma. The Ship Sails On I love because there’s this gorgeous ship, it’s all painted and it’s just beautiful. This is going to be amazing.”

“There’s a box set here by Fellini. Oh my God, Fellini. How can you miss Fellini? Once in your lifetime, you should watch at least one Fellini and there’s cinema already.”

“I do want to start, actually, with this incredible Fellini box set. I came in here wanting to get I vitelloni because I… I saw that film for the first time a couple years ago at a Fellini retrospective in Eugene, Oregon. And I went with my two friends Cordell Stetson and Carrie Mann who really introduced me to film at a young age. I remember having a Eugene Weekly that we tore out and them making me this amazing, comprehensive list of films that I should check out. But when I went and saw I vitelloni, it felt like a really special moment because it's kind of about a band of… slackers that are stuck in a small town, and I feel like that was very much who we were as teenagers. And I think that watching movies was kind of our way of getting out of that small town. And I feel like it's a really underrated Fellini movie, and it's really, really great. And this is an incredible box set that looks like it's filled with records, but is filled with films. So I'm very, very excited about this.”

“And guess what, they said in case I'm interested... Ha! I'm taking this one home, y'all! Okay? Whoa! Fellini is my god, my hero... Fellini made it... Made it possible for me to think that I was a filmmaker. Because none of his stuff makes sense really, really, at the end of the day. But it does make sense. And I don't make sense. Yeah, I love it. Thank you.”

“So one of my favorite, favorite movies is The Nights of Cabiria, which is in this set, which is the Essential Fellini set. Yeah, so this, if you're a Fellini fan, this is, this is definitely. I actually got to meet Fellini when I was 13 years old when I did my first movie, which was Paul Mazursky's Tempest with John Cassavetes, and Gena Rowlands, and we filmed a month at Cinecittà. And, this guy came in and, 'Bellissima,' kissed me on the top of my head, and I was like, 'Who's that?', it was Fellini. So really excited about watching all of those because I haven't seen all of those.”

“What was I thinking? I know. I made a film on the history of country music, and we interviewed Kris Kristofferson and he told me the inspiration for “Me and Bobby McGee” was, in many ways, La strada. And so we actually licensed and used a little bit of La strada in our film on country music. Everything that Fellini touched I want to be part of and I understand that there may be a collection and it might be possible not just to pick out a single La strada but to have… the essential Federico Fellini, one of the great, great masters of all time, so.”

“[Translated] This is my buddy Federico. La strada feels like a silent film, actually. It's a totally expressionist film. I vitelloni is the story of these young bourgeois idiots in small-town Italy. I think it's pretty autobiographical. Beautiful. Il Bidone, the story of a total failure. I think it ends in a garbage dump. I could go on... I was saying that Lang had these dense images... His framing... There's no room left in the frame. The frame closes in on the characters. Fellini is the opposite. There's this depth of field around them. That's the depth of life itself, and it's... It's devastating.”

“If I’m talking about actresses, I have to talk about Giulietta Masina. And I see this… extraordinary gift of Fellini, but within Fellini’s work with his amazing wife and muse, we have La strada, one of the most important female performances of all time. I was in a restaurant in Rome when I was 19, and they walked into the restaurant and he walked in and they sat down, and, as they sat down, she walked in and everyone in the restaurant started clapping, and he sat down and he asked her to stand and we gave her a standing ovation in the restaurant, was one of my favorite memories to just be part of that.”

“There’s some big box sets, Juliette, at the end. -Look, I’ve already earmarked... -Oh, yeah. -this. -Oh, wow. -That’s amazing. -There’s only one.”

“Which, which would you rather have? This is not, no, no, I think the Bergman. Okay, we can decide later. I'm just your sherpa then. Yeah.”

“Oh boy, check this out. Besides having the best artwork of, of any of the, any of the films here that I've seen so far, I've always been a fan of Fellini's and all of the music of Fellini. It's like a Juliet of the Spirits. In the U. S. Mostly theremin got used to be sci-fi, or to be human voices, or to be, that otherworldly sound, but there was this other instrument called a Novachord, and it's, I think more than anywhere else, it's most beautifully used in Juliet of the Spirits. If you go listen to that soundtrack, it's, it's a, it's really wonderful. There you go. You know, I have to, one other thing I could say about Fellini. I just have this box set, it's got Satyricon in it. Yeah. When I first, started at Kent State in like 1968 or '69, it was either the first or second year, they'd show films like to the art department, like on these little screens, like in a little room, like a, like a school classroom. Yeah. And I saw Satyricon and it blew my mind, and it made me realize that, the film scoring was just like totally open, 'cause it was the most, it's one of the most imaginative, and it was definitely a pioneer in, in like incredible, creativity in, scoring. It was used all these ancient instruments and, just the fact that the song had, I mean, the movie had almost no dialogue made the music all the more apparent and important. Yeah, it was, yeah.”

“My final win of an amazing visit is one of my absolute favorite filmmakers, Fellini. Fellini, postwar Italy somehow really resonates with me for working-class Black America. Something about, okay, we’re rebuilding our life out of the ruins and we’ve got so much flavor and we embrace the surrealism of our lives, and it’s comedic and it’s tragic and it’s heroic. It’s all the things at once. He’s always been a giant hero to me. When I was in film school, I remember writing a paper on 8½. I did not get the grade I deserved, but I got the life I deserved. Thank you, Fellini.”

“I need to watch more Fellini. I don't know a lot about Fellini. I don't know a lot about movies. I just kind of bumble along and find stuff that I like, and I try not to make rules about it. And I just watch what I like, and steal what I like, too. But somebody said that my stuff is Fellini-esque, and so now I gotta watch this stuff to see what I'm doing.”

“This is the best of Fellini. Yeah. Well, La dolce vita. And I think– I remember I was… a premiere of it on Third Avenue at the Baronet or the Coronet, and I was there watching him come in. Of course, big fan.”

“Oh, and then, of course, look, darlings, if you leave here without this, you’re just being crazy, because a Fellini compilation, you have And the Ship Sails On, which is very underrated and so incredible. Right, the chicken standing on one leg for the entire thing. That’s so funny. It’s hilarious.”