Fellini: I'm a Born Liar
Encyclopedia
Fellini: I'm a Born Liar is a 2002 French
documentary film
written and directed by Damian Pettigrew
.
Based on Federico Fellini
's last confessions filmed by Pettigrew in Rome in 1991 and 1992 (Fellini died in 1993), the film eschews straightforward biography to highlight the Italian director's unorthodox working methods, conscience, and philosophy.
A masterclass in cinema aesthetics, the feature documentary uses excerpts and behind-the-scenes from 8½
, Juliet of the Spirits
, Histoires extraordinaires
, Satyricon
, Amarcord
, Fellini's Casanova
, And the Ship Sails On, and City of Women
. Also interviewed are Roberto Benigni
(La voce della luna
), Terence Stamp
(Histoires extraordinaires), and Donald Sutherland
(Casanova), among other notable Fellini collaborators.
The film was nominated for Best Documentary at the European Film Awards, Europe's equivalent of the Oscars.
A camera tracks crosswise alongside a wide, brightly appointed beach, in what appears to be the dead of winter. No bathers are in sight, only a rolling parade of empty cabanas, with a tranquil blue seascape in the distance beyond. The wistful, melancholy music of Nino Rota
lends these vistas a dreamy familiarity. We then jump from color to luminous black & white, and a quick glimpse of Federico Fellini’s 1963 masterpiece, 8½
, in which the monumentally buxom harlot, La Saraghina, is preparing to perform her rumba on the beach for a flock of fugitive schoolboys. It’s the very same beach we were just staring at, but magically denuded of 40 years of succeeding development, and made mythic through the eyes of a master. From this point of departure, Pettigrew juxtaposes archival footage and fresh interviews with Fellini’s collaborators, interspersed with classic clips and the fruits of his own present-day visits to the haunting locales where I Vitelloni
(1953), Nights of Cabiria
(1957), La Dolce Vita
(1960), Satyricon
(1969) and other cinematic wonders first came to life. The goal is to fuse these ingredients thematically, to a degree that may better illuminate Fellini’s conscience and philosophies.
"I am a born liar," the maestro tells us. "For me, the things that are the most real are the ones I invented." In one way or another, Fellini’s playful habit of honestly admitting falsehood is presented, and tested, as the key to his art, and even his spirituality. The maestro’s boyhood in the Adriatic coastal town of Rimini
is conjured through a combination of an unpublished baby picture of Fellini, contemporary footage, and his own spoken reminiscence. Fellini remembers being fascinated, when still a small boy, by the town’s artistic types - bohemian outcasts who were, by turns, dirty, flashy, and inner directed. "A small boy is naturally rebellious," he tells us, of himself. "He’s reacting to the laws, the taboos, the rules laid down by his family, his school. And my generation was faced with so many taboos, those of the Catholic Church, of Fascism
."
This reflection is intercut with a behind-the-scenes of Amarcord
(1973), Fellini’s intimate epic about small-town life in the Benito Mussolini
era. The focus is on the scene, both nightmarish and comedic, in which the hero’s father is obliged by the police to drink castor oil, for no reason other than as a clownish, sadistic exercise of small-time power. Fellini circles the action, prompting the actors, crooning to them, snarling, sometimes obliging them to act directly towards him, as he crouches off-camera. Emphasised in this context is Fellini’s intense discomfort at causing such a scene to be re-enacted, however satiric the energy. He scowls, grits his teeth, and admonishes one actor playing a Blackshirt bully to be more precise, for pity’s sake: "Your partner has been suffering for days because of you. Get it right!"
Fellini’s early manhood and lifelong collaboration with his actress wife, Giulietta Masina
, are evoked through a combination of interviews (particularly with Fellini’s boyhood chum Titta Benzi) and clips from 8½ and Juliet of the Spirits
. While it is an understandable temptation to think of such scenes as "autobiography", they are counter-balanced by Fellini’s own warnings: "Memory is a most mysterious element, almost indefinable, that links us to things we don’t even remember having lived. It constantly incites us to stay in contact with dimensions, events, and sensations, that we can’t define, but that we know actually happened." After a close look at the overtly fake plastic seascapes of And the Ship Sails On (1983), Italian novelist Italo Calvino
observes: "To a psychoanalyst, whether you tell the truth or whether you lie, isn’t very important. Because even lies are interesting, eloquent, revealing, just as much as what is considered truth. I distrust a writer who claims to tell the whole truth about himself, about life, or about the world."
Some of the contradictions in Fellini’s accounts of himself are just plain funny. "I adore actors," he tells us. Cut to Donald Sutherland
, star of Fellini's Casanova
(1976), who quietly seethes that "in his relations with actors, Federico was dreadful, a martinet, a tyrant". Yet Sutherland is close to a smile as he recalls and then offers an insight that deepens the film’s argument: "Fellini is constantly threatened by his own superficiality
, and is constantly running away from it, in the same sense as Orson Welles
. Orson Welles created a lie about himself that was in fact the truth, but he knew that it was a lie he’d created - and once everybody believed it, he found it insupportable." Rocking the stability of these persuasive remarks is Roberto Benigni
, star of La voce della luna
(1990), extolling Fellini’s charm with actors in bright, broad strokes: "He treated me, for the first time in my life, like I was a real actor. Or better - actress! I was in the center, and to everybody he say, 'This is-a my Kim-a Novak.'"
Terence Stamp
, who played Toby Dammit in Histoires extraordinaires
(1968), remembers that when he asked for a bit of directorial instruction, Fellini glared at him at first as if witnessing something unnatural - a puppet who dared to question its puppeteer. Then, off the top of his head, he offered Stamp a lulu of an "actor’s motivation" for Toby, telling him: "Last-a night you play Macbeth. Then you go to a party. Big-a party. Whiskey. Hashish. Cocaine. A whore-gy! And at this-a whore-gy, you fuck some woman while some black-a man fuck you. Then you are on your way to the airport and someone put big tab LSD
under your tongue. Now you're here!" Stamp needed no further preparation. Nevertheless, he was constantly intrigued by Fellini’s love of extreme artifice. When he asked the director why the makeup people had been told to place Toby’s eyebrows at such an unnaturally high angle on his forehead, Fellini replied, "They are question marks. It makes you look like you’re asking a question."
Tullio Pinelli
, screenwriter of La strada
and La dolce vita
, and cameraman Giuseppe Rotunno
outline the varied, often complex approaches to scripting a Fellini film and lighting it. Noted French producer Toscan du Plantier details the frustration of working with a temperamental director who "needs an enemy" for inspiration. "An artist is a medium," insists Fellini, "a vessel to be filled by fantasy" as painter and long-time intimate, Rinaldo Geleng, evokes the maestro's wild mental states during La dolce vita, 8½ and Casanova. Featured during these interviews are extremely rare behind-the-scenes of La dolce vita, Juliet of the Spirits, Fellini's Casanova, and City of Women that are, in turn, punctuated by mysterious uncredited appearances by Ennio Flaiano
, Alain Cuny
, and Nanni Moretti
.
As the film moves through its final third, we tour the stagier sets and sample the less formally scripted scenes which characterize Fellini’s later work. These scenes are balanced against the filmmaker’s own latter-day musings in such a way that, even if one tends to resist Fellini’s later films, one is better able to see and understand them on his terms as part of an inevitable, continuous growth on his part. "Faking things, constantly faking!" says Fellini as we observe in detail his skillfully crafted, openly false, studio-built seascapes. "Making a fake sea, a fake meadow, a fake storm. All this faking, this representation - probably unconsciously - is merely a repetition of a kind of magic ritual."
After a clip from 8½ in which a sleepless Guido (Marcello Mastroianni
) worries that his latest film will capsize, owing to his own shortcomings - "What if it’s the end," he asks himself, "of a big fat liar without talent or genius?"- Fellini reflects that "doubt" is also a vital part of the creative process. "Fear is a feeling you have to cultivate. A man cannot do without being afraid. A fearless man is, I think, a fool. Fear is inseparable from being human." Fear of death motivated Fellini to abandon, sometime around 1966, a poetic film about the afterlife called The Voyage of G. Mastorna. Terence Stamp encouraged Fellini to make the film anyway: "'You think if you make this film, you will die,'" he recalls telling the maestro. "'And you will! But not in the way you think. You’ll be reborn.'" Fellini resisted the advice. And yet, Mastorna itself was reborn, again and again as he saw it, in all his later work. "The most intimate and secret part of that film has nourished and found its way into every film I made later," he reflects. "Like the wreck of a ship that from the floor of the ocean continues to send radioactive signals." We are then shown footage of Mastroianni with Giulietta Masina
on the set of City of Women
and Mastroianni during a screen test for the ill-fated Mastorna.
Such ruminations set the tone for the film’s close in which Fellini reflects (as he approaches his own death in 1993) on the fleeting properties of life in general and the unforeseen, dream-like career which became his life. "I think it is a necessity," he says of the creative process, alluding not just to filmmaking but to the imaginative ways in which we each navigate our lives. "An interpretation... Which protects, consoles and reassures. I believe that art is the most successful attempt to instill in mankind the need to have a religious feeling. That’s what any kind of art expresses."
The film ends full circle at the seascape where it began except that, now, the remnant of an abandoned camera-track is aimed straight into the sea. On the ambiguity of this final image, critic F. X. Feeney wrote: "Is this substitution of a real sea for the imaginary ones we’ve been sailing for the past hour and forty minutes a critique, a refutation of Fellini’s beloved fakery? Or is it a validation - an invitation to enter the reality at which those fancies were ultimately aimed? In keeping with the maestro's elusive art, the image is a deliberate paradox."
In the summer of 1983, Pettigrew was planning a documentary about novelist Italo Calvino
. But when the two met at the novelist’s Roman apartment, "We sat around talking about 8½ when we ought to have been discussing Calvino," explained Pettigrew to Newsweek International correspondent Michael J. Agovino. Fellini became such a ready topic whenever the two men relaxed from their more formal interview that after a few days, Calvino told the young filmmaker he had arranged a "little surprise" for him - lunch at Cinecittà
cooked by Fellini. "So there he was chopping the garlic," recalled Pettigrew. "The meal was spaghetti aglio e olio, al dente with a sprinkle of black pepper." Appropriately enough, the colloquy between the two Italian fabulists centered entirely on food. "Calvino knew how to steer the conversation. We talked a great deal about French and Italian cheeses - a subject dear to both of them; Calvino had spent many years in Paris and could compare gorgonzola and camembert with expertise." When Fellini pressed the Canadian filmmaker for word of his nation’s cuisine, the most unique he could come up with was the national snack, maple syrup served on snow. "Fellini looked at me in stupefaction. 'Thees is not possible,' he said. 'It is food for mooses and beears.'" Calvino rescued Pettigrew by repeating a thematic connection the latter had made between Elias Canetti
’s book Crowds and Power and Fellini’s political parable, Prova d'orchestra
(1979). Fellini was duly surprised, admitting to Pettigrew that Canetti’s work had indeed been a conscious influence.
Pettigrew then turned the conversation to film. They were dining in Fellini’s private office beside the soundstages at Cinecittà
where he was finishing And the Ship Sails On (1983), a joyful production compared to the storms that had attended some of his previous pictures. Talk hinged on Fellini’s now total commitment to using soundstages, for exteriors as well as interiors. Pettigrew raised the issue of landscape as a means of revealing a character’s inner nature, and this struck a deep, sympathetic chord in both Calvino and Fellini. They each recalled favorite film-moments in which landscape and character merged, speaking particularly of Rossellini
’s Stromboli
, but circling (guided by Calvino) around the beauty and melancholy of the natural landscapes in Fellini’s early work.
When Pettigrew brought up the barren rocky hillsides where Augusto (Broderick Crawford
) is left to die at the end of Il bidone
, Fellini named the place without batting an eye. "Monte Marino, 15 kilometers south of Rome
." Intrigued that the maestro’s memory was so exact, Pettigrew asked about La Strada
. "Bagnoregio
, Ovindoli
, Ostia
," replied Fellini. And 8½
? "Ostia and Tivoli
, the Palais del Drago in Filicciano, 90 kilometers north of Rome. The provincial train station was shot in a train washing shed in the via Prenestina near Porto Maggiore." "What about decor?" Pettigrew wondered. "The hotel lobby and staircase in 8½, for example." "Based on the Plaza Hotel
in Rome,” Fellini explained, “except that I built a larger staircase and added a second lion. I had the elevator doors copied down to the last detail at great expense. The spa is a combination of the Chianciano and Montecatini
spas in Tuscany
.”
Not until 2001 could Pettigrew assemble a film crew to make the journey across Italy but it was apparently this defining moment over lunch, mining Fellini’s memory for places and taking notes, that I’m a Born Liar was born. "I thought it might be a way of making a unique film on Fellini which would for once lead us outside the Cinecittà studios, shooting 'real' locations, 'real' décor and threading these into the 'false' images of his films. The aim would be a portrait dealing with truth and lies, reality and fiction. I was excited by the possibilities of mixing black & white film with the locations in color. But it was years before I met a producer who shared my enthusiasm. Until Olivier Gal, my French producer, finally secured funding with Arte
, FilmFour, TelePiu, Scottish Screen
, and Eurimages
, all the other potential backers either wanted to cut costs or churn out a quickie TV program for a fast buck, especially just after Fellini died." Los Angeles Times reviewer Kenneth Turan
reported that what "is beyond doubt is Pettigrew's devotion to Fellini, whom he first met in 1983 and pursued for a decade to get the extended interviews... Then Pettigrew sat on the material for years before he found collaborators willing to finance his vision of how it should be used".
From the beginning, however, Pettigrew made his plans known to Fellini and secured the maestro’s agreement to cooperate. This proved to be a necessary final step in his education about a paradoxical subject. "Fellini made a cryptic comment to me about 'opposites' and the Italian mind: 'The typical Italian says yes when he means no and no when he means yes.'" Calvino, overhearing, countered with a Joycean
adjustment: "Like Nes and Yo." Much as the elder and younger filmmaker would often write and see each over the next decade, even after Calvino’s death in 1985, Fellini kept putting the interviews off, perpetually telling Pettigrew that he would find time the following year. By the summers of 1991 and 1992, "free time" had become inescapable: for the first time in 40 years, Fellini was unemployed. "Ah, Damiano!" he lamented. "My last film, La voce della luna
(1990), is a beeg flop. Producers call me no more. So you come to Rome and we become partners in crime." Pettigrew managed to obtain more than 10 hours of footage with a Fellini "supremely present, fully aware that the tapes were perhaps his filmed testament -- or, as he later put it in a letter to me: 'The longest and most detailed conversation ever recorded on my personal vision'".
Although Pettigrew admits challenging Fellini so aggressively during the final 1992 film shoot that he threatened to walk out, their friendship was such that it became physically painful for him to see the great man grown so depressed. "His health was rapidly declining and producers had written him off as a bad risk. I have photographs of Fellini that would make anyone wince: the expression on his face is that of an artist who knows, against his will, that his life’s work is over. His deep melancholy, in fact, pervades the entire film." Even so, there were amusing twists in the conversation. When Pettigrew shared a bit of off-handed, amateur medical diagnosis - that the mass of black hairs protruding from Fellini’s ears was a classic sign of arteriosclerosis
- the maestro began to treat his provocateur with a superstitious reverence, and cooperated more fully than ever.
In a 2004 radio interview with Australian journalist Julie Rigg, Pettigrew reflected on the following passage from Calvino’s last novel, Mr. Palomar
, which had inspired Fellini for a rooftop scene with Roberto Benigni in La voce della luna:
When Calvino originally dictated the text to Pettigrew, both were struck by how much it evoked Fellini, "the mystery man covered in the scales of a pine-cone." Serving as the basis for his question to Donald Sutherland on Fellini's notoriously facetious temperament, the actor read the above text and replied, "Fellini is constantly running away from his own superficiality." Pettigrew recalled that Fellini not only knew the Calvino text by heart, "'he encouraged me to make use of it. It was to be our little homage to Calvino, our way of thanking him. 'After all,' quipped Fellini, 'landscape ees character'".
For the Canadian director, the leap from Calvino (born 1923) to Fellini (born 1920) was a straight line: "Both were from northern Italy. Both began their artistic careers as more or less frustrated neorealists
seeking to develop forms that would accommodate their fantastic imaginations. To my question, 'Are novelists liars?' Calvino replied: 'Of course. They tell that piece of truth hidden at the bottom of every lie'. Fellini was delighted: 'I always knew I had a robust reason for being a born liar.'"
, won the Rockie Award for Best Arts Documentary at the 2002 Banff World Television Festival, the Coup de Coeur at the 2002 Marseille Festival of Documentary Film
, and was nominated for Best Documentary at the European Film Awards, Europe's equivalent of the Oscars.
Selected in over 40 international festivals including Cannes, Moscow, Amsterdam (IDFA), and Montréal, the film was distributed theatrically in 15 countries and sold to television worldwide. It was honoured at the maestro's 2003 gala retrospective at the Fellini Foundation in Rimini
and the Cinémathèque française
in Paris.
, Artistic Director Shane Danielson reviewed the film as a "remarkable achievement that illuminates its subject with a rare acuity and precision" while Hannah McGill reported for The Herald (Glasgow)
that it was "not to be missed. Composed of interviews with the great Italian director himself, as well as collaborators such as Terence Stamp and Donald Sutherland, this is an expertly judged and beautifully made document. Fellini's eloquent descriptions of his own development and working processes reveal extraordinary insight, not only into film-making, but into art and artists across all disciplinary boundaries". S. F. Said of The Telegraph
(London) wrote: "For sheer entertainment value, Fellini: I'm A Born Liar is as good as any fiction. The lengthy, probing interview in which Fellini is sometimes contradictory, sometimes self-deceiving, is always entertaining. This is neatly played off against the recollections of collaborators, including Terence Stamp and Donald Sutherland, which are alternately affectionate and appalled."
In France, it was acclaimed in major magazines and newspapers including Les Inrockuptibles
, Le Nouvel observateur
, Libération
, Le Figaro
and Le Monde
, the latter describing it as a "fascinating film, porteur d'une grande beauté". Vincent Malausa of Les Cahiers du Cinéma was particularly impressed by the film's structure: "By the extreme rigour of its movement, the film succeeds in illuminating the fundamentals of Fellini's entire œuvre."
at the Film Forum
, David Denby
's The New Yorker
review described the film as "a superb documentary fantasia and an extraordinarily controlled piece of film in its own right. The interviews, recorded in the year before the director’s death, are often eloquent – Fellini’s long sentences actually take you somewhere – and Pettigrew and his colleagues provide a surrounding texture of film excerpts and freshly shot footage that has the density of one of the Maestro’s own movies, without the excess".
Michael Wilmington of the Chicago Tribune
felt it was crafted for the happy few but "a must for Fellini lovers... Seeing Fellini again in the flesh and in his films is, as always, a pleasure and a teasing mystery - Fellini: I'm a Born Liar is best watched in conjunction with the films themselves". Although he was "happy to have seen it", Roger Ebert
declared the film "lacked specifics" and that as "a biography of Fellini the film is almost worthless but as an insight into his style, the film is priceless". In his New York Times review, A. O. Scott
explained that Fellini's style was precisely what the film was all about: "The interviews with Fellini and some of his collaborators, the snippets of movies both famous and obscure, the glimpses behind the scenes and the master's own garrulous, charming presence make for a thrilling masterclass in cinema aesthetics, with footnotes compiled by an intelligent and devoted disciple." Reporting for both NPR
and the Los Angeles Times
, Kenneth Turan
argued that "there's a lot to like about Born Liar, starting with that comprehensive interview which reveals Fellini to be an intoxicating conversationalist, articulate, expansive and capable of giving radically different takes on the same subject". Turan concluded that the film was "both completely fascinating and intermittently frustrating; however, as with Fellini's own films, the downside is far outweighed by the pluses".
By being "squarely focused on the nature of Fellini's insatiability", Wesley Morris
of The Boston Globe
maintained that Born Liar found "the truth behind Fellini's genius". Harper Barnes, longtime editor and cultural critic for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
, praised the film as a "remarkable, intellectually daunting and mind-stirring documentary that deals with philosophical and psychological questions, but always in a Felliniesque way. It tells a story, one that is visually rich and emotionally compelling and charged with one of the great director's favorite concepts - expectation, the sense that something always new and marvelous will come along". Barnes placed it on his Top Ten list of the best films of 2003.
"There should be a separate term for films that are nonfiction but clearly not intended to be objective documentaries," argued Wade Major of Boxoffice Magazine. "For without such a category, it's impossible to do proper justice to Fellini: I'm a Born Liar, probably the best such film ever made." "Few viewers of this fascinating documentary will remain untouched", wrote prominent Fellini expert Dr. Peter Bondanella in Cineaste Magazine. “There is no question that Pettigrew’s film on Fellini represents the most detailed and lengthy conversation with him ever recorded."
's themes from La dolce vita (1960), 8½ (1963), Amarcord (1973), and Casanova (1976), and various themes from City of Women (1980) composed by Luis Bacalov.
The feature documentary is available in the following DVD editions:
The Opening DVD is an 8-disc anamorphically enhanced
international Collectors Edition that includes the theatrical version together with six films by Federico Fellini, and 105' of bonus material featuring the animated film, Il lungo viaggio di Fellini (directed by Khrajnovski, written by Tonino Guerra
), a 20' documentary by Pettigrew that takes the viewer from Rimini
across the Apennine Mountains
to Rome
and the Tyrrhenian Sea
, interviews with Roland Topor
and Donald Sutherland
, artwork by Jean Giraud
, and rare footage of the maestro drawing a caricature of himself.
Designed as a companion to the documentary (which, in contrast, uses a single photo of Fellini as a baby), the book I'm a Born Liar: A Fellini Lexicon
has 124 film stills of Fellini at work and many unpublished photographs restored by the Cineteca del Comune di Bologna (Italy) .
documentary film
written and directed by Damian Pettigrew
.
Based on Federico Fellini
's last confessions filmed by Pettigrew in Rome in 1991 and 1992 (Fellini died in 1993), the film eschews straightforward biography to highlight the Italian director's unorthodox working methods, conscience, and philosophy.
A masterclass in cinema aesthetics, the feature documentary uses excerpts and behind-the-scenes from 8½
, Juliet of the Spirits
, Histoires extraordinaires
, Satyricon
, Amarcord
, Fellini's Casanova
, And the Ship Sails On, and City of Women
. Also interviewed are Roberto Benigni
(La voce della luna
), Terence Stamp
(Histoires extraordinaires), and Donald Sutherland
(Casanova), among other notable Fellini collaborators.
The film was nominated for Best Documentary at the European Film Awards, Europe's equivalent of the Oscars.
A camera tracks crosswise alongside a wide, brightly appointed beach, in what appears to be the dead of winter. No bathers are in sight, only a rolling parade of empty cabanas, with a tranquil blue seascape in the distance beyond. The wistful, melancholy music of Nino Rota
lends these vistas a dreamy familiarity. We then jump from color to luminous black & white, and a quick glimpse of Federico Fellini’s 1963 masterpiece, 8½
, in which the monumentally buxom harlot, La Saraghina, is preparing to perform her rumba on the beach for a flock of fugitive schoolboys. It’s the very same beach we were just staring at, but magically denuded of 40 years of succeeding development, and made mythic through the eyes of a master. From this point of departure, Pettigrew juxtaposes archival footage and fresh interviews with Fellini’s collaborators, interspersed with classic clips and the fruits of his own present-day visits to the haunting locales where I Vitelloni
(1953), Nights of Cabiria
(1957), La Dolce Vita
(1960), Satyricon
(1969) and other cinematic wonders first came to life. The goal is to fuse these ingredients thematically, to a degree that may better illuminate Fellini’s conscience and philosophies.
"I am a born liar," the maestro tells us. "For me, the things that are the most real are the ones I invented." In one way or another, Fellini’s playful habit of honestly admitting falsehood is presented, and tested, as the key to his art, and even his spirituality. The maestro’s boyhood in the Adriatic coastal town of Rimini
is conjured through a combination of an unpublished baby picture of Fellini, contemporary footage, and his own spoken reminiscence. Fellini remembers being fascinated, when still a small boy, by the town’s artistic types - bohemian outcasts who were, by turns, dirty, flashy, and inner directed. "A small boy is naturally rebellious," he tells us, of himself. "He’s reacting to the laws, the taboos, the rules laid down by his family, his school. And my generation was faced with so many taboos, those of the Catholic Church, of Fascism
."
This reflection is intercut with a behind-the-scenes of Amarcord
(1973), Fellini’s intimate epic about small-town life in the Benito Mussolini
era. The focus is on the scene, both nightmarish and comedic, in which the hero’s father is obliged by the police to drink castor oil, for no reason other than as a clownish, sadistic exercise of small-time power. Fellini circles the action, prompting the actors, crooning to them, snarling, sometimes obliging them to act directly towards him, as he crouches off-camera. Emphasised in this context is Fellini’s intense discomfort at causing such a scene to be re-enacted, however satiric the energy. He scowls, grits his teeth, and admonishes one actor playing a Blackshirt bully to be more precise, for pity’s sake: "Your partner has been suffering for days because of you. Get it right!"
Fellini’s early manhood and lifelong collaboration with his actress wife, Giulietta Masina
, are evoked through a combination of interviews (particularly with Fellini’s boyhood chum Titta Benzi) and clips from 8½ and Juliet of the Spirits
. While it is an understandable temptation to think of such scenes as "autobiography", they are counter-balanced by Fellini’s own warnings: "Memory is a most mysterious element, almost indefinable, that links us to things we don’t even remember having lived. It constantly incites us to stay in contact with dimensions, events, and sensations, that we can’t define, but that we know actually happened." After a close look at the overtly fake plastic seascapes of And the Ship Sails On (1983), Italian novelist Italo Calvino
observes: "To a psychoanalyst, whether you tell the truth or whether you lie, isn’t very important. Because even lies are interesting, eloquent, revealing, just as much as what is considered truth. I distrust a writer who claims to tell the whole truth about himself, about life, or about the world."
Some of the contradictions in Fellini’s accounts of himself are just plain funny. "I adore actors," he tells us. Cut to Donald Sutherland
, star of Fellini's Casanova
(1976), who quietly seethes that "in his relations with actors, Federico was dreadful, a martinet, a tyrant". Yet Sutherland is close to a smile as he recalls and then offers an insight that deepens the film’s argument: "Fellini is constantly threatened by his own superficiality
, and is constantly running away from it, in the same sense as Orson Welles
. Orson Welles created a lie about himself that was in fact the truth, but he knew that it was a lie he’d created - and once everybody believed it, he found it insupportable." Rocking the stability of these persuasive remarks is Roberto Benigni
, star of La voce della luna
(1990), extolling Fellini’s charm with actors in bright, broad strokes: "He treated me, for the first time in my life, like I was a real actor. Or better - actress! I was in the center, and to everybody he say, 'This is-a my Kim-a Novak.'"
Terence Stamp
, who played Toby Dammit in Histoires extraordinaires
(1968), remembers that when he asked for a bit of directorial instruction, Fellini glared at him at first as if witnessing something unnatural - a puppet who dared to question its puppeteer. Then, off the top of his head, he offered Stamp a lulu of an "actor’s motivation" for Toby, telling him: "Last-a night you play Macbeth. Then you go to a party. Big-a party. Whiskey. Hashish. Cocaine. A whore-gy! And at this-a whore-gy, you fuck some woman while some black-a man fuck you. Then you are on your way to the airport and someone put big tab LSD
under your tongue. Now you're here!" Stamp needed no further preparation. Nevertheless, he was constantly intrigued by Fellini’s love of extreme artifice. When he asked the director why the makeup people had been told to place Toby’s eyebrows at such an unnaturally high angle on his forehead, Fellini replied, "They are question marks. It makes you look like you’re asking a question."
Tullio Pinelli
, screenwriter of La strada
and La dolce vita
, and cameraman Giuseppe Rotunno
outline the varied, often complex approaches to scripting a Fellini film and lighting it. Noted French producer Toscan du Plantier details the frustration of working with a temperamental director who "needs an enemy" for inspiration. "An artist is a medium," insists Fellini, "a vessel to be filled by fantasy" as painter and long-time intimate, Rinaldo Geleng, evokes the maestro's wild mental states during La dolce vita, 8½ and Casanova. Featured during these interviews are extremely rare behind-the-scenes of La dolce vita, Juliet of the Spirits, Fellini's Casanova, and City of Women that are, in turn, punctuated by mysterious uncredited appearances by Ennio Flaiano
, Alain Cuny
, and Nanni Moretti
.
As the film moves through its final third, we tour the stagier sets and sample the less formally scripted scenes which characterize Fellini’s later work. These scenes are balanced against the filmmaker’s own latter-day musings in such a way that, even if one tends to resist Fellini’s later films, one is better able to see and understand them on his terms as part of an inevitable, continuous growth on his part. "Faking things, constantly faking!" says Fellini as we observe in detail his skillfully crafted, openly false, studio-built seascapes. "Making a fake sea, a fake meadow, a fake storm. All this faking, this representation - probably unconsciously - is merely a repetition of a kind of magic ritual."
After a clip from 8½ in which a sleepless Guido (Marcello Mastroianni
) worries that his latest film will capsize, owing to his own shortcomings - "What if it’s the end," he asks himself, "of a big fat liar without talent or genius?"- Fellini reflects that "doubt" is also a vital part of the creative process. "Fear is a feeling you have to cultivate. A man cannot do without being afraid. A fearless man is, I think, a fool. Fear is inseparable from being human." Fear of death motivated Fellini to abandon, sometime around 1966, a poetic film about the afterlife called The Voyage of G. Mastorna. Terence Stamp encouraged Fellini to make the film anyway: "'You think if you make this film, you will die,'" he recalls telling the maestro. "'And you will! But not in the way you think. You’ll be reborn.'" Fellini resisted the advice. And yet, Mastorna itself was reborn, again and again as he saw it, in all his later work. "The most intimate and secret part of that film has nourished and found its way into every film I made later," he reflects. "Like the wreck of a ship that from the floor of the ocean continues to send radioactive signals." We are then shown footage of Mastroianni with Giulietta Masina
on the set of City of Women
and Mastroianni during a screen test for the ill-fated Mastorna.
Such ruminations set the tone for the film’s close in which Fellini reflects (as he approaches his own death in 1993) on the fleeting properties of life in general and the unforeseen, dream-like career which became his life. "I think it is a necessity," he says of the creative process, alluding not just to filmmaking but to the imaginative ways in which we each navigate our lives. "An interpretation... Which protects, consoles and reassures. I believe that art is the most successful attempt to instill in mankind the need to have a religious feeling. That’s what any kind of art expresses."
The film ends full circle at the seascape where it began except that, now, the remnant of an abandoned camera-track is aimed straight into the sea. On the ambiguity of this final image, critic F. X. Feeney wrote: "Is this substitution of a real sea for the imaginary ones we’ve been sailing for the past hour and forty minutes a critique, a refutation of Fellini’s beloved fakery? Or is it a validation - an invitation to enter the reality at which those fancies were ultimately aimed? In keeping with the maestro's elusive art, the image is a deliberate paradox."
In the summer of 1983, Pettigrew was planning a documentary about novelist Italo Calvino
. But when the two met at the novelist’s Roman apartment, "We sat around talking about 8½ when we ought to have been discussing Calvino," explained Pettigrew to Newsweek International correspondent Michael J. Agovino. Fellini became such a ready topic whenever the two men relaxed from their more formal interview that after a few days, Calvino told the young filmmaker he had arranged a "little surprise" for him - lunch at Cinecittà
cooked by Fellini. "So there he was chopping the garlic," recalled Pettigrew. "The meal was spaghetti aglio e olio, al dente with a sprinkle of black pepper." Appropriately enough, the colloquy between the two Italian fabulists centered entirely on food. "Calvino knew how to steer the conversation. We talked a great deal about French and Italian cheeses - a subject dear to both of them; Calvino had spent many years in Paris and could compare gorgonzola and camembert with expertise." When Fellini pressed the Canadian filmmaker for word of his nation’s cuisine, the most unique he could come up with was the national snack, maple syrup served on snow. "Fellini looked at me in stupefaction. 'Thees is not possible,' he said. 'It is food for mooses and beears.'" Calvino rescued Pettigrew by repeating a thematic connection the latter had made between Elias Canetti
’s book Crowds and Power and Fellini’s political parable, Prova d'orchestra
(1979). Fellini was duly surprised, admitting to Pettigrew that Canetti’s work had indeed been a conscious influence.
Pettigrew then turned the conversation to film. They were dining in Fellini’s private office beside the soundstages at Cinecittà
where he was finishing And the Ship Sails On (1983), a joyful production compared to the storms that had attended some of his previous pictures. Talk hinged on Fellini’s now total commitment to using soundstages, for exteriors as well as interiors. Pettigrew raised the issue of landscape as a means of revealing a character’s inner nature, and this struck a deep, sympathetic chord in both Calvino and Fellini. They each recalled favorite film-moments in which landscape and character merged, speaking particularly of Rossellini
’s Stromboli
, but circling (guided by Calvino) around the beauty and melancholy of the natural landscapes in Fellini’s early work.
When Pettigrew brought up the barren rocky hillsides where Augusto (Broderick Crawford
) is left to die at the end of Il bidone
, Fellini named the place without batting an eye. "Monte Marino, 15 kilometers south of Rome
." Intrigued that the maestro’s memory was so exact, Pettigrew asked about La Strada
. "Bagnoregio
, Ovindoli
, Ostia
," replied Fellini. And 8½
? "Ostia and Tivoli
, the Palais del Drago in Filicciano, 90 kilometers north of Rome. The provincial train station was shot in a train washing shed in the via Prenestina near Porto Maggiore." "What about decor?" Pettigrew wondered. "The hotel lobby and staircase in 8½, for example." "Based on the Plaza Hotel
in Rome,” Fellini explained, “except that I built a larger staircase and added a second lion. I had the elevator doors copied down to the last detail at great expense. The spa is a combination of the Chianciano and Montecatini
spas in Tuscany
.”
Not until 2001 could Pettigrew assemble a film crew to make the journey across Italy but it was apparently this defining moment over lunch, mining Fellini’s memory for places and taking notes, that I’m a Born Liar was born. "I thought it might be a way of making a unique film on Fellini which would for once lead us outside the Cinecittà studios, shooting 'real' locations, 'real' décor and threading these into the 'false' images of his films. The aim would be a portrait dealing with truth and lies, reality and fiction. I was excited by the possibilities of mixing black & white film with the locations in color. But it was years before I met a producer who shared my enthusiasm. Until Olivier Gal, my French producer, finally secured funding with Arte
, FilmFour, TelePiu, Scottish Screen
, and Eurimages
, all the other potential backers either wanted to cut costs or churn out a quickie TV program for a fast buck, especially just after Fellini died." Los Angeles Times reviewer Kenneth Turan
reported that what "is beyond doubt is Pettigrew's devotion to Fellini, whom he first met in 1983 and pursued for a decade to get the extended interviews... Then Pettigrew sat on the material for years before he found collaborators willing to finance his vision of how it should be used".
From the beginning, however, Pettigrew made his plans known to Fellini and secured the maestro’s agreement to cooperate. This proved to be a necessary final step in his education about a paradoxical subject. "Fellini made a cryptic comment to me about 'opposites' and the Italian mind: 'The typical Italian says yes when he means no and no when he means yes.'" Calvino, overhearing, countered with a Joycean
adjustment: "Like Nes and Yo." Much as the elder and younger filmmaker would often write and see each over the next decade, even after Calvino’s death in 1985, Fellini kept putting the interviews off, perpetually telling Pettigrew that he would find time the following year. By the summers of 1991 and 1992, "free time" had become inescapable: for the first time in 40 years, Fellini was unemployed. "Ah, Damiano!" he lamented. "My last film, La voce della luna
(1990), is a beeg flop. Producers call me no more. So you come to Rome and we become partners in crime." Pettigrew managed to obtain more than 10 hours of footage with a Fellini "supremely present, fully aware that the tapes were perhaps his filmed testament -- or, as he later put it in a letter to me: 'The longest and most detailed conversation ever recorded on my personal vision'".
Although Pettigrew admits challenging Fellini so aggressively during the final 1992 film shoot that he threatened to walk out, their friendship was such that it became physically painful for him to see the great man grown so depressed. "His health was rapidly declining and producers had written him off as a bad risk. I have photographs of Fellini that would make anyone wince: the expression on his face is that of an artist who knows, against his will, that his life’s work is over. His deep melancholy, in fact, pervades the entire film." Even so, there were amusing twists in the conversation. When Pettigrew shared a bit of off-handed, amateur medical diagnosis - that the mass of black hairs protruding from Fellini’s ears was a classic sign of arteriosclerosis
- the maestro began to treat his provocateur with a superstitious reverence, and cooperated more fully than ever.
In a 2004 radio interview with Australian journalist Julie Rigg, Pettigrew reflected on the following passage from Calvino’s last novel, Mr. Palomar
, which had inspired Fellini for a rooftop scene with Roberto Benigni in La voce della luna:
When Calvino originally dictated the text to Pettigrew, both were struck by how much it evoked Fellini, "the mystery man covered in the scales of a pine-cone." Serving as the basis for his question to Donald Sutherland on Fellini's notoriously facetious temperament, the actor read the above text and replied, "Fellini is constantly running away from his own superficiality." Pettigrew recalled that Fellini not only knew the Calvino text by heart, "'he encouraged me to make use of it. It was to be our little homage to Calvino, our way of thanking him. 'After all,' quipped Fellini, 'landscape ees character'".
For the Canadian director, the leap from Calvino (born 1923) to Fellini (born 1920) was a straight line: "Both were from northern Italy. Both began their artistic careers as more or less frustrated neorealists
seeking to develop forms that would accommodate their fantastic imaginations. To my question, 'Are novelists liars?' Calvino replied: 'Of course. They tell that piece of truth hidden at the bottom of every lie'. Fellini was delighted: 'I always knew I had a robust reason for being a born liar.'"
, won the Rockie Award for Best Arts Documentary at the 2002 Banff World Television Festival, the Coup de Coeur at the 2002 Marseille Festival of Documentary Film
, and was nominated for Best Documentary at the European Film Awards, Europe's equivalent of the Oscars.
Selected in over 40 international festivals including Cannes, Moscow, Amsterdam (IDFA), and Montréal, the film was distributed theatrically in 15 countries and sold to television worldwide. It was honoured at the maestro's 2003 gala retrospective at the Fellini Foundation in Rimini
and the Cinémathèque française
in Paris.
, Artistic Director Shane Danielson reviewed the film as a "remarkable achievement that illuminates its subject with a rare acuity and precision" while Hannah McGill reported for The Herald (Glasgow)
that it was "not to be missed. Composed of interviews with the great Italian director himself, as well as collaborators such as Terence Stamp and Donald Sutherland, this is an expertly judged and beautifully made document. Fellini's eloquent descriptions of his own development and working processes reveal extraordinary insight, not only into film-making, but into art and artists across all disciplinary boundaries". S. F. Said of The Telegraph
(London) wrote: "For sheer entertainment value, Fellini: I'm A Born Liar is as good as any fiction. The lengthy, probing interview in which Fellini is sometimes contradictory, sometimes self-deceiving, is always entertaining. This is neatly played off against the recollections of collaborators, including Terence Stamp and Donald Sutherland, which are alternately affectionate and appalled."
In France, it was acclaimed in major magazines and newspapers including Les Inrockuptibles
, Le Nouvel observateur
, Libération
, Le Figaro
and Le Monde
, the latter describing it as a "fascinating film, porteur d'une grande beauté". Vincent Malausa of Les Cahiers du Cinéma was particularly impressed by the film's structure: "By the extreme rigour of its movement, the film succeeds in illuminating the fundamentals of Fellini's entire œuvre."
at the Film Forum
, David Denby
's The New Yorker
review described the film as "a superb documentary fantasia and an extraordinarily controlled piece of film in its own right. The interviews, recorded in the year before the director’s death, are often eloquent – Fellini’s long sentences actually take you somewhere – and Pettigrew and his colleagues provide a surrounding texture of film excerpts and freshly shot footage that has the density of one of the Maestro’s own movies, without the excess".
Michael Wilmington of the Chicago Tribune
felt it was crafted for the happy few but "a must for Fellini lovers... Seeing Fellini again in the flesh and in his films is, as always, a pleasure and a teasing mystery - Fellini: I'm a Born Liar is best watched in conjunction with the films themselves". Although he was "happy to have seen it", Roger Ebert
declared the film "lacked specifics" and that as "a biography of Fellini the film is almost worthless but as an insight into his style, the film is priceless". In his New York Times review, A. O. Scott
explained that Fellini's style was precisely what the film was all about: "The interviews with Fellini and some of his collaborators, the snippets of movies both famous and obscure, the glimpses behind the scenes and the master's own garrulous, charming presence make for a thrilling masterclass in cinema aesthetics, with footnotes compiled by an intelligent and devoted disciple." Reporting for both NPR
and the Los Angeles Times
, Kenneth Turan
argued that "there's a lot to like about Born Liar, starting with that comprehensive interview which reveals Fellini to be an intoxicating conversationalist, articulate, expansive and capable of giving radically different takes on the same subject". Turan concluded that the film was "both completely fascinating and intermittently frustrating; however, as with Fellini's own films, the downside is far outweighed by the pluses".
By being "squarely focused on the nature of Fellini's insatiability", Wesley Morris
of The Boston Globe
maintained that Born Liar found "the truth behind Fellini's genius". Harper Barnes, longtime editor and cultural critic for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
, praised the film as a "remarkable, intellectually daunting and mind-stirring documentary that deals with philosophical and psychological questions, but always in a Felliniesque way. It tells a story, one that is visually rich and emotionally compelling and charged with one of the great director's favorite concepts - expectation, the sense that something always new and marvelous will come along". Barnes placed it on his Top Ten list of the best films of 2003.
"There should be a separate term for films that are nonfiction but clearly not intended to be objective documentaries," argued Wade Major of Boxoffice Magazine. "For without such a category, it's impossible to do proper justice to Fellini: I'm a Born Liar, probably the best such film ever made." "Few viewers of this fascinating documentary will remain untouched", wrote prominent Fellini expert Dr. Peter Bondanella in Cineaste Magazine. “There is no question that Pettigrew’s film on Fellini represents the most detailed and lengthy conversation with him ever recorded."
's themes from La dolce vita (1960), 8½ (1963), Amarcord (1973), and Casanova (1976), and various themes from City of Women (1980) composed by Luis Bacalov.
The feature documentary is available in the following DVD editions:
The Opening DVD is an 8-disc anamorphically enhanced
international Collectors Edition that includes the theatrical version together with six films by Federico Fellini, and 105' of bonus material featuring the animated film, Il lungo viaggio di Fellini (directed by Khrajnovski, written by Tonino Guerra
), a 20' documentary by Pettigrew that takes the viewer from Rimini
across the Apennine Mountains
to Rome
and the Tyrrhenian Sea
, interviews with Roland Topor
and Donald Sutherland
, artwork by Jean Giraud
, and rare footage of the maestro drawing a caricature of himself.
Designed as a companion to the documentary (which, in contrast, uses a single photo of Fellini as a baby), the book I'm a Born Liar: A Fellini Lexicon
has 124 film stills of Fellini at work and many unpublished photographs restored by the Cineteca del Comune di Bologna (Italy) .
documentary film
written and directed by Damian Pettigrew
.
Based on Federico Fellini
's last confessions filmed by Pettigrew in Rome in 1991 and 1992 (Fellini died in 1993), the film eschews straightforward biography to highlight the Italian director's unorthodox working methods, conscience, and philosophy.
A masterclass in cinema aesthetics, the feature documentary uses excerpts and behind-the-scenes from 8½
, Juliet of the Spirits
, Histoires extraordinaires
, Satyricon
, Amarcord
, Fellini's Casanova
, And the Ship Sails On, and City of Women
. Also interviewed are Roberto Benigni
(La voce della luna
), Terence Stamp
(Histoires extraordinaires), and Donald Sutherland
(Casanova), among other notable Fellini collaborators.
The film was nominated for Best Documentary at the European Film Awards, Europe's equivalent of the Oscars.
A camera tracks crosswise alongside a wide, brightly appointed beach, in what appears to be the dead of winter. No bathers are in sight, only a rolling parade of empty cabanas, with a tranquil blue seascape in the distance beyond. The wistful, melancholy music of Nino Rota
lends these vistas a dreamy familiarity. We then jump from color to luminous black & white, and a quick glimpse of Federico Fellini’s 1963 masterpiece, 8½
, in which the monumentally buxom harlot, La Saraghina, is preparing to perform her rumba on the beach for a flock of fugitive schoolboys. It’s the very same beach we were just staring at, but magically denuded of 40 years of succeeding development, and made mythic through the eyes of a master. From this point of departure, Pettigrew juxtaposes archival footage and fresh interviews with Fellini’s collaborators, interspersed with classic clips and the fruits of his own present-day visits to the haunting locales where I Vitelloni
(1953), Nights of Cabiria
(1957), La Dolce Vita
(1960), Satyricon
(1969) and other cinematic wonders first came to life. The goal is to fuse these ingredients thematically, to a degree that may better illuminate Fellini’s conscience and philosophies.
"I am a born liar," the maestro tells us. "For me, the things that are the most real are the ones I invented." In one way or another, Fellini’s playful habit of honestly admitting falsehood is presented, and tested, as the key to his art, and even his spirituality. The maestro’s boyhood in the Adriatic coastal town of Rimini
is conjured through a combination of an unpublished baby picture of Fellini, contemporary footage, and his own spoken reminiscence. Fellini remembers being fascinated, when still a small boy, by the town’s artistic types - bohemian outcasts who were, by turns, dirty, flashy, and inner directed. "A small boy is naturally rebellious," he tells us, of himself. "He’s reacting to the laws, the taboos, the rules laid down by his family, his school. And my generation was faced with so many taboos, those of the Catholic Church, of Fascism
."
This reflection is intercut with a behind-the-scenes of Amarcord
(1973), Fellini’s intimate epic about small-town life in the Benito Mussolini
era. The focus is on the scene, both nightmarish and comedic, in which the hero’s father is obliged by the police to drink castor oil, for no reason other than as a clownish, sadistic exercise of small-time power. Fellini circles the action, prompting the actors, crooning to them, snarling, sometimes obliging them to act directly towards him, as he crouches off-camera. Emphasised in this context is Fellini’s intense discomfort at causing such a scene to be re-enacted, however satiric the energy. He scowls, grits his teeth, and admonishes one actor playing a Blackshirt bully to be more precise, for pity’s sake: "Your partner has been suffering for days because of you. Get it right!"
Fellini’s early manhood and lifelong collaboration with his actress wife, Giulietta Masina
, are evoked through a combination of interviews (particularly with Fellini’s boyhood chum Titta Benzi) and clips from 8½ and Juliet of the Spirits
. While it is an understandable temptation to think of such scenes as "autobiography", they are counter-balanced by Fellini’s own warnings: "Memory is a most mysterious element, almost indefinable, that links us to things we don’t even remember having lived. It constantly incites us to stay in contact with dimensions, events, and sensations, that we can’t define, but that we know actually happened." After a close look at the overtly fake plastic seascapes of And the Ship Sails On (1983), Italian novelist Italo Calvino
observes: "To a psychoanalyst, whether you tell the truth or whether you lie, isn’t very important. Because even lies are interesting, eloquent, revealing, just as much as what is considered truth. I distrust a writer who claims to tell the whole truth about himself, about life, or about the world."
Some of the contradictions in Fellini’s accounts of himself are just plain funny. "I adore actors," he tells us. Cut to Donald Sutherland
, star of Fellini's Casanova
(1976), who quietly seethes that "in his relations with actors, Federico was dreadful, a martinet, a tyrant". Yet Sutherland is close to a smile as he recalls and then offers an insight that deepens the film’s argument: "Fellini is constantly threatened by his own superficiality
, and is constantly running away from it, in the same sense as Orson Welles
. Orson Welles created a lie about himself that was in fact the truth, but he knew that it was a lie he’d created - and once everybody believed it, he found it insupportable." Rocking the stability of these persuasive remarks is Roberto Benigni
, star of La voce della luna
(1990), extolling Fellini’s charm with actors in bright, broad strokes: "He treated me, for the first time in my life, like I was a real actor. Or better - actress! I was in the center, and to everybody he say, 'This is-a my Kim-a Novak.'"
Terence Stamp
, who played Toby Dammit in Histoires extraordinaires
(1968), remembers that when he asked for a bit of directorial instruction, Fellini glared at him at first as if witnessing something unnatural - a puppet who dared to question its puppeteer. Then, off the top of his head, he offered Stamp a lulu of an "actor’s motivation" for Toby, telling him: "Last-a night you play Macbeth. Then you go to a party. Big-a party. Whiskey. Hashish. Cocaine. A whore-gy! And at this-a whore-gy, you fuck some woman while some black-a man fuck you. Then you are on your way to the airport and someone put big tab LSD
under your tongue. Now you're here!" Stamp needed no further preparation. Nevertheless, he was constantly intrigued by Fellini’s love of extreme artifice. When he asked the director why the makeup people had been told to place Toby’s eyebrows at such an unnaturally high angle on his forehead, Fellini replied, "They are question marks. It makes you look like you’re asking a question."
Tullio Pinelli
, screenwriter of La strada
and La dolce vita
, and cameraman Giuseppe Rotunno
outline the varied, often complex approaches to scripting a Fellini film and lighting it. Noted French producer Toscan du Plantier details the frustration of working with a temperamental director who "needs an enemy" for inspiration. "An artist is a medium," insists Fellini, "a vessel to be filled by fantasy" as painter and long-time intimate, Rinaldo Geleng, evokes the maestro's wild mental states during La dolce vita, 8½ and Casanova. Featured during these interviews are extremely rare behind-the-scenes of La dolce vita, Juliet of the Spirits, Fellini's Casanova, and City of Women that are, in turn, punctuated by mysterious uncredited appearances by Ennio Flaiano
, Alain Cuny
, and Nanni Moretti
.
As the film moves through its final third, we tour the stagier sets and sample the less formally scripted scenes which characterize Fellini’s later work. These scenes are balanced against the filmmaker’s own latter-day musings in such a way that, even if one tends to resist Fellini’s later films, one is better able to see and understand them on his terms as part of an inevitable, continuous growth on his part. "Faking things, constantly faking!" says Fellini as we observe in detail his skillfully crafted, openly false, studio-built seascapes. "Making a fake sea, a fake meadow, a fake storm. All this faking, this representation - probably unconsciously - is merely a repetition of a kind of magic ritual."
After a clip from 8½ in which a sleepless Guido (Marcello Mastroianni
) worries that his latest film will capsize, owing to his own shortcomings - "What if it’s the end," he asks himself, "of a big fat liar without talent or genius?"- Fellini reflects that "doubt" is also a vital part of the creative process. "Fear is a feeling you have to cultivate. A man cannot do without being afraid. A fearless man is, I think, a fool. Fear is inseparable from being human." Fear of death motivated Fellini to abandon, sometime around 1966, a poetic film about the afterlife called The Voyage of G. Mastorna. Terence Stamp encouraged Fellini to make the film anyway: "'You think if you make this film, you will die,'" he recalls telling the maestro. "'And you will! But not in the way you think. You’ll be reborn.'" Fellini resisted the advice. And yet, Mastorna itself was reborn, again and again as he saw it, in all his later work. "The most intimate and secret part of that film has nourished and found its way into every film I made later," he reflects. "Like the wreck of a ship that from the floor of the ocean continues to send radioactive signals." We are then shown footage of Mastroianni with Giulietta Masina
on the set of City of Women
and Mastroianni during a screen test for the ill-fated Mastorna.
Such ruminations set the tone for the film’s close in which Fellini reflects (as he approaches his own death in 1993) on the fleeting properties of life in general and the unforeseen, dream-like career which became his life. "I think it is a necessity," he says of the creative process, alluding not just to filmmaking but to the imaginative ways in which we each navigate our lives. "An interpretation... Which protects, consoles and reassures. I believe that art is the most successful attempt to instill in mankind the need to have a religious feeling. That’s what any kind of art expresses."
The film ends full circle at the seascape where it began except that, now, the remnant of an abandoned camera-track is aimed straight into the sea. On the ambiguity of this final image, critic F. X. Feeney wrote: "Is this substitution of a real sea for the imaginary ones we’ve been sailing for the past hour and forty minutes a critique, a refutation of Fellini’s beloved fakery? Or is it a validation - an invitation to enter the reality at which those fancies were ultimately aimed? In keeping with the maestro's elusive art, the image is a deliberate paradox."
In the summer of 1983, Pettigrew was planning a documentary about novelist Italo Calvino
. But when the two met at the novelist’s Roman apartment, "We sat around talking about 8½ when we ought to have been discussing Calvino," explained Pettigrew to Newsweek International correspondent Michael J. Agovino. Fellini became such a ready topic whenever the two men relaxed from their more formal interview that after a few days, Calvino told the young filmmaker he had arranged a "little surprise" for him - lunch at Cinecittà
cooked by Fellini. "So there he was chopping the garlic," recalled Pettigrew. "The meal was spaghetti aglio e olio, al dente with a sprinkle of black pepper." Appropriately enough, the colloquy between the two Italian fabulists centered entirely on food. "Calvino knew how to steer the conversation. We talked a great deal about French and Italian cheeses - a subject dear to both of them; Calvino had spent many years in Paris and could compare gorgonzola and camembert with expertise." When Fellini pressed the Canadian filmmaker for word of his nation’s cuisine, the most unique he could come up with was the national snack, maple syrup served on snow. "Fellini looked at me in stupefaction. 'Thees is not possible,' he said. 'It is food for mooses and beears.'" Calvino rescued Pettigrew by repeating a thematic connection the latter had made between Elias Canetti
’s book Crowds and Power and Fellini’s political parable, Prova d'orchestra
(1979). Fellini was duly surprised, admitting to Pettigrew that Canetti’s work had indeed been a conscious influence.
Pettigrew then turned the conversation to film. They were dining in Fellini’s private office beside the soundstages at Cinecittà
where he was finishing And the Ship Sails On (1983), a joyful production compared to the storms that had attended some of his previous pictures. Talk hinged on Fellini’s now total commitment to using soundstages, for exteriors as well as interiors. Pettigrew raised the issue of landscape as a means of revealing a character’s inner nature, and this struck a deep, sympathetic chord in both Calvino and Fellini. They each recalled favorite film-moments in which landscape and character merged, speaking particularly of Rossellini
’s Stromboli
, but circling (guided by Calvino) around the beauty and melancholy of the natural landscapes in Fellini’s early work.
When Pettigrew brought up the barren rocky hillsides where Augusto (Broderick Crawford
) is left to die at the end of Il bidone
, Fellini named the place without batting an eye. "Monte Marino, 15 kilometers south of Rome
." Intrigued that the maestro’s memory was so exact, Pettigrew asked about La Strada
. "Bagnoregio
, Ovindoli
, Ostia
," replied Fellini. And 8½
? "Ostia and Tivoli
, the Palais del Drago in Filicciano, 90 kilometers north of Rome. The provincial train station was shot in a train washing shed in the via Prenestina near Porto Maggiore." "What about decor?" Pettigrew wondered. "The hotel lobby and staircase in 8½, for example." "Based on the Plaza Hotel
in Rome,” Fellini explained, “except that I built a larger staircase and added a second lion. I had the elevator doors copied down to the last detail at great expense. The spa is a combination of the Chianciano and Montecatini
spas in Tuscany
.”
Not until 2001 could Pettigrew assemble a film crew to make the journey across Italy but it was apparently this defining moment over lunch, mining Fellini’s memory for places and taking notes, that I’m a Born Liar was born. "I thought it might be a way of making a unique film on Fellini which would for once lead us outside the Cinecittà studios, shooting 'real' locations, 'real' décor and threading these into the 'false' images of his films. The aim would be a portrait dealing with truth and lies, reality and fiction. I was excited by the possibilities of mixing black & white film with the locations in color. But it was years before I met a producer who shared my enthusiasm. Until Olivier Gal, my French producer, finally secured funding with Arte
, FilmFour, TelePiu, Scottish Screen
, and Eurimages
, all the other potential backers either wanted to cut costs or churn out a quickie TV program for a fast buck, especially just after Fellini died." Los Angeles Times reviewer Kenneth Turan
reported that what "is beyond doubt is Pettigrew's devotion to Fellini, whom he first met in 1983 and pursued for a decade to get the extended interviews... Then Pettigrew sat on the material for years before he found collaborators willing to finance his vision of how it should be used".
From the beginning, however, Pettigrew made his plans known to Fellini and secured the maestro’s agreement to cooperate. This proved to be a necessary final step in his education about a paradoxical subject. "Fellini made a cryptic comment to me about 'opposites' and the Italian mind: 'The typical Italian says yes when he means no and no when he means yes.'" Calvino, overhearing, countered with a Joycean
adjustment: "Like Nes and Yo." Much as the elder and younger filmmaker would often write and see each over the next decade, even after Calvino’s death in 1985, Fellini kept putting the interviews off, perpetually telling Pettigrew that he would find time the following year. By the summers of 1991 and 1992, "free time" had become inescapable: for the first time in 40 years, Fellini was unemployed. "Ah, Damiano!" he lamented. "My last film, La voce della luna
(1990), is a beeg flop. Producers call me no more. So you come to Rome and we become partners in crime." Pettigrew managed to obtain more than 10 hours of footage with a Fellini "supremely present, fully aware that the tapes were perhaps his filmed testament -- or, as he later put it in a letter to me: 'The longest and most detailed conversation ever recorded on my personal vision'".
Although Pettigrew admits challenging Fellini so aggressively during the final 1992 film shoot that he threatened to walk out, their friendship was such that it became physically painful for him to see the great man grown so depressed. "His health was rapidly declining and producers had written him off as a bad risk. I have photographs of Fellini that would make anyone wince: the expression on his face is that of an artist who knows, against his will, that his life’s work is over. His deep melancholy, in fact, pervades the entire film." Even so, there were amusing twists in the conversation. When Pettigrew shared a bit of off-handed, amateur medical diagnosis - that the mass of black hairs protruding from Fellini’s ears was a classic sign of arteriosclerosis
- the maestro began to treat his provocateur with a superstitious reverence, and cooperated more fully than ever.
In a 2004 radio interview with Australian journalist Julie Rigg, Pettigrew reflected on the following passage from Calvino’s last novel, Mr. Palomar
, which had inspired Fellini for a rooftop scene with Roberto Benigni in La voce della luna:
When Calvino originally dictated the text to Pettigrew, both were struck by how much it evoked Fellini, "the mystery man covered in the scales of a pine-cone." Serving as the basis for his question to Donald Sutherland on Fellini's notoriously facetious temperament, the actor read the above text and replied, "Fellini is constantly running away from his own superficiality." Pettigrew recalled that Fellini not only knew the Calvino text by heart, "'he encouraged me to make use of it. It was to be our little homage to Calvino, our way of thanking him. 'After all,' quipped Fellini, 'landscape ees character'".
For the Canadian director, the leap from Calvino (born 1923) to Fellini (born 1920) was a straight line: "Both were from northern Italy. Both began their artistic careers as more or less frustrated neorealists
seeking to develop forms that would accommodate their fantastic imaginations. To my question, 'Are novelists liars?' Calvino replied: 'Of course. They tell that piece of truth hidden at the bottom of every lie'. Fellini was delighted: 'I always knew I had a robust reason for being a born liar.'"
, won the Rockie Award for Best Arts Documentary at the 2002 Banff World Television Festival, the Coup de Coeur at the 2002 Marseille Festival of Documentary Film
, and was nominated for Best Documentary at the European Film Awards, Europe's equivalent of the Oscars.
Selected in over 40 international festivals including Cannes, Moscow, Amsterdam (IDFA), and Montréal, the film was distributed theatrically in 15 countries and sold to television worldwide. It was honoured at the maestro's 2003 gala retrospective at the Fellini Foundation in Rimini
and the Cinémathèque française
in Paris.
, Artistic Director Shane Danielson reviewed the film as a "remarkable achievement that illuminates its subject with a rare acuity and precision" while Hannah McGill reported for The Herald (Glasgow)
that it was "not to be missed. Composed of interviews with the great Italian director himself, as well as collaborators such as Terence Stamp and Donald Sutherland, this is an expertly judged and beautifully made document. Fellini's eloquent descriptions of his own development and working processes reveal extraordinary insight, not only into film-making, but into art and artists across all disciplinary boundaries". S. F. Said of The Telegraph
(London) wrote: "For sheer entertainment value, Fellini: I'm A Born Liar is as good as any fiction. The lengthy, probing interview in which Fellini is sometimes contradictory, sometimes self-deceiving, is always entertaining. This is neatly played off against the recollections of collaborators, including Terence Stamp and Donald Sutherland, which are alternately affectionate and appalled."
In France, it was acclaimed in major magazines and newspapers including Les Inrockuptibles
, Le Nouvel observateur
, Libération
, Le Figaro
and Le Monde
, the latter describing it as a "fascinating film, porteur d'une grande beauté". Vincent Malausa of Les Cahiers du Cinéma was particularly impressed by the film's structure: "By the extreme rigour of its movement, the film succeeds in illuminating the fundamentals of Fellini's entire œuvre."
at the Film Forum
, David Denby
's The New Yorker
review described the film as "a superb documentary fantasia and an extraordinarily controlled piece of film in its own right. The interviews, recorded in the year before the director’s death, are often eloquent – Fellini’s long sentences actually take you somewhere – and Pettigrew and his colleagues provide a surrounding texture of film excerpts and freshly shot footage that has the density of one of the Maestro’s own movies, without the excess".
Michael Wilmington of the Chicago Tribune
felt it was crafted for the happy few but "a must for Fellini lovers... Seeing Fellini again in the flesh and in his films is, as always, a pleasure and a teasing mystery - Fellini: I'm a Born Liar is best watched in conjunction with the films themselves". Although he was "happy to have seen it", Roger Ebert
declared the film "lacked specifics" and that as "a biography of Fellini the film is almost worthless but as an insight into his style, the film is priceless". In his New York Times review, A. O. Scott
explained that Fellini's style was precisely what the film was all about: "The interviews with Fellini and some of his collaborators, the snippets of movies both famous and obscure, the glimpses behind the scenes and the master's own garrulous, charming presence make for a thrilling masterclass in cinema aesthetics, with footnotes compiled by an intelligent and devoted disciple." Reporting for both NPR
and the Los Angeles Times
, Kenneth Turan
argued that "there's a lot to like about Born Liar, starting with that comprehensive interview which reveals Fellini to be an intoxicating conversationalist, articulate, expansive and capable of giving radically different takes on the same subject". Turan concluded that the film was "both completely fascinating and intermittently frustrating; however, as with Fellini's own films, the downside is far outweighed by the pluses".
By being "squarely focused on the nature of Fellini's insatiability", Wesley Morris
of The Boston Globe
maintained that Born Liar found "the truth behind Fellini's genius". Harper Barnes, longtime editor and cultural critic for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
, praised the film as a "remarkable, intellectually daunting and mind-stirring documentary that deals with philosophical and psychological questions, but always in a Felliniesque way. It tells a story, one that is visually rich and emotionally compelling and charged with one of the great director's favorite concepts - expectation, the sense that something always new and marvelous will come along". Barnes placed it on his Top Ten list of the best films of 2003.
"There should be a separate term for films that are nonfiction but clearly not intended to be objective documentaries," argued Wade Major of Boxoffice Magazine. "For without such a category, it's impossible to do proper justice to Fellini: I'm a Born Liar, probably the best such film ever made." "Few viewers of this fascinating documentary will remain untouched", wrote prominent Fellini expert Dr. Peter Bondanella in Cineaste Magazine. “There is no question that Pettigrew’s film on Fellini represents the most detailed and lengthy conversation with him ever recorded."
's themes from La dolce vita (1960), 8½ (1963), Amarcord (1973), and Casanova (1976), and various themes from City of Women (1980) composed by Luis Bacalov.
The feature documentary is available in the following DVD editions:
The Opening DVD is an 8-disc anamorphically enhanced
international Collectors Edition that includes the theatrical version together with six films by Federico Fellini, and 105' of bonus material featuring the animated film, Il lungo viaggio di Fellini (directed by Khrajnovski, written by Tonino Guerra
), a 20' documentary by Pettigrew that takes the viewer from Rimini
across the Apennine Mountains
to Rome
and the Tyrrhenian Sea
, interviews with Roland Topor
and Donald Sutherland
, artwork by Jean Giraud
, and rare footage of the maestro drawing a caricature of himself.
Designed as a companion to the documentary (which, in contrast, uses a single photo of Fellini as a baby), the book I'm a Born Liar: A Fellini Lexicon
has 124 film stills of Fellini at work and many unpublished photographs restored by the Cineteca del Comune di Bologna (Italy) .
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
documentary film
Documentary film
Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...
written and directed by Damian Pettigrew
Damian Pettigrew
Damian Pettigrew is a Canadian filmmaker, screenwriter, producer, author, and multimedia artist, best known for his cinematic portraits of Balthus and Federico Fellini...
.
Based on Federico Fellini
Federico Fellini
Federico Fellini, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI , was an Italian film director and scriptwriter. Known for a distinct style that blends fantasy and baroque images, he is considered one of the most influential and widely revered filmmakers of the 20th century...
's last confessions filmed by Pettigrew in Rome in 1991 and 1992 (Fellini died in 1993), the film eschews straightforward biography to highlight the Italian director's unorthodox working methods, conscience, and philosophy.
A masterclass in cinema aesthetics, the feature documentary uses excerpts and behind-the-scenes from 8½
8½
8½ is a 1963 Italian fantasy film directed by Federico Fellini. Co-scripted by Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano, and Brunello Rondi, it stars Marcello Mastroianni as Guido Anselmi, a famous Italian film director...
, Juliet of the Spirits
Juliet of the Spirits
Juliet of the Spirits is a 1965 Italian film directed by Federico Fellini that uses "caricatural types and dream situations to represent a psychic landscape"...
, Histoires extraordinaires
Histoires extraordinaires
Histoires extraordinaires is a 1968 "omnibus" film comprising three segments...
, Satyricon
Satyricon (film)
Satyricon is a 1969 Italian fantasy drama film written and directed by Federico Fellini. It is loosely based on Petronius's work, Satyricon, a series of bawdy and satirical episodes written during the reign of the emperor Nero and set in imperial Rome.-Plot:The film opens on a graffiti-covered...
, Amarcord
Amarcord
Amarcord is a 1973 Italian comedy-drama film directed by Federico Fellini, a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age tale about Titta, an adolescent boy growing up among an eccentric cast of characters in the fictional town of Borgo in 1930s Fascist Italy...
, Fellini's Casanova
Fellini's Casanova
Fellini's Casanova is a 1976 Italian film by director Federico Fellini, adapted from the autobiography of Giacomo Casanova, the 18th century adventurer and writer....
, And the Ship Sails On, and City of Women
City of Women
City of Women is a 1980 film written and directed by Federico Fellini. Amid Fellini's characteristic combination of dreamlike, outrageous, and artistic imagery, Marcello Mastroianni plays Snàporaz, a man who voyages through male and female spaces toward a confrontation with his own attitudes...
. Also interviewed are Roberto Benigni
Roberto Benigni
Roberto Remigio Benigni, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI is an Italian actor, comedian, screenwriter and director of film, theatre and television.- Early years :...
(La voce della luna
La voce della luna
The Voice of the Moon is a 1990 film by Italian director Federico Fellini, featuring actors Paolo Villaggio and Roberto Benigni. Returning to themes he first explored in La strada , Fellini crafts a parable on the whisperings of the soul that only madmen and vagabonds are capable of hearing...
), Terence Stamp
Terence Stamp
Terence Henry Stamp is an English actor. Since starting his career in 1962 he has appeared in over 60 films. His title role as Billy Budd in his film debut earned Stamp an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor and a BAFTA nomination for Best Newcomer.His other major roles include...
(Histoires extraordinaires), and Donald Sutherland
Donald Sutherland
Donald McNichol Sutherland, OC is a Canadian actor with a film career spanning nearly 50 years. Some of Sutherland's more notable movie roles included offbeat warriors in such war movies as The Dirty Dozen, , MASH , and Kelly's Heroes , as well as in such popular films as Klute, Invasion of the...
(Casanova), among other notable Fellini collaborators.
The film was nominated for Best Documentary at the European Film Awards, Europe's equivalent of the Oscars.
Plot
Nino Rota
Nino Rota was an Italian composer and academic who is best known for his film scores, notably for the films of Federico Fellini and Luchino Visconti...
lends these vistas a dreamy familiarity. We then jump from color to luminous black & white, and a quick glimpse of Federico Fellini’s 1963 masterpiece, 8½
8½
8½ is a 1963 Italian fantasy film directed by Federico Fellini. Co-scripted by Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano, and Brunello Rondi, it stars Marcello Mastroianni as Guido Anselmi, a famous Italian film director...
, in which the monumentally buxom harlot, La Saraghina, is preparing to perform her rumba on the beach for a flock of fugitive schoolboys. It’s the very same beach we were just staring at, but magically denuded of 40 years of succeeding development, and made mythic through the eyes of a master. From this point of departure, Pettigrew juxtaposes archival footage and fresh interviews with Fellini’s collaborators, interspersed with classic clips and the fruits of his own present-day visits to the haunting locales where I Vitelloni
I Vitelloni
I vitelloni is an Italian comedy drama film directed by Federico Fellini. Recognized as a pivotal work in the director's artistic evolution, the film has distinct autobiographical elements that mirror important societal changes in 1950s Italy....
(1953), Nights of Cabiria
Nights of Cabiria
Nights of Cabiria is a 1957 Italian film directed by Federico Fellini. Fellini's wife, Giulietta Masina, plays Cabiria Ceccarelli, a feisty but naive prostitute in Ostia, then a seedy section of Rome...
(1957), La Dolce Vita
La Dolce Vita
La Dolce Vita is a 1960 comedy-drama film written and directed by the critically acclaimed director Federico Fellini. The film is a story of a passive journalist's week in Rome, and his search for both happiness and love that will never come...
(1960), Satyricon
Satyricon (film)
Satyricon is a 1969 Italian fantasy drama film written and directed by Federico Fellini. It is loosely based on Petronius's work, Satyricon, a series of bawdy and satirical episodes written during the reign of the emperor Nero and set in imperial Rome.-Plot:The film opens on a graffiti-covered...
(1969) and other cinematic wonders first came to life. The goal is to fuse these ingredients thematically, to a degree that may better illuminate Fellini’s conscience and philosophies.
"I am a born liar," the maestro tells us. "For me, the things that are the most real are the ones I invented." In one way or another, Fellini’s playful habit of honestly admitting falsehood is presented, and tested, as the key to his art, and even his spirituality. The maestro’s boyhood in the Adriatic coastal town of Rimini
Rimini
Rimini is a medium-sized city of 142,579 inhabitants in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy, and capital city of the Province of Rimini. It is located on the Adriatic Sea, on the coast between the rivers Marecchia and Ausa...
is conjured through a combination of an unpublished baby picture of Fellini, contemporary footage, and his own spoken reminiscence. Fellini remembers being fascinated, when still a small boy, by the town’s artistic types - bohemian outcasts who were, by turns, dirty, flashy, and inner directed. "A small boy is naturally rebellious," he tells us, of himself. "He’s reacting to the laws, the taboos, the rules laid down by his family, his school. And my generation was faced with so many taboos, those of the Catholic Church, of Fascism
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
."
This reflection is intercut with a behind-the-scenes of Amarcord
Amarcord
Amarcord is a 1973 Italian comedy-drama film directed by Federico Fellini, a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age tale about Titta, an adolescent boy growing up among an eccentric cast of characters in the fictional town of Borgo in 1930s Fascist Italy...
(1973), Fellini’s intimate epic about small-town life in the Benito Mussolini
Benito Mussolini
Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was an Italian politician who led the National Fascist Party and is credited with being one of the key figures in the creation of Fascism....
era. The focus is on the scene, both nightmarish and comedic, in which the hero’s father is obliged by the police to drink castor oil, for no reason other than as a clownish, sadistic exercise of small-time power. Fellini circles the action, prompting the actors, crooning to them, snarling, sometimes obliging them to act directly towards him, as he crouches off-camera. Emphasised in this context is Fellini’s intense discomfort at causing such a scene to be re-enacted, however satiric the energy. He scowls, grits his teeth, and admonishes one actor playing a Blackshirt bully to be more precise, for pity’s sake: "Your partner has been suffering for days because of you. Get it right!"
Fellini’s early manhood and lifelong collaboration with his actress wife, Giulietta Masina
Giulietta Masina
Giulietta Masina was an Italian film and stage actress. She starred in La Strada and Nights of Cabiria, both winners of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, in 1956 and 1957, respectively...
, are evoked through a combination of interviews (particularly with Fellini’s boyhood chum Titta Benzi) and clips from 8½ and Juliet of the Spirits
Juliet of the Spirits
Juliet of the Spirits is a 1965 Italian film directed by Federico Fellini that uses "caricatural types and dream situations to represent a psychic landscape"...
. While it is an understandable temptation to think of such scenes as "autobiography", they are counter-balanced by Fellini’s own warnings: "Memory is a most mysterious element, almost indefinable, that links us to things we don’t even remember having lived. It constantly incites us to stay in contact with dimensions, events, and sensations, that we can’t define, but that we know actually happened." After a close look at the overtly fake plastic seascapes of And the Ship Sails On (1983), Italian novelist Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy , the Cosmicomics collection of short stories , and the novels Invisible Cities and If on a winter's night a traveler .Lionised in Britain and the United States,...
observes: "To a psychoanalyst, whether you tell the truth or whether you lie, isn’t very important. Because even lies are interesting, eloquent, revealing, just as much as what is considered truth. I distrust a writer who claims to tell the whole truth about himself, about life, or about the world."
Some of the contradictions in Fellini’s accounts of himself are just plain funny. "I adore actors," he tells us. Cut to Donald Sutherland
Donald Sutherland
Donald McNichol Sutherland, OC is a Canadian actor with a film career spanning nearly 50 years. Some of Sutherland's more notable movie roles included offbeat warriors in such war movies as The Dirty Dozen, , MASH , and Kelly's Heroes , as well as in such popular films as Klute, Invasion of the...
, star of Fellini's Casanova
Fellini's Casanova
Fellini's Casanova is a 1976 Italian film by director Federico Fellini, adapted from the autobiography of Giacomo Casanova, the 18th century adventurer and writer....
(1976), who quietly seethes that "in his relations with actors, Federico was dreadful, a martinet, a tyrant". Yet Sutherland is close to a smile as he recalls and then offers an insight that deepens the film’s argument: "Fellini is constantly threatened by his own superficiality
Superficiality
'The principle of superficiality versus depth' has pervaded Western culture since at least the time of Plato: 'the dialectic of truth and appearance,' as the surface image of the latter 'competes with what Plato designates for us beyond appearance as being the Idea'.21stC urban parlance speaks of...
, and is constantly running away from it, in the same sense as Orson Welles
Orson Welles
George Orson Welles , best known as Orson Welles, was an American film director, actor, theatre director, screenwriter, and producer, who worked extensively in film, theatre, television and radio...
. Orson Welles created a lie about himself that was in fact the truth, but he knew that it was a lie he’d created - and once everybody believed it, he found it insupportable." Rocking the stability of these persuasive remarks is Roberto Benigni
Roberto Benigni
Roberto Remigio Benigni, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI is an Italian actor, comedian, screenwriter and director of film, theatre and television.- Early years :...
, star of La voce della luna
La voce della luna
The Voice of the Moon is a 1990 film by Italian director Federico Fellini, featuring actors Paolo Villaggio and Roberto Benigni. Returning to themes he first explored in La strada , Fellini crafts a parable on the whisperings of the soul that only madmen and vagabonds are capable of hearing...
(1990), extolling Fellini’s charm with actors in bright, broad strokes: "He treated me, for the first time in my life, like I was a real actor. Or better - actress! I was in the center, and to everybody he say, 'This is-a my Kim-a Novak.'"
Terence Stamp
Terence Stamp
Terence Henry Stamp is an English actor. Since starting his career in 1962 he has appeared in over 60 films. His title role as Billy Budd in his film debut earned Stamp an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor and a BAFTA nomination for Best Newcomer.His other major roles include...
, who played Toby Dammit in Histoires extraordinaires
Histoires extraordinaires
Histoires extraordinaires is a 1968 "omnibus" film comprising three segments...
(1968), remembers that when he asked for a bit of directorial instruction, Fellini glared at him at first as if witnessing something unnatural - a puppet who dared to question its puppeteer. Then, off the top of his head, he offered Stamp a lulu of an "actor’s motivation" for Toby, telling him: "Last-a night you play Macbeth. Then you go to a party. Big-a party. Whiskey. Hashish. Cocaine. A whore-gy! And at this-a whore-gy, you fuck some woman while some black-a man fuck you. Then you are on your way to the airport and someone put big tab LSD
LSD
Lysergic acid diethylamide, abbreviated LSD or LSD-25, also known as lysergide and colloquially as acid, is a semisynthetic psychedelic drug of the ergoline family, well known for its psychological effects which can include altered thinking processes, closed and open eye visuals, synaesthesia, an...
under your tongue. Now you're here!" Stamp needed no further preparation. Nevertheless, he was constantly intrigued by Fellini’s love of extreme artifice. When he asked the director why the makeup people had been told to place Toby’s eyebrows at such an unnaturally high angle on his forehead, Fellini replied, "They are question marks. It makes you look like you’re asking a question."
Tullio Pinelli
Tullio Pinelli
Tullio Pinelli was an Italian screenwriter best known for his work on the Federico Fellini classics I Vitelloni, La strada, La Dolce Vita and 8½.-Biography:...
, screenwriter of La strada
La Strada
La Strada is a 1954 Italian neorealist drama directed by Federico Fellini in which a naïve young woman is sold to a brutish man and goes on the road as a part of his itinerant show....
and La dolce vita
La Dolce Vita
La Dolce Vita is a 1960 comedy-drama film written and directed by the critically acclaimed director Federico Fellini. The film is a story of a passive journalist's week in Rome, and his search for both happiness and love that will never come...
, and cameraman Giuseppe Rotunno
Giuseppe Rotunno
Giuseppe Rotunno, A.S.C., A.I.C. is an Italian cinematographer. Sometimes credited as Peppino Rotunno, he was director of photography on eight films by Federico Fellini...
outline the varied, often complex approaches to scripting a Fellini film and lighting it. Noted French producer Toscan du Plantier details the frustration of working with a temperamental director who "needs an enemy" for inspiration. "An artist is a medium," insists Fellini, "a vessel to be filled by fantasy" as painter and long-time intimate, Rinaldo Geleng, evokes the maestro's wild mental states during La dolce vita, 8½ and Casanova. Featured during these interviews are extremely rare behind-the-scenes of La dolce vita, Juliet of the Spirits, Fellini's Casanova, and City of Women that are, in turn, punctuated by mysterious uncredited appearances by Ennio Flaiano
Ennio Flaiano
Ennio Flaiano , was an Italian screenwriter, playwright, novelist, journalist and drama critic...
, Alain Cuny
Alain Cuny
Alain Cuny was a French actor.He was born René Xavier Marie in Saint-Malo, Brittany, and studied medicine for a while before entering the film industry as a costume and set designer. Cuny started acting in the 1930s...
, and Nanni Moretti
Nanni Moretti
Giovanni "Nanni" Moretti is an Italian film director, producer, screenwriter and actor.-Life and work:Moretti was born in Bruneck, South Tyrol , in 1953 to parents who were teachers...
.
As the film moves through its final third, we tour the stagier sets and sample the less formally scripted scenes which characterize Fellini’s later work. These scenes are balanced against the filmmaker’s own latter-day musings in such a way that, even if one tends to resist Fellini’s later films, one is better able to see and understand them on his terms as part of an inevitable, continuous growth on his part. "Faking things, constantly faking!" says Fellini as we observe in detail his skillfully crafted, openly false, studio-built seascapes. "Making a fake sea, a fake meadow, a fake storm. All this faking, this representation - probably unconsciously - is merely a repetition of a kind of magic ritual."
After a clip from 8½ in which a sleepless Guido (Marcello Mastroianni
Marcello Mastroianni
Marcello Vincenzo Domenico Mastroianni, Knight Grand Cross was an Italian film actor. His honours included British Film Academy Awards, Best Actor awards at the Cannes Film Festival and two Golden Globe Awards.- Personal life :...
) worries that his latest film will capsize, owing to his own shortcomings - "What if it’s the end," he asks himself, "of a big fat liar without talent or genius?"- Fellini reflects that "doubt" is also a vital part of the creative process. "Fear is a feeling you have to cultivate. A man cannot do without being afraid. A fearless man is, I think, a fool. Fear is inseparable from being human." Fear of death motivated Fellini to abandon, sometime around 1966, a poetic film about the afterlife called The Voyage of G. Mastorna. Terence Stamp encouraged Fellini to make the film anyway: "'You think if you make this film, you will die,'" he recalls telling the maestro. "'And you will! But not in the way you think. You’ll be reborn.'" Fellini resisted the advice. And yet, Mastorna itself was reborn, again and again as he saw it, in all his later work. "The most intimate and secret part of that film has nourished and found its way into every film I made later," he reflects. "Like the wreck of a ship that from the floor of the ocean continues to send radioactive signals." We are then shown footage of Mastroianni with Giulietta Masina
Giulietta Masina
Giulietta Masina was an Italian film and stage actress. She starred in La Strada and Nights of Cabiria, both winners of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, in 1956 and 1957, respectively...
on the set of City of Women
City of Women
City of Women is a 1980 film written and directed by Federico Fellini. Amid Fellini's characteristic combination of dreamlike, outrageous, and artistic imagery, Marcello Mastroianni plays Snàporaz, a man who voyages through male and female spaces toward a confrontation with his own attitudes...
and Mastroianni during a screen test for the ill-fated Mastorna.
Such ruminations set the tone for the film’s close in which Fellini reflects (as he approaches his own death in 1993) on the fleeting properties of life in general and the unforeseen, dream-like career which became his life. "I think it is a necessity," he says of the creative process, alluding not just to filmmaking but to the imaginative ways in which we each navigate our lives. "An interpretation... Which protects, consoles and reassures. I believe that art is the most successful attempt to instill in mankind the need to have a religious feeling. That’s what any kind of art expresses."
The film ends full circle at the seascape where it began except that, now, the remnant of an abandoned camera-track is aimed straight into the sea. On the ambiguity of this final image, critic F. X. Feeney wrote: "Is this substitution of a real sea for the imaginary ones we’ve been sailing for the past hour and forty minutes a critique, a refutation of Fellini’s beloved fakery? Or is it a validation - an invitation to enter the reality at which those fancies were ultimately aimed? In keeping with the maestro's elusive art, the image is a deliberate paradox."
Production and financing
Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy , the Cosmicomics collection of short stories , and the novels Invisible Cities and If on a winter's night a traveler .Lionised in Britain and the United States,...
. But when the two met at the novelist’s Roman apartment, "We sat around talking about 8½ when we ought to have been discussing Calvino," explained Pettigrew to Newsweek International correspondent Michael J. Agovino. Fellini became such a ready topic whenever the two men relaxed from their more formal interview that after a few days, Calvino told the young filmmaker he had arranged a "little surprise" for him - lunch at Cinecittà
Cinecittà
Cinecittà is a large film studio in Rome that is considered the hub of Italian cinema.-History:The studios were founded in 1937 by Benito Mussolini and his head of cinema Luigi Freddi for propaganda purposes, under the slogan "Il cinema è l'arma più forte"...
cooked by Fellini. "So there he was chopping the garlic," recalled Pettigrew. "The meal was spaghetti aglio e olio, al dente with a sprinkle of black pepper." Appropriately enough, the colloquy between the two Italian fabulists centered entirely on food. "Calvino knew how to steer the conversation. We talked a great deal about French and Italian cheeses - a subject dear to both of them; Calvino had spent many years in Paris and could compare gorgonzola and camembert with expertise." When Fellini pressed the Canadian filmmaker for word of his nation’s cuisine, the most unique he could come up with was the national snack, maple syrup served on snow. "Fellini looked at me in stupefaction. 'Thees is not possible,' he said. 'It is food for mooses and beears.'" Calvino rescued Pettigrew by repeating a thematic connection the latter had made between Elias Canetti
Elias Canetti
Elias Canetti was a Bulgarian-born modernist novelist, playwright, memoirist, and non-fiction writer. He wrote in German and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981, "for writings marked by a broad outlook, a wealth of ideas and artistic power".-Life:...
’s book Crowds and Power and Fellini’s political parable, Prova d'orchestra
Prova d'orchestra
Orchestra Rehearsal is a 1978 Italian film directed by Federico Fellini. It follows an Italian orchestra as the members go on strike against the conductor...
(1979). Fellini was duly surprised, admitting to Pettigrew that Canetti’s work had indeed been a conscious influence.
Pettigrew then turned the conversation to film. They were dining in Fellini’s private office beside the soundstages at Cinecittà
Cinecittà
Cinecittà is a large film studio in Rome that is considered the hub of Italian cinema.-History:The studios were founded in 1937 by Benito Mussolini and his head of cinema Luigi Freddi for propaganda purposes, under the slogan "Il cinema è l'arma più forte"...
where he was finishing And the Ship Sails On (1983), a joyful production compared to the storms that had attended some of his previous pictures. Talk hinged on Fellini’s now total commitment to using soundstages, for exteriors as well as interiors. Pettigrew raised the issue of landscape as a means of revealing a character’s inner nature, and this struck a deep, sympathetic chord in both Calvino and Fellini. They each recalled favorite film-moments in which landscape and character merged, speaking particularly of Rossellini
Rossellini
Rossellini is a common Italian family name in Italy. Other spellings include: Rosselini.Rossellini may refers to:* Roberto Rossellini, Italian film director, and brother of Renzo** Renzo Rossellini, producer, son of Roberto...
’s Stromboli
Stromboli
Stromboli is a small island in the Tyrrhenian Sea, off the north coast of Sicily, containing one of the three active volcanoes in Italy. It is one of the eight Aeolian Islands, a volcanic arc north of Sicily. This name is a corruption of the Ancient Greek name Strongulē which was given to it...
, but circling (guided by Calvino) around the beauty and melancholy of the natural landscapes in Fellini’s early work.
When Pettigrew brought up the barren rocky hillsides where Augusto (Broderick Crawford
Broderick Crawford
Broderick Crawford was an Academy Award-winning American stage, film, radio and TV actor, often cast in tough-guy roles and best known for his starring role in the television series "Highway Patrol."-Early life:...
) is left to die at the end of Il bidone
Il bidone
Il bidone is an Italian film directed by Federico Fellini. It features Broderick Crawford, Richard Basehart, Giulietta Masina, among others....
, Fellini named the place without batting an eye. "Monte Marino, 15 kilometers south of Rome
Rome
Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...
." Intrigued that the maestro’s memory was so exact, Pettigrew asked about La Strada
La Strada
La Strada is a 1954 Italian neorealist drama directed by Federico Fellini in which a naïve young woman is sold to a brutish man and goes on the road as a part of his itinerant show....
. "Bagnoregio
Civita di Bagnoregio
Civita di Bagnoregio is a town in the Province of Viterbo in Central Italy, a frazione of the comune of Bagnoregio, 2 km W from it. It is about north of Rome.-History:...
, Ovindoli
Ovindoli
Ovindoli is a village and comune of the province of L'Aquila in the Abruzzo region of central Italy. Close to Rome, it is a popular resort for both summer and winter sports, including hiking, biking, equestrian activities and downhill and cross-country skiing.-Geography:Ovindoli lies in the...
, Ostia
Ostia (quarter of Rome)
Ostia is a large neighbourhood in the XIII Municipio of the comune of Rome, Italy. Ostia is also the only municipio or district of Rome on the Tyrrhenian Sea and many Romans spend the summer holidays there. Sometimes it is confused with Ostia Antica, an archaeological area, that is nearby...
," replied Fellini. And 8½
8½
8½ is a 1963 Italian fantasy film directed by Federico Fellini. Co-scripted by Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano, and Brunello Rondi, it stars Marcello Mastroianni as Guido Anselmi, a famous Italian film director...
? "Ostia and Tivoli
Tivoli, Italy
Tivoli , the classical Tibur, is an ancient Italian town in Lazio, about 30 km east-north-east of Rome, at the falls of the Aniene river where it issues from the Sabine hills...
, the Palais del Drago in Filicciano, 90 kilometers north of Rome. The provincial train station was shot in a train washing shed in the via Prenestina near Porto Maggiore." "What about decor?" Pettigrew wondered. "The hotel lobby and staircase in 8½, for example." "Based on the Plaza Hotel
Plaza Hotel
The Plaza Hotel in New York City is a landmark 20-story luxury hotel with a height of and length of that occupies the west side of Grand Army Plaza, from which it derives its name, and extends along Central Park South in Manhattan. Fifth Avenue extends along the east side of Grand Army Plaza...
in Rome,” Fellini explained, “except that I built a larger staircase and added a second lion. I had the elevator doors copied down to the last detail at great expense. The spa is a combination of the Chianciano and Montecatini
Montecatini
- Places in Italy :* Montecatini Terme, health resort in Tuscany* Montecatini Val di Cecina, village and mining town to the south of Pisa*Montecatini, hamlet in the comune of San Martino in Rio...
spas in Tuscany
Tuscany
Tuscany is a region in Italy. It has an area of about 23,000 square kilometres and a population of about 3.75 million inhabitants. The regional capital is Florence ....
.”
Not until 2001 could Pettigrew assemble a film crew to make the journey across Italy but it was apparently this defining moment over lunch, mining Fellini’s memory for places and taking notes, that I’m a Born Liar was born. "I thought it might be a way of making a unique film on Fellini which would for once lead us outside the Cinecittà studios, shooting 'real' locations, 'real' décor and threading these into the 'false' images of his films. The aim would be a portrait dealing with truth and lies, reality and fiction. I was excited by the possibilities of mixing black & white film with the locations in color. But it was years before I met a producer who shared my enthusiasm. Until Olivier Gal, my French producer, finally secured funding with Arte
Arte
Arte is a Franco-German TV network. It is a European culture channel and aims to promote quality programming especially in areas of culture and the arts...
, FilmFour, TelePiu, Scottish Screen
Scottish Screen
Scottish Screen is the national body for film and television in Scotland, established in April 1997. It took on the functions of the Scottish Film Council, the Scottish Film Production Fund, Scottish Screen Locations and Scottish Broadcast and Film Training, forming a unitary organisation.Scottish...
, and Eurimages
Eurimages
Eurimages is the Council of Europe fund for the co-production, distribution, exhibition and digitisation of European cinematographic works. It aims to promote the European film industry by encouraging the production and distribution of films and fostering co-operation between professionals....
, all the other potential backers either wanted to cut costs or churn out a quickie TV program for a fast buck, especially just after Fellini died." Los Angeles Times reviewer Kenneth Turan
Kenneth Turan
Kenneth Turan is an American film critic and Lecturer in the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California.-Background:...
reported that what "is beyond doubt is Pettigrew's devotion to Fellini, whom he first met in 1983 and pursued for a decade to get the extended interviews... Then Pettigrew sat on the material for years before he found collaborators willing to finance his vision of how it should be used".
From the beginning, however, Pettigrew made his plans known to Fellini and secured the maestro’s agreement to cooperate. This proved to be a necessary final step in his education about a paradoxical subject. "Fellini made a cryptic comment to me about 'opposites' and the Italian mind: 'The typical Italian says yes when he means no and no when he means yes.'" Calvino, overhearing, countered with a Joycean
Joycean
A text is deemed Joycean when it is reminiscent of the writings of James Joyce, particularly Ulysses or Finnegans Wake. Joycean fiction exhibits a high degree of verbal play, usually within the framework of stream of consciousness. Works that are "Joycean" may also be technically eclectic,...
adjustment: "Like Nes and Yo." Much as the elder and younger filmmaker would often write and see each over the next decade, even after Calvino’s death in 1985, Fellini kept putting the interviews off, perpetually telling Pettigrew that he would find time the following year. By the summers of 1991 and 1992, "free time" had become inescapable: for the first time in 40 years, Fellini was unemployed. "Ah, Damiano!" he lamented. "My last film, La voce della luna
La voce della luna
The Voice of the Moon is a 1990 film by Italian director Federico Fellini, featuring actors Paolo Villaggio and Roberto Benigni. Returning to themes he first explored in La strada , Fellini crafts a parable on the whisperings of the soul that only madmen and vagabonds are capable of hearing...
(1990), is a beeg flop. Producers call me no more. So you come to Rome and we become partners in crime." Pettigrew managed to obtain more than 10 hours of footage with a Fellini "supremely present, fully aware that the tapes were perhaps his filmed testament -- or, as he later put it in a letter to me: 'The longest and most detailed conversation ever recorded on my personal vision'".
Although Pettigrew admits challenging Fellini so aggressively during the final 1992 film shoot that he threatened to walk out, their friendship was such that it became physically painful for him to see the great man grown so depressed. "His health was rapidly declining and producers had written him off as a bad risk. I have photographs of Fellini that would make anyone wince: the expression on his face is that of an artist who knows, against his will, that his life’s work is over. His deep melancholy, in fact, pervades the entire film." Even so, there were amusing twists in the conversation. When Pettigrew shared a bit of off-handed, amateur medical diagnosis - that the mass of black hairs protruding from Fellini’s ears was a classic sign of arteriosclerosis
Arteriosclerosis
Arteriosclerosis refers to a stiffening of arteries.Arteriosclerosis is a general term describing any hardening of medium or large arteries It should not be confused with "arteriolosclerosis" or "atherosclerosis".Also known by the name "myoconditis" which is...
- the maestro began to treat his provocateur with a superstitious reverence, and cooperated more fully than ever.
In a 2004 radio interview with Australian journalist Julie Rigg, Pettigrew reflected on the following passage from Calvino’s last novel, Mr. Palomar
Mr. Palomar
Mr. Palomar is a 1983 novel by the Italian writer Italo Calvino. Its original Italian title is Palomar. In an interview with Gregory Lucente, Calvino stated that he began writing Mr. Palomar in 1975, making it a predecessor to earlier published works such as If on a winter's night a traveler. Mr...
, which had inspired Fellini for a rooftop scene with Roberto Benigni in La voce della luna:
The true shape of the city of Rome is in this rise and dip of roofs, of tiles old and new, flat and curved ... TV aerials, straight or crooked, painted or rusting, in the models of successive generations… And domes that lie curved against the sky, in every direction, at every distance, as if to confirm the feminine, Junonic essence of the city... from up here, you have the impression that this is the real crust of the earth, uneven but compact, though furrowed by crevices of unknown depth, cracks or wells or craters, whose edges - seen in perspective - look as if they overlap, like the scales of a pine-cone. What can be concealed, at the bottom? I don’t know: life on the surface is so rich and various that I have no urge to enquire further. I believe that it is only when you’ve come to know the surface of things that you can try to find out what lies beneath. But the surface of things is inexhaustible.
When Calvino originally dictated the text to Pettigrew, both were struck by how much it evoked Fellini, "the mystery man covered in the scales of a pine-cone." Serving as the basis for his question to Donald Sutherland on Fellini's notoriously facetious temperament, the actor read the above text and replied, "Fellini is constantly running away from his own superficiality." Pettigrew recalled that Fellini not only knew the Calvino text by heart, "'he encouraged me to make use of it. It was to be our little homage to Calvino, our way of thanking him. 'After all,' quipped Fellini, 'landscape ees character'".
For the Canadian director, the leap from Calvino (born 1923) to Fellini (born 1920) was a straight line: "Both were from northern Italy. Both began their artistic careers as more or less frustrated neorealists
Neorealism (art)
In art, neorealism was established by the ex-Camden Town Group painters Charles Ginner and Harold Gilman at the beginning of World War I. They set out to explore the spirit of their age through the shapes and colours of daily life...
seeking to develop forms that would accommodate their fantastic imaginations. To my question, 'Are novelists liars?' Calvino replied: 'Of course. They tell that piece of truth hidden at the bottom of every lie'. Fellini was delighted: 'I always knew I had a robust reason for being a born liar.'"
Awards and festivals
The film premiered at the 2002 Edinburgh International Film FestivalEdinburgh International Film Festival
The Edinburgh International Film Festival is an annual fortnight of cinema screenings and related events taking place each June. Established in 1947, it is the world's oldest continually running film festival...
, won the Rockie Award for Best Arts Documentary at the 2002 Banff World Television Festival, the Coup de Coeur at the 2002 Marseille Festival of Documentary Film
Marseille Festival of Documentary Film
Marseille International Festival of Documentary Film is a documentary film festival held yearly since 1989 in Marseille, France. The festival awards grand prizes in international and national categories...
, and was nominated for Best Documentary at the European Film Awards, Europe's equivalent of the Oscars.
Selected in over 40 international festivals including Cannes, Moscow, Amsterdam (IDFA), and Montréal, the film was distributed theatrically in 15 countries and sold to television worldwide. It was honoured at the maestro's 2003 gala retrospective at the Fellini Foundation in Rimini
Rimini
Rimini is a medium-sized city of 142,579 inhabitants in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy, and capital city of the Province of Rimini. It is located on the Adriatic Sea, on the coast between the rivers Marecchia and Ausa...
and the Cinémathèque française
Cinémathèque Française
The Cinémathèque Française holds one of the largest archives of films, movie documents and film-related objects in the world. Located in Paris, the Cinémathèque holds daily screenings of films from around the world.-History:...
in Paris.
Europe
In Europe, Born Liar garnered unanimously favorable reviews. At its sold out Edinburgh premiere attended by Terence StampTerence Stamp
Terence Henry Stamp is an English actor. Since starting his career in 1962 he has appeared in over 60 films. His title role as Billy Budd in his film debut earned Stamp an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor and a BAFTA nomination for Best Newcomer.His other major roles include...
, Artistic Director Shane Danielson reviewed the film as a "remarkable achievement that illuminates its subject with a rare acuity and precision" while Hannah McGill reported for The Herald (Glasgow)
The Herald (Glasgow)
The Herald is a broadsheet newspaper published Monday to Saturday in Glasgow, and available throughout Scotland. As of August 2011 it had an audited circulation of 47,226, giving it a lead over Scotland's other 'quality' national daily, The Scotsman, published in Edinburgh.The 1889 to 1906 editions...
that it was "not to be missed. Composed of interviews with the great Italian director himself, as well as collaborators such as Terence Stamp and Donald Sutherland, this is an expertly judged and beautifully made document. Fellini's eloquent descriptions of his own development and working processes reveal extraordinary insight, not only into film-making, but into art and artists across all disciplinary boundaries". S. F. Said of The Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph is a daily morning broadsheet newspaper distributed throughout the United Kingdom and internationally. The newspaper was founded by Arthur B...
(London) wrote: "For sheer entertainment value, Fellini: I'm A Born Liar is as good as any fiction. The lengthy, probing interview in which Fellini is sometimes contradictory, sometimes self-deceiving, is always entertaining. This is neatly played off against the recollections of collaborators, including Terence Stamp and Donald Sutherland, which are alternately affectionate and appalled."
In France, it was acclaimed in major magazines and newspapers including Les Inrockuptibles
Les Inrockuptibles
Les Inrockuptibles is a French cultural magazine. Started as a monthly magazine in 1986, it became weekly in 1995. The name is a play on "Les Incorruptibles", the French title of the American television series The Untouchables...
, Le Nouvel observateur
Le Nouvel Observateur
Le Nouvel Observateur is a weekly French newsmagazine. Based in Paris, it is the most prominent French general information magazine in terms of audience and circulation ....
, Libération
Libération
Libération is a French daily newspaper founded in Paris by Jean-Paul Sartre and Serge July in 1973 in the wake of the protest movements of May 1968. Originally a leftist newspaper, it has undergone a number of shifts during the 1980s and 1990s...
, Le Figaro
Le Figaro
Le Figaro is a French daily newspaper founded in 1826 and published in Paris. It is one of three French newspapers of record, with Le Monde and Libération, and is the oldest newspaper in France. It is also the second-largest national newspaper in France after Le Parisien and before Le Monde, but...
and Le Monde
Le Monde
Le Monde is a French daily evening newspaper owned by La Vie-Le Monde Group and edited in Paris. It is one of two French newspapers of record, and has generally been well respected since its first edition under founder Hubert Beuve-Méry on 19 December 1944...
, the latter describing it as a "fascinating film, porteur d'une grande beauté". Vincent Malausa of Les Cahiers du Cinéma was particularly impressed by the film's structure: "By the extreme rigour of its movement, the film succeeds in illuminating the fundamentals of Fellini's entire œuvre."
North America
In North America, the film received generally favorable reviews. On the eve of its U.S. premiere attended by Donald SutherlandDonald Sutherland
Donald McNichol Sutherland, OC is a Canadian actor with a film career spanning nearly 50 years. Some of Sutherland's more notable movie roles included offbeat warriors in such war movies as The Dirty Dozen, , MASH , and Kelly's Heroes , as well as in such popular films as Klute, Invasion of the...
at the Film Forum
Film Forum
Film Forum is a nonprofit movie theater located at 209 West Houston Street in New York City. It began in 1970 as an alternative screening space for independent films, with 50 folding chairs, one projector and a US$19,000 annual budget. Karen Cooper became director in 1972 and under her leadership,...
, David Denby
David Denby (film critic)
David Denby is an American journalist, best known as a film critic for The New Yorker magazine.-Background and education:Denby grew up in New York City. He received a B.A...
's The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
review described the film as "a superb documentary fantasia and an extraordinarily controlled piece of film in its own right. The interviews, recorded in the year before the director’s death, are often eloquent – Fellini’s long sentences actually take you somewhere – and Pettigrew and his colleagues provide a surrounding texture of film excerpts and freshly shot footage that has the density of one of the Maestro’s own movies, without the excess".
Michael Wilmington of the Chicago Tribune
Chicago Tribune
The Chicago Tribune is a major daily newspaper based in Chicago, Illinois, and the flagship publication of the Tribune Company. Formerly self-styled as the "World's Greatest Newspaper" , it remains the most read daily newspaper of the Chicago metropolitan area and the Great Lakes region and is...
felt it was crafted for the happy few but "a must for Fellini lovers... Seeing Fellini again in the flesh and in his films is, as always, a pleasure and a teasing mystery - Fellini: I'm a Born Liar is best watched in conjunction with the films themselves". Although he was "happy to have seen it", Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert
Roger Joseph Ebert is an American film critic and screenwriter. He is the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.Ebert is known for his film review column and for the television programs Sneak Previews, At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and Siskel and Ebert and The...
declared the film "lacked specifics" and that as "a biography of Fellini the film is almost worthless but as an insight into his style, the film is priceless". In his New York Times review, A. O. Scott
A. O. Scott
Anthony Oliver Scott, known as A. O. Scott , is an American journalist and critic. He is a chief film critic for The New York Times, along with Manohla Dargis.-Background and education:...
explained that Fellini's style was precisely what the film was all about: "The interviews with Fellini and some of his collaborators, the snippets of movies both famous and obscure, the glimpses behind the scenes and the master's own garrulous, charming presence make for a thrilling masterclass in cinema aesthetics, with footnotes compiled by an intelligent and devoted disciple." Reporting for both NPR
NPR
NPR, formerly National Public Radio, is a privately and publicly funded non-profit membership media organization that serves as a national syndicator to a network of 900 public radio stations in the United States. NPR was created in 1970, following congressional passage of the Public Broadcasting...
and the Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....
, Kenneth Turan
Kenneth Turan
Kenneth Turan is an American film critic and Lecturer in the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California.-Background:...
argued that "there's a lot to like about Born Liar, starting with that comprehensive interview which reveals Fellini to be an intoxicating conversationalist, articulate, expansive and capable of giving radically different takes on the same subject". Turan concluded that the film was "both completely fascinating and intermittently frustrating; however, as with Fellini's own films, the downside is far outweighed by the pluses".
By being "squarely focused on the nature of Fellini's insatiability", Wesley Morris
Wesley Morris
Wesley Morris is a film critic at The Boston Globe where he reviews films alongside Ty Burr. Morris and Burr also make regular appearances on NECN to discuss the latest films and do the weekly Take Two film review video series on Boston.com...
of The Boston Globe
The Boston Globe
The Boston Globe is an American daily newspaper based in Boston, Massachusetts. The Boston Globe has been owned by The New York Times Company since 1993...
maintained that Born Liar found "the truth behind Fellini's genius". Harper Barnes, longtime editor and cultural critic for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch is the major city-wide newspaper in St. Louis, Missouri. Although written to serve Greater St. Louis, the Post-Dispatch is one of the largest newspapers in the Midwestern United States, and is available and read as far west as Kansas City, Missouri, as far south as...
, praised the film as a "remarkable, intellectually daunting and mind-stirring documentary that deals with philosophical and psychological questions, but always in a Felliniesque way. It tells a story, one that is visually rich and emotionally compelling and charged with one of the great director's favorite concepts - expectation, the sense that something always new and marvelous will come along". Barnes placed it on his Top Ten list of the best films of 2003.
"There should be a separate term for films that are nonfiction but clearly not intended to be objective documentaries," argued Wade Major of Boxoffice Magazine. "For without such a category, it's impossible to do proper justice to Fellini: I'm a Born Liar, probably the best such film ever made." "Few viewers of this fascinating documentary will remain untouched", wrote prominent Fellini expert Dr. Peter Bondanella in Cineaste Magazine. “There is no question that Pettigrew’s film on Fellini represents the most detailed and lengthy conversation with him ever recorded."
Soundtrack
Nino RotaNino Rota
Nino Rota was an Italian composer and academic who is best known for his film scores, notably for the films of Federico Fellini and Luchino Visconti...
's themes from La dolce vita (1960), 8½ (1963), Amarcord (1973), and Casanova (1976), and various themes from City of Women (1980) composed by Luis Bacalov.
Theatrical releases
- Scotland: 56th Edinburgh International Film FestivalEdinburgh International Film FestivalThe Edinburgh International Film Festival is an annual fortnight of cinema screenings and related events taking place each June. Established in 1947, it is the world's oldest continually running film festival...
premiere (24 August 2002) - France: Heliotrope Films in tandem with MK2 International for world sales (May 7, 2003)
- United States: First Look International (April 2, 2003)
- Canada: Crystal Films (Québec, April 4, 2003) TVA Films (nationwide, 2004)
- Italy: Mikado (June 20, 2003)
- Spain: Cooper Films (June 22, 2003)
- Netherlands (September 10, 2003)
- Denmark (August 15, 2003)
- Japan: Toho Koshinsha Films (November 1, 2003)
- Australia: Palace Films (October 15, 2003)
- Brazil: Providence Films (June 20, 2003)
- Bulgaria: Marigold Films (July 12, 2003)
- Sweden: Sveriges Television (2003)
- Russia: Moscow Film Festival (June 26, 2004)
- Switzerland: CAB Productions (2004)
- United Kingdom: Metro Tartan Distribution (2006)
- Portugal: Costa do Castelo Filmes (2006)
- Ukraine: Klarmina (2006)
DVD and book releases
- North America - First Look Pictures (in Region 1 with cover art by Jean GiraudJean GiraudJean Henri Gaston Giraud is a French comics artist. Giraud has earned worldwide fame, not only under his own name but also under the pseudonym Moebius, and to a lesser extent Gir, the latter appearing mostly in the form of a boxed signature at the bottom of the artist's paintings, for instance the...
) - Italy - Cecchi Gori Editoria (in Region 2)
- Japan: Toho Koshinsha Films (in Region 2)
- Brazil: Providence Films (in Region 2)
- Bulgaria: Marigold Films (in Region 2)
- Ukraine: Klarmina (in Region 2)
- Portugal - Costa do Castelo Filmes (in Region 2)
- France and Switzerland - Les Films de Ma Vie (in Region 2) and Opening (in Region 2).
The Opening DVD is an 8-disc anamorphically enhanced
Anamorphic widescreen
Anamorphic widescreen, when applied to DVD manufacture, is a video process that horizontally squeezes a widescreen image so that it can be stored in a standard 4:3 aspect ratio DVD image frame. Compatible playback equipment can then re-expand the horizontal dimension to show the original widescreen...
international Collectors Edition that includes the theatrical version together with six films by Federico Fellini, and 105' of bonus material featuring the animated film, Il lungo viaggio di Fellini (directed by Khrajnovski, written by Tonino Guerra
Tonino Guerra
Tonino Guerra is an Italian poet, writer and screenwriter who has collaborated with some of the most prominent film directors of the world.-Biography:Guerra was born in Santarcangelo di Romagna....
), a 20' documentary by Pettigrew that takes the viewer from Rimini
Rimini
Rimini is a medium-sized city of 142,579 inhabitants in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy, and capital city of the Province of Rimini. It is located on the Adriatic Sea, on the coast between the rivers Marecchia and Ausa...
across the Apennine Mountains
Apennine mountains
The Apennines or Apennine Mountains or Greek oros but just as often used alone as a noun. The ancient Greeks and Romans typically but not always used "mountain" in the singular to mean one or a range; thus, "the Apennine mountain" refers to the entire chain and is translated "the Apennine...
to Rome
Rome
Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...
and the Tyrrhenian Sea
Tyrrhenian Sea
The Tyrrhenian Sea is part of the Mediterranean Sea off the western coast of Italy.-Geography:The sea is bounded by Corsica and Sardinia , Tuscany, Lazio, Campania, Basilicata and Calabria and Sicily ....
, interviews with Roland Topor
Roland Topor
Roland Topor , was a French illustrator, painter, writer and filmmaker, known for the surreal nature of his work...
and Donald Sutherland
Donald Sutherland
Donald McNichol Sutherland, OC is a Canadian actor with a film career spanning nearly 50 years. Some of Sutherland's more notable movie roles included offbeat warriors in such war movies as The Dirty Dozen, , MASH , and Kelly's Heroes , as well as in such popular films as Klute, Invasion of the...
, artwork by Jean Giraud
Jean Giraud
Jean Henri Gaston Giraud is a French comics artist. Giraud has earned worldwide fame, not only under his own name but also under the pseudonym Moebius, and to a lesser extent Gir, the latter appearing mostly in the form of a boxed signature at the bottom of the artist's paintings, for instance the...
, and rare footage of the maestro drawing a caricature of himself.
Designed as a companion to the documentary (which, in contrast, uses a single photo of Fellini as a baby), the book I'm a Born Liar: A Fellini Lexicon
I'm a Born Liar: A Fellini Lexicon
I'm a Born Liar: A Fellini Lexicon is a book combining film stills and photographs with transcripts of the last filmed interviews with Federico Fellini conducted by Canadian filmmaker Damian Pettigrew in Rome in 1991 and 1992...
has 124 film stills of Fellini at work and many unpublished photographs restored by the Cineteca del Comune di Bologna (Italy) .
Sources
Fellini: I'm a Born Liar is a 2002 FrenchFrance
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
documentary film
Documentary film
Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...
written and directed by Damian Pettigrew
Damian Pettigrew
Damian Pettigrew is a Canadian filmmaker, screenwriter, producer, author, and multimedia artist, best known for his cinematic portraits of Balthus and Federico Fellini...
.
Based on Federico Fellini
Federico Fellini
Federico Fellini, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI , was an Italian film director and scriptwriter. Known for a distinct style that blends fantasy and baroque images, he is considered one of the most influential and widely revered filmmakers of the 20th century...
's last confessions filmed by Pettigrew in Rome in 1991 and 1992 (Fellini died in 1993), the film eschews straightforward biography to highlight the Italian director's unorthodox working methods, conscience, and philosophy.
A masterclass in cinema aesthetics, the feature documentary uses excerpts and behind-the-scenes from 8½
8½
8½ is a 1963 Italian fantasy film directed by Federico Fellini. Co-scripted by Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano, and Brunello Rondi, it stars Marcello Mastroianni as Guido Anselmi, a famous Italian film director...
, Juliet of the Spirits
Juliet of the Spirits
Juliet of the Spirits is a 1965 Italian film directed by Federico Fellini that uses "caricatural types and dream situations to represent a psychic landscape"...
, Histoires extraordinaires
Histoires extraordinaires
Histoires extraordinaires is a 1968 "omnibus" film comprising three segments...
, Satyricon
Satyricon (film)
Satyricon is a 1969 Italian fantasy drama film written and directed by Federico Fellini. It is loosely based on Petronius's work, Satyricon, a series of bawdy and satirical episodes written during the reign of the emperor Nero and set in imperial Rome.-Plot:The film opens on a graffiti-covered...
, Amarcord
Amarcord
Amarcord is a 1973 Italian comedy-drama film directed by Federico Fellini, a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age tale about Titta, an adolescent boy growing up among an eccentric cast of characters in the fictional town of Borgo in 1930s Fascist Italy...
, Fellini's Casanova
Fellini's Casanova
Fellini's Casanova is a 1976 Italian film by director Federico Fellini, adapted from the autobiography of Giacomo Casanova, the 18th century adventurer and writer....
, And the Ship Sails On, and City of Women
City of Women
City of Women is a 1980 film written and directed by Federico Fellini. Amid Fellini's characteristic combination of dreamlike, outrageous, and artistic imagery, Marcello Mastroianni plays Snàporaz, a man who voyages through male and female spaces toward a confrontation with his own attitudes...
. Also interviewed are Roberto Benigni
Roberto Benigni
Roberto Remigio Benigni, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI is an Italian actor, comedian, screenwriter and director of film, theatre and television.- Early years :...
(La voce della luna
La voce della luna
The Voice of the Moon is a 1990 film by Italian director Federico Fellini, featuring actors Paolo Villaggio and Roberto Benigni. Returning to themes he first explored in La strada , Fellini crafts a parable on the whisperings of the soul that only madmen and vagabonds are capable of hearing...
), Terence Stamp
Terence Stamp
Terence Henry Stamp is an English actor. Since starting his career in 1962 he has appeared in over 60 films. His title role as Billy Budd in his film debut earned Stamp an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor and a BAFTA nomination for Best Newcomer.His other major roles include...
(Histoires extraordinaires), and Donald Sutherland
Donald Sutherland
Donald McNichol Sutherland, OC is a Canadian actor with a film career spanning nearly 50 years. Some of Sutherland's more notable movie roles included offbeat warriors in such war movies as The Dirty Dozen, , MASH , and Kelly's Heroes , as well as in such popular films as Klute, Invasion of the...
(Casanova), among other notable Fellini collaborators.
The film was nominated for Best Documentary at the European Film Awards, Europe's equivalent of the Oscars.
Plot
Nino Rota
Nino Rota was an Italian composer and academic who is best known for his film scores, notably for the films of Federico Fellini and Luchino Visconti...
lends these vistas a dreamy familiarity. We then jump from color to luminous black & white, and a quick glimpse of Federico Fellini’s 1963 masterpiece, 8½
8½
8½ is a 1963 Italian fantasy film directed by Federico Fellini. Co-scripted by Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano, and Brunello Rondi, it stars Marcello Mastroianni as Guido Anselmi, a famous Italian film director...
, in which the monumentally buxom harlot, La Saraghina, is preparing to perform her rumba on the beach for a flock of fugitive schoolboys. It’s the very same beach we were just staring at, but magically denuded of 40 years of succeeding development, and made mythic through the eyes of a master. From this point of departure, Pettigrew juxtaposes archival footage and fresh interviews with Fellini’s collaborators, interspersed with classic clips and the fruits of his own present-day visits to the haunting locales where I Vitelloni
I Vitelloni
I vitelloni is an Italian comedy drama film directed by Federico Fellini. Recognized as a pivotal work in the director's artistic evolution, the film has distinct autobiographical elements that mirror important societal changes in 1950s Italy....
(1953), Nights of Cabiria
Nights of Cabiria
Nights of Cabiria is a 1957 Italian film directed by Federico Fellini. Fellini's wife, Giulietta Masina, plays Cabiria Ceccarelli, a feisty but naive prostitute in Ostia, then a seedy section of Rome...
(1957), La Dolce Vita
La Dolce Vita
La Dolce Vita is a 1960 comedy-drama film written and directed by the critically acclaimed director Federico Fellini. The film is a story of a passive journalist's week in Rome, and his search for both happiness and love that will never come...
(1960), Satyricon
Satyricon (film)
Satyricon is a 1969 Italian fantasy drama film written and directed by Federico Fellini. It is loosely based on Petronius's work, Satyricon, a series of bawdy and satirical episodes written during the reign of the emperor Nero and set in imperial Rome.-Plot:The film opens on a graffiti-covered...
(1969) and other cinematic wonders first came to life. The goal is to fuse these ingredients thematically, to a degree that may better illuminate Fellini’s conscience and philosophies.
"I am a born liar," the maestro tells us. "For me, the things that are the most real are the ones I invented." In one way or another, Fellini’s playful habit of honestly admitting falsehood is presented, and tested, as the key to his art, and even his spirituality. The maestro’s boyhood in the Adriatic coastal town of Rimini
Rimini
Rimini is a medium-sized city of 142,579 inhabitants in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy, and capital city of the Province of Rimini. It is located on the Adriatic Sea, on the coast between the rivers Marecchia and Ausa...
is conjured through a combination of an unpublished baby picture of Fellini, contemporary footage, and his own spoken reminiscence. Fellini remembers being fascinated, when still a small boy, by the town’s artistic types - bohemian outcasts who were, by turns, dirty, flashy, and inner directed. "A small boy is naturally rebellious," he tells us, of himself. "He’s reacting to the laws, the taboos, the rules laid down by his family, his school. And my generation was faced with so many taboos, those of the Catholic Church, of Fascism
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
."
This reflection is intercut with a behind-the-scenes of Amarcord
Amarcord
Amarcord is a 1973 Italian comedy-drama film directed by Federico Fellini, a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age tale about Titta, an adolescent boy growing up among an eccentric cast of characters in the fictional town of Borgo in 1930s Fascist Italy...
(1973), Fellini’s intimate epic about small-town life in the Benito Mussolini
Benito Mussolini
Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was an Italian politician who led the National Fascist Party and is credited with being one of the key figures in the creation of Fascism....
era. The focus is on the scene, both nightmarish and comedic, in which the hero’s father is obliged by the police to drink castor oil, for no reason other than as a clownish, sadistic exercise of small-time power. Fellini circles the action, prompting the actors, crooning to them, snarling, sometimes obliging them to act directly towards him, as he crouches off-camera. Emphasised in this context is Fellini’s intense discomfort at causing such a scene to be re-enacted, however satiric the energy. He scowls, grits his teeth, and admonishes one actor playing a Blackshirt bully to be more precise, for pity’s sake: "Your partner has been suffering for days because of you. Get it right!"
Fellini’s early manhood and lifelong collaboration with his actress wife, Giulietta Masina
Giulietta Masina
Giulietta Masina was an Italian film and stage actress. She starred in La Strada and Nights of Cabiria, both winners of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, in 1956 and 1957, respectively...
, are evoked through a combination of interviews (particularly with Fellini’s boyhood chum Titta Benzi) and clips from 8½ and Juliet of the Spirits
Juliet of the Spirits
Juliet of the Spirits is a 1965 Italian film directed by Federico Fellini that uses "caricatural types and dream situations to represent a psychic landscape"...
. While it is an understandable temptation to think of such scenes as "autobiography", they are counter-balanced by Fellini’s own warnings: "Memory is a most mysterious element, almost indefinable, that links us to things we don’t even remember having lived. It constantly incites us to stay in contact with dimensions, events, and sensations, that we can’t define, but that we know actually happened." After a close look at the overtly fake plastic seascapes of And the Ship Sails On (1983), Italian novelist Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy , the Cosmicomics collection of short stories , and the novels Invisible Cities and If on a winter's night a traveler .Lionised in Britain and the United States,...
observes: "To a psychoanalyst, whether you tell the truth or whether you lie, isn’t very important. Because even lies are interesting, eloquent, revealing, just as much as what is considered truth. I distrust a writer who claims to tell the whole truth about himself, about life, or about the world."
Some of the contradictions in Fellini’s accounts of himself are just plain funny. "I adore actors," he tells us. Cut to Donald Sutherland
Donald Sutherland
Donald McNichol Sutherland, OC is a Canadian actor with a film career spanning nearly 50 years. Some of Sutherland's more notable movie roles included offbeat warriors in such war movies as The Dirty Dozen, , MASH , and Kelly's Heroes , as well as in such popular films as Klute, Invasion of the...
, star of Fellini's Casanova
Fellini's Casanova
Fellini's Casanova is a 1976 Italian film by director Federico Fellini, adapted from the autobiography of Giacomo Casanova, the 18th century adventurer and writer....
(1976), who quietly seethes that "in his relations with actors, Federico was dreadful, a martinet, a tyrant". Yet Sutherland is close to a smile as he recalls and then offers an insight that deepens the film’s argument: "Fellini is constantly threatened by his own superficiality
Superficiality
'The principle of superficiality versus depth' has pervaded Western culture since at least the time of Plato: 'the dialectic of truth and appearance,' as the surface image of the latter 'competes with what Plato designates for us beyond appearance as being the Idea'.21stC urban parlance speaks of...
, and is constantly running away from it, in the same sense as Orson Welles
Orson Welles
George Orson Welles , best known as Orson Welles, was an American film director, actor, theatre director, screenwriter, and producer, who worked extensively in film, theatre, television and radio...
. Orson Welles created a lie about himself that was in fact the truth, but he knew that it was a lie he’d created - and once everybody believed it, he found it insupportable." Rocking the stability of these persuasive remarks is Roberto Benigni
Roberto Benigni
Roberto Remigio Benigni, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI is an Italian actor, comedian, screenwriter and director of film, theatre and television.- Early years :...
, star of La voce della luna
La voce della luna
The Voice of the Moon is a 1990 film by Italian director Federico Fellini, featuring actors Paolo Villaggio and Roberto Benigni. Returning to themes he first explored in La strada , Fellini crafts a parable on the whisperings of the soul that only madmen and vagabonds are capable of hearing...
(1990), extolling Fellini’s charm with actors in bright, broad strokes: "He treated me, for the first time in my life, like I was a real actor. Or better - actress! I was in the center, and to everybody he say, 'This is-a my Kim-a Novak.'"
Terence Stamp
Terence Stamp
Terence Henry Stamp is an English actor. Since starting his career in 1962 he has appeared in over 60 films. His title role as Billy Budd in his film debut earned Stamp an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor and a BAFTA nomination for Best Newcomer.His other major roles include...
, who played Toby Dammit in Histoires extraordinaires
Histoires extraordinaires
Histoires extraordinaires is a 1968 "omnibus" film comprising three segments...
(1968), remembers that when he asked for a bit of directorial instruction, Fellini glared at him at first as if witnessing something unnatural - a puppet who dared to question its puppeteer. Then, off the top of his head, he offered Stamp a lulu of an "actor’s motivation" for Toby, telling him: "Last-a night you play Macbeth. Then you go to a party. Big-a party. Whiskey. Hashish. Cocaine. A whore-gy! And at this-a whore-gy, you fuck some woman while some black-a man fuck you. Then you are on your way to the airport and someone put big tab LSD
LSD
Lysergic acid diethylamide, abbreviated LSD or LSD-25, also known as lysergide and colloquially as acid, is a semisynthetic psychedelic drug of the ergoline family, well known for its psychological effects which can include altered thinking processes, closed and open eye visuals, synaesthesia, an...
under your tongue. Now you're here!" Stamp needed no further preparation. Nevertheless, he was constantly intrigued by Fellini’s love of extreme artifice. When he asked the director why the makeup people had been told to place Toby’s eyebrows at such an unnaturally high angle on his forehead, Fellini replied, "They are question marks. It makes you look like you’re asking a question."
Tullio Pinelli
Tullio Pinelli
Tullio Pinelli was an Italian screenwriter best known for his work on the Federico Fellini classics I Vitelloni, La strada, La Dolce Vita and 8½.-Biography:...
, screenwriter of La strada
La Strada
La Strada is a 1954 Italian neorealist drama directed by Federico Fellini in which a naïve young woman is sold to a brutish man and goes on the road as a part of his itinerant show....
and La dolce vita
La Dolce Vita
La Dolce Vita is a 1960 comedy-drama film written and directed by the critically acclaimed director Federico Fellini. The film is a story of a passive journalist's week in Rome, and his search for both happiness and love that will never come...
, and cameraman Giuseppe Rotunno
Giuseppe Rotunno
Giuseppe Rotunno, A.S.C., A.I.C. is an Italian cinematographer. Sometimes credited as Peppino Rotunno, he was director of photography on eight films by Federico Fellini...
outline the varied, often complex approaches to scripting a Fellini film and lighting it. Noted French producer Toscan du Plantier details the frustration of working with a temperamental director who "needs an enemy" for inspiration. "An artist is a medium," insists Fellini, "a vessel to be filled by fantasy" as painter and long-time intimate, Rinaldo Geleng, evokes the maestro's wild mental states during La dolce vita, 8½ and Casanova. Featured during these interviews are extremely rare behind-the-scenes of La dolce vita, Juliet of the Spirits, Fellini's Casanova, and City of Women that are, in turn, punctuated by mysterious uncredited appearances by Ennio Flaiano
Ennio Flaiano
Ennio Flaiano , was an Italian screenwriter, playwright, novelist, journalist and drama critic...
, Alain Cuny
Alain Cuny
Alain Cuny was a French actor.He was born René Xavier Marie in Saint-Malo, Brittany, and studied medicine for a while before entering the film industry as a costume and set designer. Cuny started acting in the 1930s...
, and Nanni Moretti
Nanni Moretti
Giovanni "Nanni" Moretti is an Italian film director, producer, screenwriter and actor.-Life and work:Moretti was born in Bruneck, South Tyrol , in 1953 to parents who were teachers...
.
As the film moves through its final third, we tour the stagier sets and sample the less formally scripted scenes which characterize Fellini’s later work. These scenes are balanced against the filmmaker’s own latter-day musings in such a way that, even if one tends to resist Fellini’s later films, one is better able to see and understand them on his terms as part of an inevitable, continuous growth on his part. "Faking things, constantly faking!" says Fellini as we observe in detail his skillfully crafted, openly false, studio-built seascapes. "Making a fake sea, a fake meadow, a fake storm. All this faking, this representation - probably unconsciously - is merely a repetition of a kind of magic ritual."
After a clip from 8½ in which a sleepless Guido (Marcello Mastroianni
Marcello Mastroianni
Marcello Vincenzo Domenico Mastroianni, Knight Grand Cross was an Italian film actor. His honours included British Film Academy Awards, Best Actor awards at the Cannes Film Festival and two Golden Globe Awards.- Personal life :...
) worries that his latest film will capsize, owing to his own shortcomings - "What if it’s the end," he asks himself, "of a big fat liar without talent or genius?"- Fellini reflects that "doubt" is also a vital part of the creative process. "Fear is a feeling you have to cultivate. A man cannot do without being afraid. A fearless man is, I think, a fool. Fear is inseparable from being human." Fear of death motivated Fellini to abandon, sometime around 1966, a poetic film about the afterlife called The Voyage of G. Mastorna. Terence Stamp encouraged Fellini to make the film anyway: "'You think if you make this film, you will die,'" he recalls telling the maestro. "'And you will! But not in the way you think. You’ll be reborn.'" Fellini resisted the advice. And yet, Mastorna itself was reborn, again and again as he saw it, in all his later work. "The most intimate and secret part of that film has nourished and found its way into every film I made later," he reflects. "Like the wreck of a ship that from the floor of the ocean continues to send radioactive signals." We are then shown footage of Mastroianni with Giulietta Masina
Giulietta Masina
Giulietta Masina was an Italian film and stage actress. She starred in La Strada and Nights of Cabiria, both winners of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, in 1956 and 1957, respectively...
on the set of City of Women
City of Women
City of Women is a 1980 film written and directed by Federico Fellini. Amid Fellini's characteristic combination of dreamlike, outrageous, and artistic imagery, Marcello Mastroianni plays Snàporaz, a man who voyages through male and female spaces toward a confrontation with his own attitudes...
and Mastroianni during a screen test for the ill-fated Mastorna.
Such ruminations set the tone for the film’s close in which Fellini reflects (as he approaches his own death in 1993) on the fleeting properties of life in general and the unforeseen, dream-like career which became his life. "I think it is a necessity," he says of the creative process, alluding not just to filmmaking but to the imaginative ways in which we each navigate our lives. "An interpretation... Which protects, consoles and reassures. I believe that art is the most successful attempt to instill in mankind the need to have a religious feeling. That’s what any kind of art expresses."
The film ends full circle at the seascape where it began except that, now, the remnant of an abandoned camera-track is aimed straight into the sea. On the ambiguity of this final image, critic F. X. Feeney wrote: "Is this substitution of a real sea for the imaginary ones we’ve been sailing for the past hour and forty minutes a critique, a refutation of Fellini’s beloved fakery? Or is it a validation - an invitation to enter the reality at which those fancies were ultimately aimed? In keeping with the maestro's elusive art, the image is a deliberate paradox."
Production and financing
Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy , the Cosmicomics collection of short stories , and the novels Invisible Cities and If on a winter's night a traveler .Lionised in Britain and the United States,...
. But when the two met at the novelist’s Roman apartment, "We sat around talking about 8½ when we ought to have been discussing Calvino," explained Pettigrew to Newsweek International correspondent Michael J. Agovino. Fellini became such a ready topic whenever the two men relaxed from their more formal interview that after a few days, Calvino told the young filmmaker he had arranged a "little surprise" for him - lunch at Cinecittà
Cinecittà
Cinecittà is a large film studio in Rome that is considered the hub of Italian cinema.-History:The studios were founded in 1937 by Benito Mussolini and his head of cinema Luigi Freddi for propaganda purposes, under the slogan "Il cinema è l'arma più forte"...
cooked by Fellini. "So there he was chopping the garlic," recalled Pettigrew. "The meal was spaghetti aglio e olio, al dente with a sprinkle of black pepper." Appropriately enough, the colloquy between the two Italian fabulists centered entirely on food. "Calvino knew how to steer the conversation. We talked a great deal about French and Italian cheeses - a subject dear to both of them; Calvino had spent many years in Paris and could compare gorgonzola and camembert with expertise." When Fellini pressed the Canadian filmmaker for word of his nation’s cuisine, the most unique he could come up with was the national snack, maple syrup served on snow. "Fellini looked at me in stupefaction. 'Thees is not possible,' he said. 'It is food for mooses and beears.'" Calvino rescued Pettigrew by repeating a thematic connection the latter had made between Elias Canetti
Elias Canetti
Elias Canetti was a Bulgarian-born modernist novelist, playwright, memoirist, and non-fiction writer. He wrote in German and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981, "for writings marked by a broad outlook, a wealth of ideas and artistic power".-Life:...
’s book Crowds and Power and Fellini’s political parable, Prova d'orchestra
Prova d'orchestra
Orchestra Rehearsal is a 1978 Italian film directed by Federico Fellini. It follows an Italian orchestra as the members go on strike against the conductor...
(1979). Fellini was duly surprised, admitting to Pettigrew that Canetti’s work had indeed been a conscious influence.
Pettigrew then turned the conversation to film. They were dining in Fellini’s private office beside the soundstages at Cinecittà
Cinecittà
Cinecittà is a large film studio in Rome that is considered the hub of Italian cinema.-History:The studios were founded in 1937 by Benito Mussolini and his head of cinema Luigi Freddi for propaganda purposes, under the slogan "Il cinema è l'arma più forte"...
where he was finishing And the Ship Sails On (1983), a joyful production compared to the storms that had attended some of his previous pictures. Talk hinged on Fellini’s now total commitment to using soundstages, for exteriors as well as interiors. Pettigrew raised the issue of landscape as a means of revealing a character’s inner nature, and this struck a deep, sympathetic chord in both Calvino and Fellini. They each recalled favorite film-moments in which landscape and character merged, speaking particularly of Rossellini
Rossellini
Rossellini is a common Italian family name in Italy. Other spellings include: Rosselini.Rossellini may refers to:* Roberto Rossellini, Italian film director, and brother of Renzo** Renzo Rossellini, producer, son of Roberto...
’s Stromboli
Stromboli
Stromboli is a small island in the Tyrrhenian Sea, off the north coast of Sicily, containing one of the three active volcanoes in Italy. It is one of the eight Aeolian Islands, a volcanic arc north of Sicily. This name is a corruption of the Ancient Greek name Strongulē which was given to it...
, but circling (guided by Calvino) around the beauty and melancholy of the natural landscapes in Fellini’s early work.
When Pettigrew brought up the barren rocky hillsides where Augusto (Broderick Crawford
Broderick Crawford
Broderick Crawford was an Academy Award-winning American stage, film, radio and TV actor, often cast in tough-guy roles and best known for his starring role in the television series "Highway Patrol."-Early life:...
) is left to die at the end of Il bidone
Il bidone
Il bidone is an Italian film directed by Federico Fellini. It features Broderick Crawford, Richard Basehart, Giulietta Masina, among others....
, Fellini named the place without batting an eye. "Monte Marino, 15 kilometers south of Rome
Rome
Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...
." Intrigued that the maestro’s memory was so exact, Pettigrew asked about La Strada
La Strada
La Strada is a 1954 Italian neorealist drama directed by Federico Fellini in which a naïve young woman is sold to a brutish man and goes on the road as a part of his itinerant show....
. "Bagnoregio
Civita di Bagnoregio
Civita di Bagnoregio is a town in the Province of Viterbo in Central Italy, a frazione of the comune of Bagnoregio, 2 km W from it. It is about north of Rome.-History:...
, Ovindoli
Ovindoli
Ovindoli is a village and comune of the province of L'Aquila in the Abruzzo region of central Italy. Close to Rome, it is a popular resort for both summer and winter sports, including hiking, biking, equestrian activities and downhill and cross-country skiing.-Geography:Ovindoli lies in the...
, Ostia
Ostia (quarter of Rome)
Ostia is a large neighbourhood in the XIII Municipio of the comune of Rome, Italy. Ostia is also the only municipio or district of Rome on the Tyrrhenian Sea and many Romans spend the summer holidays there. Sometimes it is confused with Ostia Antica, an archaeological area, that is nearby...
," replied Fellini. And 8½
8½
8½ is a 1963 Italian fantasy film directed by Federico Fellini. Co-scripted by Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano, and Brunello Rondi, it stars Marcello Mastroianni as Guido Anselmi, a famous Italian film director...
? "Ostia and Tivoli
Tivoli, Italy
Tivoli , the classical Tibur, is an ancient Italian town in Lazio, about 30 km east-north-east of Rome, at the falls of the Aniene river where it issues from the Sabine hills...
, the Palais del Drago in Filicciano, 90 kilometers north of Rome. The provincial train station was shot in a train washing shed in the via Prenestina near Porto Maggiore." "What about decor?" Pettigrew wondered. "The hotel lobby and staircase in 8½, for example." "Based on the Plaza Hotel
Plaza Hotel
The Plaza Hotel in New York City is a landmark 20-story luxury hotel with a height of and length of that occupies the west side of Grand Army Plaza, from which it derives its name, and extends along Central Park South in Manhattan. Fifth Avenue extends along the east side of Grand Army Plaza...
in Rome,” Fellini explained, “except that I built a larger staircase and added a second lion. I had the elevator doors copied down to the last detail at great expense. The spa is a combination of the Chianciano and Montecatini
Montecatini
- Places in Italy :* Montecatini Terme, health resort in Tuscany* Montecatini Val di Cecina, village and mining town to the south of Pisa*Montecatini, hamlet in the comune of San Martino in Rio...
spas in Tuscany
Tuscany
Tuscany is a region in Italy. It has an area of about 23,000 square kilometres and a population of about 3.75 million inhabitants. The regional capital is Florence ....
.”
Not until 2001 could Pettigrew assemble a film crew to make the journey across Italy but it was apparently this defining moment over lunch, mining Fellini’s memory for places and taking notes, that I’m a Born Liar was born. "I thought it might be a way of making a unique film on Fellini which would for once lead us outside the Cinecittà studios, shooting 'real' locations, 'real' décor and threading these into the 'false' images of his films. The aim would be a portrait dealing with truth and lies, reality and fiction. I was excited by the possibilities of mixing black & white film with the locations in color. But it was years before I met a producer who shared my enthusiasm. Until Olivier Gal, my French producer, finally secured funding with Arte
Arte
Arte is a Franco-German TV network. It is a European culture channel and aims to promote quality programming especially in areas of culture and the arts...
, FilmFour, TelePiu, Scottish Screen
Scottish Screen
Scottish Screen is the national body for film and television in Scotland, established in April 1997. It took on the functions of the Scottish Film Council, the Scottish Film Production Fund, Scottish Screen Locations and Scottish Broadcast and Film Training, forming a unitary organisation.Scottish...
, and Eurimages
Eurimages
Eurimages is the Council of Europe fund for the co-production, distribution, exhibition and digitisation of European cinematographic works. It aims to promote the European film industry by encouraging the production and distribution of films and fostering co-operation between professionals....
, all the other potential backers either wanted to cut costs or churn out a quickie TV program for a fast buck, especially just after Fellini died." Los Angeles Times reviewer Kenneth Turan
Kenneth Turan
Kenneth Turan is an American film critic and Lecturer in the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California.-Background:...
reported that what "is beyond doubt is Pettigrew's devotion to Fellini, whom he first met in 1983 and pursued for a decade to get the extended interviews... Then Pettigrew sat on the material for years before he found collaborators willing to finance his vision of how it should be used".
From the beginning, however, Pettigrew made his plans known to Fellini and secured the maestro’s agreement to cooperate. This proved to be a necessary final step in his education about a paradoxical subject. "Fellini made a cryptic comment to me about 'opposites' and the Italian mind: 'The typical Italian says yes when he means no and no when he means yes.'" Calvino, overhearing, countered with a Joycean
Joycean
A text is deemed Joycean when it is reminiscent of the writings of James Joyce, particularly Ulysses or Finnegans Wake. Joycean fiction exhibits a high degree of verbal play, usually within the framework of stream of consciousness. Works that are "Joycean" may also be technically eclectic,...
adjustment: "Like Nes and Yo." Much as the elder and younger filmmaker would often write and see each over the next decade, even after Calvino’s death in 1985, Fellini kept putting the interviews off, perpetually telling Pettigrew that he would find time the following year. By the summers of 1991 and 1992, "free time" had become inescapable: for the first time in 40 years, Fellini was unemployed. "Ah, Damiano!" he lamented. "My last film, La voce della luna
La voce della luna
The Voice of the Moon is a 1990 film by Italian director Federico Fellini, featuring actors Paolo Villaggio and Roberto Benigni. Returning to themes he first explored in La strada , Fellini crafts a parable on the whisperings of the soul that only madmen and vagabonds are capable of hearing...
(1990), is a beeg flop. Producers call me no more. So you come to Rome and we become partners in crime." Pettigrew managed to obtain more than 10 hours of footage with a Fellini "supremely present, fully aware that the tapes were perhaps his filmed testament -- or, as he later put it in a letter to me: 'The longest and most detailed conversation ever recorded on my personal vision'".
Although Pettigrew admits challenging Fellini so aggressively during the final 1992 film shoot that he threatened to walk out, their friendship was such that it became physically painful for him to see the great man grown so depressed. "His health was rapidly declining and producers had written him off as a bad risk. I have photographs of Fellini that would make anyone wince: the expression on his face is that of an artist who knows, against his will, that his life’s work is over. His deep melancholy, in fact, pervades the entire film." Even so, there were amusing twists in the conversation. When Pettigrew shared a bit of off-handed, amateur medical diagnosis - that the mass of black hairs protruding from Fellini’s ears was a classic sign of arteriosclerosis
Arteriosclerosis
Arteriosclerosis refers to a stiffening of arteries.Arteriosclerosis is a general term describing any hardening of medium or large arteries It should not be confused with "arteriolosclerosis" or "atherosclerosis".Also known by the name "myoconditis" which is...
- the maestro began to treat his provocateur with a superstitious reverence, and cooperated more fully than ever.
In a 2004 radio interview with Australian journalist Julie Rigg, Pettigrew reflected on the following passage from Calvino’s last novel, Mr. Palomar
Mr. Palomar
Mr. Palomar is a 1983 novel by the Italian writer Italo Calvino. Its original Italian title is Palomar. In an interview with Gregory Lucente, Calvino stated that he began writing Mr. Palomar in 1975, making it a predecessor to earlier published works such as If on a winter's night a traveler. Mr...
, which had inspired Fellini for a rooftop scene with Roberto Benigni in La voce della luna:
The true shape of the city of Rome is in this rise and dip of roofs, of tiles old and new, flat and curved ... TV aerials, straight or crooked, painted or rusting, in the models of successive generations… And domes that lie curved against the sky, in every direction, at every distance, as if to confirm the feminine, Junonic essence of the city... from up here, you have the impression that this is the real crust of the earth, uneven but compact, though furrowed by crevices of unknown depth, cracks or wells or craters, whose edges - seen in perspective - look as if they overlap, like the scales of a pine-cone. What can be concealed, at the bottom? I don’t know: life on the surface is so rich and various that I have no urge to enquire further. I believe that it is only when you’ve come to know the surface of things that you can try to find out what lies beneath. But the surface of things is inexhaustible.
When Calvino originally dictated the text to Pettigrew, both were struck by how much it evoked Fellini, "the mystery man covered in the scales of a pine-cone." Serving as the basis for his question to Donald Sutherland on Fellini's notoriously facetious temperament, the actor read the above text and replied, "Fellini is constantly running away from his own superficiality." Pettigrew recalled that Fellini not only knew the Calvino text by heart, "'he encouraged me to make use of it. It was to be our little homage to Calvino, our way of thanking him. 'After all,' quipped Fellini, 'landscape ees character'".
For the Canadian director, the leap from Calvino (born 1923) to Fellini (born 1920) was a straight line: "Both were from northern Italy. Both began their artistic careers as more or less frustrated neorealists
Neorealism (art)
In art, neorealism was established by the ex-Camden Town Group painters Charles Ginner and Harold Gilman at the beginning of World War I. They set out to explore the spirit of their age through the shapes and colours of daily life...
seeking to develop forms that would accommodate their fantastic imaginations. To my question, 'Are novelists liars?' Calvino replied: 'Of course. They tell that piece of truth hidden at the bottom of every lie'. Fellini was delighted: 'I always knew I had a robust reason for being a born liar.'"
Awards and festivals
The film premiered at the 2002 Edinburgh International Film FestivalEdinburgh International Film Festival
The Edinburgh International Film Festival is an annual fortnight of cinema screenings and related events taking place each June. Established in 1947, it is the world's oldest continually running film festival...
, won the Rockie Award for Best Arts Documentary at the 2002 Banff World Television Festival, the Coup de Coeur at the 2002 Marseille Festival of Documentary Film
Marseille Festival of Documentary Film
Marseille International Festival of Documentary Film is a documentary film festival held yearly since 1989 in Marseille, France. The festival awards grand prizes in international and national categories...
, and was nominated for Best Documentary at the European Film Awards, Europe's equivalent of the Oscars.
Selected in over 40 international festivals including Cannes, Moscow, Amsterdam (IDFA), and Montréal, the film was distributed theatrically in 15 countries and sold to television worldwide. It was honoured at the maestro's 2003 gala retrospective at the Fellini Foundation in Rimini
Rimini
Rimini is a medium-sized city of 142,579 inhabitants in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy, and capital city of the Province of Rimini. It is located on the Adriatic Sea, on the coast between the rivers Marecchia and Ausa...
and the Cinémathèque française
Cinémathèque Française
The Cinémathèque Française holds one of the largest archives of films, movie documents and film-related objects in the world. Located in Paris, the Cinémathèque holds daily screenings of films from around the world.-History:...
in Paris.
Europe
In Europe, Born Liar garnered unanimously favorable reviews. At its sold out Edinburgh premiere attended by Terence StampTerence Stamp
Terence Henry Stamp is an English actor. Since starting his career in 1962 he has appeared in over 60 films. His title role as Billy Budd in his film debut earned Stamp an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor and a BAFTA nomination for Best Newcomer.His other major roles include...
, Artistic Director Shane Danielson reviewed the film as a "remarkable achievement that illuminates its subject with a rare acuity and precision" while Hannah McGill reported for The Herald (Glasgow)
The Herald (Glasgow)
The Herald is a broadsheet newspaper published Monday to Saturday in Glasgow, and available throughout Scotland. As of August 2011 it had an audited circulation of 47,226, giving it a lead over Scotland's other 'quality' national daily, The Scotsman, published in Edinburgh.The 1889 to 1906 editions...
that it was "not to be missed. Composed of interviews with the great Italian director himself, as well as collaborators such as Terence Stamp and Donald Sutherland, this is an expertly judged and beautifully made document. Fellini's eloquent descriptions of his own development and working processes reveal extraordinary insight, not only into film-making, but into art and artists across all disciplinary boundaries". S. F. Said of The Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph is a daily morning broadsheet newspaper distributed throughout the United Kingdom and internationally. The newspaper was founded by Arthur B...
(London) wrote: "For sheer entertainment value, Fellini: I'm A Born Liar is as good as any fiction. The lengthy, probing interview in which Fellini is sometimes contradictory, sometimes self-deceiving, is always entertaining. This is neatly played off against the recollections of collaborators, including Terence Stamp and Donald Sutherland, which are alternately affectionate and appalled."
In France, it was acclaimed in major magazines and newspapers including Les Inrockuptibles
Les Inrockuptibles
Les Inrockuptibles is a French cultural magazine. Started as a monthly magazine in 1986, it became weekly in 1995. The name is a play on "Les Incorruptibles", the French title of the American television series The Untouchables...
, Le Nouvel observateur
Le Nouvel Observateur
Le Nouvel Observateur is a weekly French newsmagazine. Based in Paris, it is the most prominent French general information magazine in terms of audience and circulation ....
, Libération
Libération
Libération is a French daily newspaper founded in Paris by Jean-Paul Sartre and Serge July in 1973 in the wake of the protest movements of May 1968. Originally a leftist newspaper, it has undergone a number of shifts during the 1980s and 1990s...
, Le Figaro
Le Figaro
Le Figaro is a French daily newspaper founded in 1826 and published in Paris. It is one of three French newspapers of record, with Le Monde and Libération, and is the oldest newspaper in France. It is also the second-largest national newspaper in France after Le Parisien and before Le Monde, but...
and Le Monde
Le Monde
Le Monde is a French daily evening newspaper owned by La Vie-Le Monde Group and edited in Paris. It is one of two French newspapers of record, and has generally been well respected since its first edition under founder Hubert Beuve-Méry on 19 December 1944...
, the latter describing it as a "fascinating film, porteur d'une grande beauté". Vincent Malausa of Les Cahiers du Cinéma was particularly impressed by the film's structure: "By the extreme rigour of its movement, the film succeeds in illuminating the fundamentals of Fellini's entire œuvre."
North America
In North America, the film received generally favorable reviews. On the eve of its U.S. premiere attended by Donald SutherlandDonald Sutherland
Donald McNichol Sutherland, OC is a Canadian actor with a film career spanning nearly 50 years. Some of Sutherland's more notable movie roles included offbeat warriors in such war movies as The Dirty Dozen, , MASH , and Kelly's Heroes , as well as in such popular films as Klute, Invasion of the...
at the Film Forum
Film Forum
Film Forum is a nonprofit movie theater located at 209 West Houston Street in New York City. It began in 1970 as an alternative screening space for independent films, with 50 folding chairs, one projector and a US$19,000 annual budget. Karen Cooper became director in 1972 and under her leadership,...
, David Denby
David Denby (film critic)
David Denby is an American journalist, best known as a film critic for The New Yorker magazine.-Background and education:Denby grew up in New York City. He received a B.A...
's The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
review described the film as "a superb documentary fantasia and an extraordinarily controlled piece of film in its own right. The interviews, recorded in the year before the director’s death, are often eloquent – Fellini’s long sentences actually take you somewhere – and Pettigrew and his colleagues provide a surrounding texture of film excerpts and freshly shot footage that has the density of one of the Maestro’s own movies, without the excess".
Michael Wilmington of the Chicago Tribune
Chicago Tribune
The Chicago Tribune is a major daily newspaper based in Chicago, Illinois, and the flagship publication of the Tribune Company. Formerly self-styled as the "World's Greatest Newspaper" , it remains the most read daily newspaper of the Chicago metropolitan area and the Great Lakes region and is...
felt it was crafted for the happy few but "a must for Fellini lovers... Seeing Fellini again in the flesh and in his films is, as always, a pleasure and a teasing mystery - Fellini: I'm a Born Liar is best watched in conjunction with the films themselves". Although he was "happy to have seen it", Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert
Roger Joseph Ebert is an American film critic and screenwriter. He is the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.Ebert is known for his film review column and for the television programs Sneak Previews, At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and Siskel and Ebert and The...
declared the film "lacked specifics" and that as "a biography of Fellini the film is almost worthless but as an insight into his style, the film is priceless". In his New York Times review, A. O. Scott
A. O. Scott
Anthony Oliver Scott, known as A. O. Scott , is an American journalist and critic. He is a chief film critic for The New York Times, along with Manohla Dargis.-Background and education:...
explained that Fellini's style was precisely what the film was all about: "The interviews with Fellini and some of his collaborators, the snippets of movies both famous and obscure, the glimpses behind the scenes and the master's own garrulous, charming presence make for a thrilling masterclass in cinema aesthetics, with footnotes compiled by an intelligent and devoted disciple." Reporting for both NPR
NPR
NPR, formerly National Public Radio, is a privately and publicly funded non-profit membership media organization that serves as a national syndicator to a network of 900 public radio stations in the United States. NPR was created in 1970, following congressional passage of the Public Broadcasting...
and the Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....
, Kenneth Turan
Kenneth Turan
Kenneth Turan is an American film critic and Lecturer in the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California.-Background:...
argued that "there's a lot to like about Born Liar, starting with that comprehensive interview which reveals Fellini to be an intoxicating conversationalist, articulate, expansive and capable of giving radically different takes on the same subject". Turan concluded that the film was "both completely fascinating and intermittently frustrating; however, as with Fellini's own films, the downside is far outweighed by the pluses".
By being "squarely focused on the nature of Fellini's insatiability", Wesley Morris
Wesley Morris
Wesley Morris is a film critic at The Boston Globe where he reviews films alongside Ty Burr. Morris and Burr also make regular appearances on NECN to discuss the latest films and do the weekly Take Two film review video series on Boston.com...
of The Boston Globe
The Boston Globe
The Boston Globe is an American daily newspaper based in Boston, Massachusetts. The Boston Globe has been owned by The New York Times Company since 1993...
maintained that Born Liar found "the truth behind Fellini's genius". Harper Barnes, longtime editor and cultural critic for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch is the major city-wide newspaper in St. Louis, Missouri. Although written to serve Greater St. Louis, the Post-Dispatch is one of the largest newspapers in the Midwestern United States, and is available and read as far west as Kansas City, Missouri, as far south as...
, praised the film as a "remarkable, intellectually daunting and mind-stirring documentary that deals with philosophical and psychological questions, but always in a Felliniesque way. It tells a story, one that is visually rich and emotionally compelling and charged with one of the great director's favorite concepts - expectation, the sense that something always new and marvelous will come along". Barnes placed it on his Top Ten list of the best films of 2003.
"There should be a separate term for films that are nonfiction but clearly not intended to be objective documentaries," argued Wade Major of Boxoffice Magazine. "For without such a category, it's impossible to do proper justice to Fellini: I'm a Born Liar, probably the best such film ever made." "Few viewers of this fascinating documentary will remain untouched", wrote prominent Fellini expert Dr. Peter Bondanella in Cineaste Magazine. “There is no question that Pettigrew’s film on Fellini represents the most detailed and lengthy conversation with him ever recorded."
Soundtrack
Nino RotaNino Rota
Nino Rota was an Italian composer and academic who is best known for his film scores, notably for the films of Federico Fellini and Luchino Visconti...
's themes from La dolce vita (1960), 8½ (1963), Amarcord (1973), and Casanova (1976), and various themes from City of Women (1980) composed by Luis Bacalov.
Theatrical releases
- Scotland: 56th Edinburgh International Film FestivalEdinburgh International Film FestivalThe Edinburgh International Film Festival is an annual fortnight of cinema screenings and related events taking place each June. Established in 1947, it is the world's oldest continually running film festival...
premiere (24 August 2002) - France: Heliotrope Films in tandem with MK2 International for world sales (May 7, 2003)
- United States: First Look International (April 2, 2003)
- Canada: Crystal Films (Québec, April 4, 2003) TVA Films (nationwide, 2004)
- Italy: Mikado (June 20, 2003)
- Spain: Cooper Films (June 22, 2003)
- Netherlands (September 10, 2003)
- Denmark (August 15, 2003)
- Japan: Toho Koshinsha Films (November 1, 2003)
- Australia: Palace Films (October 15, 2003)
- Brazil: Providence Films (June 20, 2003)
- Bulgaria: Marigold Films (July 12, 2003)
- Sweden: Sveriges Television (2003)
- Russia: Moscow Film Festival (June 26, 2004)
- Switzerland: CAB Productions (2004)
- United Kingdom: Metro Tartan Distribution (2006)
- Portugal: Costa do Castelo Filmes (2006)
- Ukraine: Klarmina (2006)
DVD and book releases
- North America - First Look Pictures (in Region 1 with cover art by Jean GiraudJean GiraudJean Henri Gaston Giraud is a French comics artist. Giraud has earned worldwide fame, not only under his own name but also under the pseudonym Moebius, and to a lesser extent Gir, the latter appearing mostly in the form of a boxed signature at the bottom of the artist's paintings, for instance the...
) - Italy - Cecchi Gori Editoria (in Region 2)
- Japan: Toho Koshinsha Films (in Region 2)
- Brazil: Providence Films (in Region 2)
- Bulgaria: Marigold Films (in Region 2)
- Ukraine: Klarmina (in Region 2)
- Portugal - Costa do Castelo Filmes (in Region 2)
- France and Switzerland - Les Films de Ma Vie (in Region 2) and Opening (in Region 2).
The Opening DVD is an 8-disc anamorphically enhanced
Anamorphic widescreen
Anamorphic widescreen, when applied to DVD manufacture, is a video process that horizontally squeezes a widescreen image so that it can be stored in a standard 4:3 aspect ratio DVD image frame. Compatible playback equipment can then re-expand the horizontal dimension to show the original widescreen...
international Collectors Edition that includes the theatrical version together with six films by Federico Fellini, and 105' of bonus material featuring the animated film, Il lungo viaggio di Fellini (directed by Khrajnovski, written by Tonino Guerra
Tonino Guerra
Tonino Guerra is an Italian poet, writer and screenwriter who has collaborated with some of the most prominent film directors of the world.-Biography:Guerra was born in Santarcangelo di Romagna....
), a 20' documentary by Pettigrew that takes the viewer from Rimini
Rimini
Rimini is a medium-sized city of 142,579 inhabitants in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy, and capital city of the Province of Rimini. It is located on the Adriatic Sea, on the coast between the rivers Marecchia and Ausa...
across the Apennine Mountains
Apennine mountains
The Apennines or Apennine Mountains or Greek oros but just as often used alone as a noun. The ancient Greeks and Romans typically but not always used "mountain" in the singular to mean one or a range; thus, "the Apennine mountain" refers to the entire chain and is translated "the Apennine...
to Rome
Rome
Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...
and the Tyrrhenian Sea
Tyrrhenian Sea
The Tyrrhenian Sea is part of the Mediterranean Sea off the western coast of Italy.-Geography:The sea is bounded by Corsica and Sardinia , Tuscany, Lazio, Campania, Basilicata and Calabria and Sicily ....
, interviews with Roland Topor
Roland Topor
Roland Topor , was a French illustrator, painter, writer and filmmaker, known for the surreal nature of his work...
and Donald Sutherland
Donald Sutherland
Donald McNichol Sutherland, OC is a Canadian actor with a film career spanning nearly 50 years. Some of Sutherland's more notable movie roles included offbeat warriors in such war movies as The Dirty Dozen, , MASH , and Kelly's Heroes , as well as in such popular films as Klute, Invasion of the...
, artwork by Jean Giraud
Jean Giraud
Jean Henri Gaston Giraud is a French comics artist. Giraud has earned worldwide fame, not only under his own name but also under the pseudonym Moebius, and to a lesser extent Gir, the latter appearing mostly in the form of a boxed signature at the bottom of the artist's paintings, for instance the...
, and rare footage of the maestro drawing a caricature of himself.
Designed as a companion to the documentary (which, in contrast, uses a single photo of Fellini as a baby), the book I'm a Born Liar: A Fellini Lexicon
I'm a Born Liar: A Fellini Lexicon
I'm a Born Liar: A Fellini Lexicon is a book combining film stills and photographs with transcripts of the last filmed interviews with Federico Fellini conducted by Canadian filmmaker Damian Pettigrew in Rome in 1991 and 1992...
has 124 film stills of Fellini at work and many unpublished photographs restored by the Cineteca del Comune di Bologna (Italy) .
Sources
Fellini: I'm a Born Liar is a 2002 FrenchFrance
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
documentary film
Documentary film
Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...
written and directed by Damian Pettigrew
Damian Pettigrew
Damian Pettigrew is a Canadian filmmaker, screenwriter, producer, author, and multimedia artist, best known for his cinematic portraits of Balthus and Federico Fellini...
.
Based on Federico Fellini
Federico Fellini
Federico Fellini, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI , was an Italian film director and scriptwriter. Known for a distinct style that blends fantasy and baroque images, he is considered one of the most influential and widely revered filmmakers of the 20th century...
's last confessions filmed by Pettigrew in Rome in 1991 and 1992 (Fellini died in 1993), the film eschews straightforward biography to highlight the Italian director's unorthodox working methods, conscience, and philosophy.
A masterclass in cinema aesthetics, the feature documentary uses excerpts and behind-the-scenes from 8½
8½
8½ is a 1963 Italian fantasy film directed by Federico Fellini. Co-scripted by Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano, and Brunello Rondi, it stars Marcello Mastroianni as Guido Anselmi, a famous Italian film director...
, Juliet of the Spirits
Juliet of the Spirits
Juliet of the Spirits is a 1965 Italian film directed by Federico Fellini that uses "caricatural types and dream situations to represent a psychic landscape"...
, Histoires extraordinaires
Histoires extraordinaires
Histoires extraordinaires is a 1968 "omnibus" film comprising three segments...
, Satyricon
Satyricon (film)
Satyricon is a 1969 Italian fantasy drama film written and directed by Federico Fellini. It is loosely based on Petronius's work, Satyricon, a series of bawdy and satirical episodes written during the reign of the emperor Nero and set in imperial Rome.-Plot:The film opens on a graffiti-covered...
, Amarcord
Amarcord
Amarcord is a 1973 Italian comedy-drama film directed by Federico Fellini, a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age tale about Titta, an adolescent boy growing up among an eccentric cast of characters in the fictional town of Borgo in 1930s Fascist Italy...
, Fellini's Casanova
Fellini's Casanova
Fellini's Casanova is a 1976 Italian film by director Federico Fellini, adapted from the autobiography of Giacomo Casanova, the 18th century adventurer and writer....
, And the Ship Sails On, and City of Women
City of Women
City of Women is a 1980 film written and directed by Federico Fellini. Amid Fellini's characteristic combination of dreamlike, outrageous, and artistic imagery, Marcello Mastroianni plays Snàporaz, a man who voyages through male and female spaces toward a confrontation with his own attitudes...
. Also interviewed are Roberto Benigni
Roberto Benigni
Roberto Remigio Benigni, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI is an Italian actor, comedian, screenwriter and director of film, theatre and television.- Early years :...
(La voce della luna
La voce della luna
The Voice of the Moon is a 1990 film by Italian director Federico Fellini, featuring actors Paolo Villaggio and Roberto Benigni. Returning to themes he first explored in La strada , Fellini crafts a parable on the whisperings of the soul that only madmen and vagabonds are capable of hearing...
), Terence Stamp
Terence Stamp
Terence Henry Stamp is an English actor. Since starting his career in 1962 he has appeared in over 60 films. His title role as Billy Budd in his film debut earned Stamp an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor and a BAFTA nomination for Best Newcomer.His other major roles include...
(Histoires extraordinaires), and Donald Sutherland
Donald Sutherland
Donald McNichol Sutherland, OC is a Canadian actor with a film career spanning nearly 50 years. Some of Sutherland's more notable movie roles included offbeat warriors in such war movies as The Dirty Dozen, , MASH , and Kelly's Heroes , as well as in such popular films as Klute, Invasion of the...
(Casanova), among other notable Fellini collaborators.
The film was nominated for Best Documentary at the European Film Awards, Europe's equivalent of the Oscars.
Plot
Nino Rota
Nino Rota was an Italian composer and academic who is best known for his film scores, notably for the films of Federico Fellini and Luchino Visconti...
lends these vistas a dreamy familiarity. We then jump from color to luminous black & white, and a quick glimpse of Federico Fellini’s 1963 masterpiece, 8½
8½
8½ is a 1963 Italian fantasy film directed by Federico Fellini. Co-scripted by Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano, and Brunello Rondi, it stars Marcello Mastroianni as Guido Anselmi, a famous Italian film director...
, in which the monumentally buxom harlot, La Saraghina, is preparing to perform her rumba on the beach for a flock of fugitive schoolboys. It’s the very same beach we were just staring at, but magically denuded of 40 years of succeeding development, and made mythic through the eyes of a master. From this point of departure, Pettigrew juxtaposes archival footage and fresh interviews with Fellini’s collaborators, interspersed with classic clips and the fruits of his own present-day visits to the haunting locales where I Vitelloni
I Vitelloni
I vitelloni is an Italian comedy drama film directed by Federico Fellini. Recognized as a pivotal work in the director's artistic evolution, the film has distinct autobiographical elements that mirror important societal changes in 1950s Italy....
(1953), Nights of Cabiria
Nights of Cabiria
Nights of Cabiria is a 1957 Italian film directed by Federico Fellini. Fellini's wife, Giulietta Masina, plays Cabiria Ceccarelli, a feisty but naive prostitute in Ostia, then a seedy section of Rome...
(1957), La Dolce Vita
La Dolce Vita
La Dolce Vita is a 1960 comedy-drama film written and directed by the critically acclaimed director Federico Fellini. The film is a story of a passive journalist's week in Rome, and his search for both happiness and love that will never come...
(1960), Satyricon
Satyricon (film)
Satyricon is a 1969 Italian fantasy drama film written and directed by Federico Fellini. It is loosely based on Petronius's work, Satyricon, a series of bawdy and satirical episodes written during the reign of the emperor Nero and set in imperial Rome.-Plot:The film opens on a graffiti-covered...
(1969) and other cinematic wonders first came to life. The goal is to fuse these ingredients thematically, to a degree that may better illuminate Fellini’s conscience and philosophies.
"I am a born liar," the maestro tells us. "For me, the things that are the most real are the ones I invented." In one way or another, Fellini’s playful habit of honestly admitting falsehood is presented, and tested, as the key to his art, and even his spirituality. The maestro’s boyhood in the Adriatic coastal town of Rimini
Rimini
Rimini is a medium-sized city of 142,579 inhabitants in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy, and capital city of the Province of Rimini. It is located on the Adriatic Sea, on the coast between the rivers Marecchia and Ausa...
is conjured through a combination of an unpublished baby picture of Fellini, contemporary footage, and his own spoken reminiscence. Fellini remembers being fascinated, when still a small boy, by the town’s artistic types - bohemian outcasts who were, by turns, dirty, flashy, and inner directed. "A small boy is naturally rebellious," he tells us, of himself. "He’s reacting to the laws, the taboos, the rules laid down by his family, his school. And my generation was faced with so many taboos, those of the Catholic Church, of Fascism
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
."
This reflection is intercut with a behind-the-scenes of Amarcord
Amarcord
Amarcord is a 1973 Italian comedy-drama film directed by Federico Fellini, a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age tale about Titta, an adolescent boy growing up among an eccentric cast of characters in the fictional town of Borgo in 1930s Fascist Italy...
(1973), Fellini’s intimate epic about small-town life in the Benito Mussolini
Benito Mussolini
Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was an Italian politician who led the National Fascist Party and is credited with being one of the key figures in the creation of Fascism....
era. The focus is on the scene, both nightmarish and comedic, in which the hero’s father is obliged by the police to drink castor oil, for no reason other than as a clownish, sadistic exercise of small-time power. Fellini circles the action, prompting the actors, crooning to them, snarling, sometimes obliging them to act directly towards him, as he crouches off-camera. Emphasised in this context is Fellini’s intense discomfort at causing such a scene to be re-enacted, however satiric the energy. He scowls, grits his teeth, and admonishes one actor playing a Blackshirt bully to be more precise, for pity’s sake: "Your partner has been suffering for days because of you. Get it right!"
Fellini’s early manhood and lifelong collaboration with his actress wife, Giulietta Masina
Giulietta Masina
Giulietta Masina was an Italian film and stage actress. She starred in La Strada and Nights of Cabiria, both winners of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, in 1956 and 1957, respectively...
, are evoked through a combination of interviews (particularly with Fellini’s boyhood chum Titta Benzi) and clips from 8½ and Juliet of the Spirits
Juliet of the Spirits
Juliet of the Spirits is a 1965 Italian film directed by Federico Fellini that uses "caricatural types and dream situations to represent a psychic landscape"...
. While it is an understandable temptation to think of such scenes as "autobiography", they are counter-balanced by Fellini’s own warnings: "Memory is a most mysterious element, almost indefinable, that links us to things we don’t even remember having lived. It constantly incites us to stay in contact with dimensions, events, and sensations, that we can’t define, but that we know actually happened." After a close look at the overtly fake plastic seascapes of And the Ship Sails On (1983), Italian novelist Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy , the Cosmicomics collection of short stories , and the novels Invisible Cities and If on a winter's night a traveler .Lionised in Britain and the United States,...
observes: "To a psychoanalyst, whether you tell the truth or whether you lie, isn’t very important. Because even lies are interesting, eloquent, revealing, just as much as what is considered truth. I distrust a writer who claims to tell the whole truth about himself, about life, or about the world."
Some of the contradictions in Fellini’s accounts of himself are just plain funny. "I adore actors," he tells us. Cut to Donald Sutherland
Donald Sutherland
Donald McNichol Sutherland, OC is a Canadian actor with a film career spanning nearly 50 years. Some of Sutherland's more notable movie roles included offbeat warriors in such war movies as The Dirty Dozen, , MASH , and Kelly's Heroes , as well as in such popular films as Klute, Invasion of the...
, star of Fellini's Casanova
Fellini's Casanova
Fellini's Casanova is a 1976 Italian film by director Federico Fellini, adapted from the autobiography of Giacomo Casanova, the 18th century adventurer and writer....
(1976), who quietly seethes that "in his relations with actors, Federico was dreadful, a martinet, a tyrant". Yet Sutherland is close to a smile as he recalls and then offers an insight that deepens the film’s argument: "Fellini is constantly threatened by his own superficiality
Superficiality
'The principle of superficiality versus depth' has pervaded Western culture since at least the time of Plato: 'the dialectic of truth and appearance,' as the surface image of the latter 'competes with what Plato designates for us beyond appearance as being the Idea'.21stC urban parlance speaks of...
, and is constantly running away from it, in the same sense as Orson Welles
Orson Welles
George Orson Welles , best known as Orson Welles, was an American film director, actor, theatre director, screenwriter, and producer, who worked extensively in film, theatre, television and radio...
. Orson Welles created a lie about himself that was in fact the truth, but he knew that it was a lie he’d created - and once everybody believed it, he found it insupportable." Rocking the stability of these persuasive remarks is Roberto Benigni
Roberto Benigni
Roberto Remigio Benigni, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI is an Italian actor, comedian, screenwriter and director of film, theatre and television.- Early years :...
, star of La voce della luna
La voce della luna
The Voice of the Moon is a 1990 film by Italian director Federico Fellini, featuring actors Paolo Villaggio and Roberto Benigni. Returning to themes he first explored in La strada , Fellini crafts a parable on the whisperings of the soul that only madmen and vagabonds are capable of hearing...
(1990), extolling Fellini’s charm with actors in bright, broad strokes: "He treated me, for the first time in my life, like I was a real actor. Or better - actress! I was in the center, and to everybody he say, 'This is-a my Kim-a Novak.'"
Terence Stamp
Terence Stamp
Terence Henry Stamp is an English actor. Since starting his career in 1962 he has appeared in over 60 films. His title role as Billy Budd in his film debut earned Stamp an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor and a BAFTA nomination for Best Newcomer.His other major roles include...
, who played Toby Dammit in Histoires extraordinaires
Histoires extraordinaires
Histoires extraordinaires is a 1968 "omnibus" film comprising three segments...
(1968), remembers that when he asked for a bit of directorial instruction, Fellini glared at him at first as if witnessing something unnatural - a puppet who dared to question its puppeteer. Then, off the top of his head, he offered Stamp a lulu of an "actor’s motivation" for Toby, telling him: "Last-a night you play Macbeth. Then you go to a party. Big-a party. Whiskey. Hashish. Cocaine. A whore-gy! And at this-a whore-gy, you fuck some woman while some black-a man fuck you. Then you are on your way to the airport and someone put big tab LSD
LSD
Lysergic acid diethylamide, abbreviated LSD or LSD-25, also known as lysergide and colloquially as acid, is a semisynthetic psychedelic drug of the ergoline family, well known for its psychological effects which can include altered thinking processes, closed and open eye visuals, synaesthesia, an...
under your tongue. Now you're here!" Stamp needed no further preparation. Nevertheless, he was constantly intrigued by Fellini’s love of extreme artifice. When he asked the director why the makeup people had been told to place Toby’s eyebrows at such an unnaturally high angle on his forehead, Fellini replied, "They are question marks. It makes you look like you’re asking a question."
Tullio Pinelli
Tullio Pinelli
Tullio Pinelli was an Italian screenwriter best known for his work on the Federico Fellini classics I Vitelloni, La strada, La Dolce Vita and 8½.-Biography:...
, screenwriter of La strada
La Strada
La Strada is a 1954 Italian neorealist drama directed by Federico Fellini in which a naïve young woman is sold to a brutish man and goes on the road as a part of his itinerant show....
and La dolce vita
La Dolce Vita
La Dolce Vita is a 1960 comedy-drama film written and directed by the critically acclaimed director Federico Fellini. The film is a story of a passive journalist's week in Rome, and his search for both happiness and love that will never come...
, and cameraman Giuseppe Rotunno
Giuseppe Rotunno
Giuseppe Rotunno, A.S.C., A.I.C. is an Italian cinematographer. Sometimes credited as Peppino Rotunno, he was director of photography on eight films by Federico Fellini...
outline the varied, often complex approaches to scripting a Fellini film and lighting it. Noted French producer Toscan du Plantier details the frustration of working with a temperamental director who "needs an enemy" for inspiration. "An artist is a medium," insists Fellini, "a vessel to be filled by fantasy" as painter and long-time intimate, Rinaldo Geleng, evokes the maestro's wild mental states during La dolce vita, 8½ and Casanova. Featured during these interviews are extremely rare behind-the-scenes of La dolce vita, Juliet of the Spirits, Fellini's Casanova, and City of Women that are, in turn, punctuated by mysterious uncredited appearances by Ennio Flaiano
Ennio Flaiano
Ennio Flaiano , was an Italian screenwriter, playwright, novelist, journalist and drama critic...
, Alain Cuny
Alain Cuny
Alain Cuny was a French actor.He was born René Xavier Marie in Saint-Malo, Brittany, and studied medicine for a while before entering the film industry as a costume and set designer. Cuny started acting in the 1930s...
, and Nanni Moretti
Nanni Moretti
Giovanni "Nanni" Moretti is an Italian film director, producer, screenwriter and actor.-Life and work:Moretti was born in Bruneck, South Tyrol , in 1953 to parents who were teachers...
.
As the film moves through its final third, we tour the stagier sets and sample the less formally scripted scenes which characterize Fellini’s later work. These scenes are balanced against the filmmaker’s own latter-day musings in such a way that, even if one tends to resist Fellini’s later films, one is better able to see and understand them on his terms as part of an inevitable, continuous growth on his part. "Faking things, constantly faking!" says Fellini as we observe in detail his skillfully crafted, openly false, studio-built seascapes. "Making a fake sea, a fake meadow, a fake storm. All this faking, this representation - probably unconsciously - is merely a repetition of a kind of magic ritual."
After a clip from 8½ in which a sleepless Guido (Marcello Mastroianni
Marcello Mastroianni
Marcello Vincenzo Domenico Mastroianni, Knight Grand Cross was an Italian film actor. His honours included British Film Academy Awards, Best Actor awards at the Cannes Film Festival and two Golden Globe Awards.- Personal life :...
) worries that his latest film will capsize, owing to his own shortcomings - "What if it’s the end," he asks himself, "of a big fat liar without talent or genius?"- Fellini reflects that "doubt" is also a vital part of the creative process. "Fear is a feeling you have to cultivate. A man cannot do without being afraid. A fearless man is, I think, a fool. Fear is inseparable from being human." Fear of death motivated Fellini to abandon, sometime around 1966, a poetic film about the afterlife called The Voyage of G. Mastorna. Terence Stamp encouraged Fellini to make the film anyway: "'You think if you make this film, you will die,'" he recalls telling the maestro. "'And you will! But not in the way you think. You’ll be reborn.'" Fellini resisted the advice. And yet, Mastorna itself was reborn, again and again as he saw it, in all his later work. "The most intimate and secret part of that film has nourished and found its way into every film I made later," he reflects. "Like the wreck of a ship that from the floor of the ocean continues to send radioactive signals." We are then shown footage of Mastroianni with Giulietta Masina
Giulietta Masina
Giulietta Masina was an Italian film and stage actress. She starred in La Strada and Nights of Cabiria, both winners of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, in 1956 and 1957, respectively...
on the set of City of Women
City of Women
City of Women is a 1980 film written and directed by Federico Fellini. Amid Fellini's characteristic combination of dreamlike, outrageous, and artistic imagery, Marcello Mastroianni plays Snàporaz, a man who voyages through male and female spaces toward a confrontation with his own attitudes...
and Mastroianni during a screen test for the ill-fated Mastorna.
Such ruminations set the tone for the film’s close in which Fellini reflects (as he approaches his own death in 1993) on the fleeting properties of life in general and the unforeseen, dream-like career which became his life. "I think it is a necessity," he says of the creative process, alluding not just to filmmaking but to the imaginative ways in which we each navigate our lives. "An interpretation... Which protects, consoles and reassures. I believe that art is the most successful attempt to instill in mankind the need to have a religious feeling. That’s what any kind of art expresses."
The film ends full circle at the seascape where it began except that, now, the remnant of an abandoned camera-track is aimed straight into the sea. On the ambiguity of this final image, critic F. X. Feeney wrote: "Is this substitution of a real sea for the imaginary ones we’ve been sailing for the past hour and forty minutes a critique, a refutation of Fellini’s beloved fakery? Or is it a validation - an invitation to enter the reality at which those fancies were ultimately aimed? In keeping with the maestro's elusive art, the image is a deliberate paradox."
Production and financing
Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy , the Cosmicomics collection of short stories , and the novels Invisible Cities and If on a winter's night a traveler .Lionised in Britain and the United States,...
. But when the two met at the novelist’s Roman apartment, "We sat around talking about 8½ when we ought to have been discussing Calvino," explained Pettigrew to Newsweek International correspondent Michael J. Agovino. Fellini became such a ready topic whenever the two men relaxed from their more formal interview that after a few days, Calvino told the young filmmaker he had arranged a "little surprise" for him - lunch at Cinecittà
Cinecittà
Cinecittà is a large film studio in Rome that is considered the hub of Italian cinema.-History:The studios were founded in 1937 by Benito Mussolini and his head of cinema Luigi Freddi for propaganda purposes, under the slogan "Il cinema è l'arma più forte"...
cooked by Fellini. "So there he was chopping the garlic," recalled Pettigrew. "The meal was spaghetti aglio e olio, al dente with a sprinkle of black pepper." Appropriately enough, the colloquy between the two Italian fabulists centered entirely on food. "Calvino knew how to steer the conversation. We talked a great deal about French and Italian cheeses - a subject dear to both of them; Calvino had spent many years in Paris and could compare gorgonzola and camembert with expertise." When Fellini pressed the Canadian filmmaker for word of his nation’s cuisine, the most unique he could come up with was the national snack, maple syrup served on snow. "Fellini looked at me in stupefaction. 'Thees is not possible,' he said. 'It is food for mooses and beears.'" Calvino rescued Pettigrew by repeating a thematic connection the latter had made between Elias Canetti
Elias Canetti
Elias Canetti was a Bulgarian-born modernist novelist, playwright, memoirist, and non-fiction writer. He wrote in German and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981, "for writings marked by a broad outlook, a wealth of ideas and artistic power".-Life:...
’s book Crowds and Power and Fellini’s political parable, Prova d'orchestra
Prova d'orchestra
Orchestra Rehearsal is a 1978 Italian film directed by Federico Fellini. It follows an Italian orchestra as the members go on strike against the conductor...
(1979). Fellini was duly surprised, admitting to Pettigrew that Canetti’s work had indeed been a conscious influence.
Pettigrew then turned the conversation to film. They were dining in Fellini’s private office beside the soundstages at Cinecittà
Cinecittà
Cinecittà is a large film studio in Rome that is considered the hub of Italian cinema.-History:The studios were founded in 1937 by Benito Mussolini and his head of cinema Luigi Freddi for propaganda purposes, under the slogan "Il cinema è l'arma più forte"...
where he was finishing And the Ship Sails On (1983), a joyful production compared to the storms that had attended some of his previous pictures. Talk hinged on Fellini’s now total commitment to using soundstages, for exteriors as well as interiors. Pettigrew raised the issue of landscape as a means of revealing a character’s inner nature, and this struck a deep, sympathetic chord in both Calvino and Fellini. They each recalled favorite film-moments in which landscape and character merged, speaking particularly of Rossellini
Rossellini
Rossellini is a common Italian family name in Italy. Other spellings include: Rosselini.Rossellini may refers to:* Roberto Rossellini, Italian film director, and brother of Renzo** Renzo Rossellini, producer, son of Roberto...
’s Stromboli
Stromboli
Stromboli is a small island in the Tyrrhenian Sea, off the north coast of Sicily, containing one of the three active volcanoes in Italy. It is one of the eight Aeolian Islands, a volcanic arc north of Sicily. This name is a corruption of the Ancient Greek name Strongulē which was given to it...
, but circling (guided by Calvino) around the beauty and melancholy of the natural landscapes in Fellini’s early work.
When Pettigrew brought up the barren rocky hillsides where Augusto (Broderick Crawford
Broderick Crawford
Broderick Crawford was an Academy Award-winning American stage, film, radio and TV actor, often cast in tough-guy roles and best known for his starring role in the television series "Highway Patrol."-Early life:...
) is left to die at the end of Il bidone
Il bidone
Il bidone is an Italian film directed by Federico Fellini. It features Broderick Crawford, Richard Basehart, Giulietta Masina, among others....
, Fellini named the place without batting an eye. "Monte Marino, 15 kilometers south of Rome
Rome
Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...
." Intrigued that the maestro’s memory was so exact, Pettigrew asked about La Strada
La Strada
La Strada is a 1954 Italian neorealist drama directed by Federico Fellini in which a naïve young woman is sold to a brutish man and goes on the road as a part of his itinerant show....
. "Bagnoregio
Civita di Bagnoregio
Civita di Bagnoregio is a town in the Province of Viterbo in Central Italy, a frazione of the comune of Bagnoregio, 2 km W from it. It is about north of Rome.-History:...
, Ovindoli
Ovindoli
Ovindoli is a village and comune of the province of L'Aquila in the Abruzzo region of central Italy. Close to Rome, it is a popular resort for both summer and winter sports, including hiking, biking, equestrian activities and downhill and cross-country skiing.-Geography:Ovindoli lies in the...
, Ostia
Ostia (quarter of Rome)
Ostia is a large neighbourhood in the XIII Municipio of the comune of Rome, Italy. Ostia is also the only municipio or district of Rome on the Tyrrhenian Sea and many Romans spend the summer holidays there. Sometimes it is confused with Ostia Antica, an archaeological area, that is nearby...
," replied Fellini. And 8½
8½
8½ is a 1963 Italian fantasy film directed by Federico Fellini. Co-scripted by Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano, and Brunello Rondi, it stars Marcello Mastroianni as Guido Anselmi, a famous Italian film director...
? "Ostia and Tivoli
Tivoli, Italy
Tivoli , the classical Tibur, is an ancient Italian town in Lazio, about 30 km east-north-east of Rome, at the falls of the Aniene river where it issues from the Sabine hills...
, the Palais del Drago in Filicciano, 90 kilometers north of Rome. The provincial train station was shot in a train washing shed in the via Prenestina near Porto Maggiore." "What about decor?" Pettigrew wondered. "The hotel lobby and staircase in 8½, for example." "Based on the Plaza Hotel
Plaza Hotel
The Plaza Hotel in New York City is a landmark 20-story luxury hotel with a height of and length of that occupies the west side of Grand Army Plaza, from which it derives its name, and extends along Central Park South in Manhattan. Fifth Avenue extends along the east side of Grand Army Plaza...
in Rome,” Fellini explained, “except that I built a larger staircase and added a second lion. I had the elevator doors copied down to the last detail at great expense. The spa is a combination of the Chianciano and Montecatini
Montecatini
- Places in Italy :* Montecatini Terme, health resort in Tuscany* Montecatini Val di Cecina, village and mining town to the south of Pisa*Montecatini, hamlet in the comune of San Martino in Rio...
spas in Tuscany
Tuscany
Tuscany is a region in Italy. It has an area of about 23,000 square kilometres and a population of about 3.75 million inhabitants. The regional capital is Florence ....
.”
Not until 2001 could Pettigrew assemble a film crew to make the journey across Italy but it was apparently this defining moment over lunch, mining Fellini’s memory for places and taking notes, that I’m a Born Liar was born. "I thought it might be a way of making a unique film on Fellini which would for once lead us outside the Cinecittà studios, shooting 'real' locations, 'real' décor and threading these into the 'false' images of his films. The aim would be a portrait dealing with truth and lies, reality and fiction. I was excited by the possibilities of mixing black & white film with the locations in color. But it was years before I met a producer who shared my enthusiasm. Until Olivier Gal, my French producer, finally secured funding with Arte
Arte
Arte is a Franco-German TV network. It is a European culture channel and aims to promote quality programming especially in areas of culture and the arts...
, FilmFour, TelePiu, Scottish Screen
Scottish Screen
Scottish Screen is the national body for film and television in Scotland, established in April 1997. It took on the functions of the Scottish Film Council, the Scottish Film Production Fund, Scottish Screen Locations and Scottish Broadcast and Film Training, forming a unitary organisation.Scottish...
, and Eurimages
Eurimages
Eurimages is the Council of Europe fund for the co-production, distribution, exhibition and digitisation of European cinematographic works. It aims to promote the European film industry by encouraging the production and distribution of films and fostering co-operation between professionals....
, all the other potential backers either wanted to cut costs or churn out a quickie TV program for a fast buck, especially just after Fellini died." Los Angeles Times reviewer Kenneth Turan
Kenneth Turan
Kenneth Turan is an American film critic and Lecturer in the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California.-Background:...
reported that what "is beyond doubt is Pettigrew's devotion to Fellini, whom he first met in 1983 and pursued for a decade to get the extended interviews... Then Pettigrew sat on the material for years before he found collaborators willing to finance his vision of how it should be used".
From the beginning, however, Pettigrew made his plans known to Fellini and secured the maestro’s agreement to cooperate. This proved to be a necessary final step in his education about a paradoxical subject. "Fellini made a cryptic comment to me about 'opposites' and the Italian mind: 'The typical Italian says yes when he means no and no when he means yes.'" Calvino, overhearing, countered with a Joycean
Joycean
A text is deemed Joycean when it is reminiscent of the writings of James Joyce, particularly Ulysses or Finnegans Wake. Joycean fiction exhibits a high degree of verbal play, usually within the framework of stream of consciousness. Works that are "Joycean" may also be technically eclectic,...
adjustment: "Like Nes and Yo." Much as the elder and younger filmmaker would often write and see each over the next decade, even after Calvino’s death in 1985, Fellini kept putting the interviews off, perpetually telling Pettigrew that he would find time the following year. By the summers of 1991 and 1992, "free time" had become inescapable: for the first time in 40 years, Fellini was unemployed. "Ah, Damiano!" he lamented. "My last film, La voce della luna
La voce della luna
The Voice of the Moon is a 1990 film by Italian director Federico Fellini, featuring actors Paolo Villaggio and Roberto Benigni. Returning to themes he first explored in La strada , Fellini crafts a parable on the whisperings of the soul that only madmen and vagabonds are capable of hearing...
(1990), is a beeg flop. Producers call me no more. So you come to Rome and we become partners in crime." Pettigrew managed to obtain more than 10 hours of footage with a Fellini "supremely present, fully aware that the tapes were perhaps his filmed testament -- or, as he later put it in a letter to me: 'The longest and most detailed conversation ever recorded on my personal vision'".
Although Pettigrew admits challenging Fellini so aggressively during the final 1992 film shoot that he threatened to walk out, their friendship was such that it became physically painful for him to see the great man grown so depressed. "His health was rapidly declining and producers had written him off as a bad risk. I have photographs of Fellini that would make anyone wince: the expression on his face is that of an artist who knows, against his will, that his life’s work is over. His deep melancholy, in fact, pervades the entire film." Even so, there were amusing twists in the conversation. When Pettigrew shared a bit of off-handed, amateur medical diagnosis - that the mass of black hairs protruding from Fellini’s ears was a classic sign of arteriosclerosis
Arteriosclerosis
Arteriosclerosis refers to a stiffening of arteries.Arteriosclerosis is a general term describing any hardening of medium or large arteries It should not be confused with "arteriolosclerosis" or "atherosclerosis".Also known by the name "myoconditis" which is...
- the maestro began to treat his provocateur with a superstitious reverence, and cooperated more fully than ever.
In a 2004 radio interview with Australian journalist Julie Rigg, Pettigrew reflected on the following passage from Calvino’s last novel, Mr. Palomar
Mr. Palomar
Mr. Palomar is a 1983 novel by the Italian writer Italo Calvino. Its original Italian title is Palomar. In an interview with Gregory Lucente, Calvino stated that he began writing Mr. Palomar in 1975, making it a predecessor to earlier published works such as If on a winter's night a traveler. Mr...
, which had inspired Fellini for a rooftop scene with Roberto Benigni in La voce della luna:
The true shape of the city of Rome is in this rise and dip of roofs, of tiles old and new, flat and curved ... TV aerials, straight or crooked, painted or rusting, in the models of successive generations… And domes that lie curved against the sky, in every direction, at every distance, as if to confirm the feminine, Junonic essence of the city... from up here, you have the impression that this is the real crust of the earth, uneven but compact, though furrowed by crevices of unknown depth, cracks or wells or craters, whose edges - seen in perspective - look as if they overlap, like the scales of a pine-cone. What can be concealed, at the bottom? I don’t know: life on the surface is so rich and various that I have no urge to enquire further. I believe that it is only when you’ve come to know the surface of things that you can try to find out what lies beneath. But the surface of things is inexhaustible.
When Calvino originally dictated the text to Pettigrew, both were struck by how much it evoked Fellini, "the mystery man covered in the scales of a pine-cone." Serving as the basis for his question to Donald Sutherland on Fellini's notoriously facetious temperament, the actor read the above text and replied, "Fellini is constantly running away from his own superficiality." Pettigrew recalled that Fellini not only knew the Calvino text by heart, "'he encouraged me to make use of it. It was to be our little homage to Calvino, our way of thanking him. 'After all,' quipped Fellini, 'landscape ees character'".
For the Canadian director, the leap from Calvino (born 1923) to Fellini (born 1920) was a straight line: "Both were from northern Italy. Both began their artistic careers as more or less frustrated neorealists
Neorealism (art)
In art, neorealism was established by the ex-Camden Town Group painters Charles Ginner and Harold Gilman at the beginning of World War I. They set out to explore the spirit of their age through the shapes and colours of daily life...
seeking to develop forms that would accommodate their fantastic imaginations. To my question, 'Are novelists liars?' Calvino replied: 'Of course. They tell that piece of truth hidden at the bottom of every lie'. Fellini was delighted: 'I always knew I had a robust reason for being a born liar.'"
Awards and festivals
The film premiered at the 2002 Edinburgh International Film FestivalEdinburgh International Film Festival
The Edinburgh International Film Festival is an annual fortnight of cinema screenings and related events taking place each June. Established in 1947, it is the world's oldest continually running film festival...
, won the Rockie Award for Best Arts Documentary at the 2002 Banff World Television Festival, the Coup de Coeur at the 2002 Marseille Festival of Documentary Film
Marseille Festival of Documentary Film
Marseille International Festival of Documentary Film is a documentary film festival held yearly since 1989 in Marseille, France. The festival awards grand prizes in international and national categories...
, and was nominated for Best Documentary at the European Film Awards, Europe's equivalent of the Oscars.
Selected in over 40 international festivals including Cannes, Moscow, Amsterdam (IDFA), and Montréal, the film was distributed theatrically in 15 countries and sold to television worldwide. It was honoured at the maestro's 2003 gala retrospective at the Fellini Foundation in Rimini
Rimini
Rimini is a medium-sized city of 142,579 inhabitants in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy, and capital city of the Province of Rimini. It is located on the Adriatic Sea, on the coast between the rivers Marecchia and Ausa...
and the Cinémathèque française
Cinémathèque Française
The Cinémathèque Française holds one of the largest archives of films, movie documents and film-related objects in the world. Located in Paris, the Cinémathèque holds daily screenings of films from around the world.-History:...
in Paris.
Europe
In Europe, Born Liar garnered unanimously favorable reviews. At its sold out Edinburgh premiere attended by Terence StampTerence Stamp
Terence Henry Stamp is an English actor. Since starting his career in 1962 he has appeared in over 60 films. His title role as Billy Budd in his film debut earned Stamp an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor and a BAFTA nomination for Best Newcomer.His other major roles include...
, Artistic Director Shane Danielson reviewed the film as a "remarkable achievement that illuminates its subject with a rare acuity and precision" while Hannah McGill reported for The Herald (Glasgow)
The Herald (Glasgow)
The Herald is a broadsheet newspaper published Monday to Saturday in Glasgow, and available throughout Scotland. As of August 2011 it had an audited circulation of 47,226, giving it a lead over Scotland's other 'quality' national daily, The Scotsman, published in Edinburgh.The 1889 to 1906 editions...
that it was "not to be missed. Composed of interviews with the great Italian director himself, as well as collaborators such as Terence Stamp and Donald Sutherland, this is an expertly judged and beautifully made document. Fellini's eloquent descriptions of his own development and working processes reveal extraordinary insight, not only into film-making, but into art and artists across all disciplinary boundaries". S. F. Said of The Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph is a daily morning broadsheet newspaper distributed throughout the United Kingdom and internationally. The newspaper was founded by Arthur B...
(London) wrote: "For sheer entertainment value, Fellini: I'm A Born Liar is as good as any fiction. The lengthy, probing interview in which Fellini is sometimes contradictory, sometimes self-deceiving, is always entertaining. This is neatly played off against the recollections of collaborators, including Terence Stamp and Donald Sutherland, which are alternately affectionate and appalled."
In France, it was acclaimed in major magazines and newspapers including Les Inrockuptibles
Les Inrockuptibles
Les Inrockuptibles is a French cultural magazine. Started as a monthly magazine in 1986, it became weekly in 1995. The name is a play on "Les Incorruptibles", the French title of the American television series The Untouchables...
, Le Nouvel observateur
Le Nouvel Observateur
Le Nouvel Observateur is a weekly French newsmagazine. Based in Paris, it is the most prominent French general information magazine in terms of audience and circulation ....
, Libération
Libération
Libération is a French daily newspaper founded in Paris by Jean-Paul Sartre and Serge July in 1973 in the wake of the protest movements of May 1968. Originally a leftist newspaper, it has undergone a number of shifts during the 1980s and 1990s...
, Le Figaro
Le Figaro
Le Figaro is a French daily newspaper founded in 1826 and published in Paris. It is one of three French newspapers of record, with Le Monde and Libération, and is the oldest newspaper in France. It is also the second-largest national newspaper in France after Le Parisien and before Le Monde, but...
and Le Monde
Le Monde
Le Monde is a French daily evening newspaper owned by La Vie-Le Monde Group and edited in Paris. It is one of two French newspapers of record, and has generally been well respected since its first edition under founder Hubert Beuve-Méry on 19 December 1944...
, the latter describing it as a "fascinating film, porteur d'une grande beauté". Vincent Malausa of Les Cahiers du Cinéma was particularly impressed by the film's structure: "By the extreme rigour of its movement, the film succeeds in illuminating the fundamentals of Fellini's entire œuvre."
North America
In North America, the film received generally favorable reviews. On the eve of its U.S. premiere attended by Donald SutherlandDonald Sutherland
Donald McNichol Sutherland, OC is a Canadian actor with a film career spanning nearly 50 years. Some of Sutherland's more notable movie roles included offbeat warriors in such war movies as The Dirty Dozen, , MASH , and Kelly's Heroes , as well as in such popular films as Klute, Invasion of the...
at the Film Forum
Film Forum
Film Forum is a nonprofit movie theater located at 209 West Houston Street in New York City. It began in 1970 as an alternative screening space for independent films, with 50 folding chairs, one projector and a US$19,000 annual budget. Karen Cooper became director in 1972 and under her leadership,...
, David Denby
David Denby (film critic)
David Denby is an American journalist, best known as a film critic for The New Yorker magazine.-Background and education:Denby grew up in New York City. He received a B.A...
's The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
review described the film as "a superb documentary fantasia and an extraordinarily controlled piece of film in its own right. The interviews, recorded in the year before the director’s death, are often eloquent – Fellini’s long sentences actually take you somewhere – and Pettigrew and his colleagues provide a surrounding texture of film excerpts and freshly shot footage that has the density of one of the Maestro’s own movies, without the excess".
Michael Wilmington of the Chicago Tribune
Chicago Tribune
The Chicago Tribune is a major daily newspaper based in Chicago, Illinois, and the flagship publication of the Tribune Company. Formerly self-styled as the "World's Greatest Newspaper" , it remains the most read daily newspaper of the Chicago metropolitan area and the Great Lakes region and is...
felt it was crafted for the happy few but "a must for Fellini lovers... Seeing Fellini again in the flesh and in his films is, as always, a pleasure and a teasing mystery - Fellini: I'm a Born Liar is best watched in conjunction with the films themselves". Although he was "happy to have seen it", Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert
Roger Joseph Ebert is an American film critic and screenwriter. He is the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.Ebert is known for his film review column and for the television programs Sneak Previews, At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and Siskel and Ebert and The...
declared the film "lacked specifics" and that as "a biography of Fellini the film is almost worthless but as an insight into his style, the film is priceless". In his New York Times review, A. O. Scott
A. O. Scott
Anthony Oliver Scott, known as A. O. Scott , is an American journalist and critic. He is a chief film critic for The New York Times, along with Manohla Dargis.-Background and education:...
explained that Fellini's style was precisely what the film was all about: "The interviews with Fellini and some of his collaborators, the snippets of movies both famous and obscure, the glimpses behind the scenes and the master's own garrulous, charming presence make for a thrilling masterclass in cinema aesthetics, with footnotes compiled by an intelligent and devoted disciple." Reporting for both NPR
NPR
NPR, formerly National Public Radio, is a privately and publicly funded non-profit membership media organization that serves as a national syndicator to a network of 900 public radio stations in the United States. NPR was created in 1970, following congressional passage of the Public Broadcasting...
and the Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....
, Kenneth Turan
Kenneth Turan
Kenneth Turan is an American film critic and Lecturer in the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California.-Background:...
argued that "there's a lot to like about Born Liar, starting with that comprehensive interview which reveals Fellini to be an intoxicating conversationalist, articulate, expansive and capable of giving radically different takes on the same subject". Turan concluded that the film was "both completely fascinating and intermittently frustrating; however, as with Fellini's own films, the downside is far outweighed by the pluses".
By being "squarely focused on the nature of Fellini's insatiability", Wesley Morris
Wesley Morris
Wesley Morris is a film critic at The Boston Globe where he reviews films alongside Ty Burr. Morris and Burr also make regular appearances on NECN to discuss the latest films and do the weekly Take Two film review video series on Boston.com...
of The Boston Globe
The Boston Globe
The Boston Globe is an American daily newspaper based in Boston, Massachusetts. The Boston Globe has been owned by The New York Times Company since 1993...
maintained that Born Liar found "the truth behind Fellini's genius". Harper Barnes, longtime editor and cultural critic for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch is the major city-wide newspaper in St. Louis, Missouri. Although written to serve Greater St. Louis, the Post-Dispatch is one of the largest newspapers in the Midwestern United States, and is available and read as far west as Kansas City, Missouri, as far south as...
, praised the film as a "remarkable, intellectually daunting and mind-stirring documentary that deals with philosophical and psychological questions, but always in a Felliniesque way. It tells a story, one that is visually rich and emotionally compelling and charged with one of the great director's favorite concepts - expectation, the sense that something always new and marvelous will come along". Barnes placed it on his Top Ten list of the best films of 2003.
"There should be a separate term for films that are nonfiction but clearly not intended to be objective documentaries," argued Wade Major of Boxoffice Magazine. "For without such a category, it's impossible to do proper justice to Fellini: I'm a Born Liar, probably the best such film ever made." "Few viewers of this fascinating documentary will remain untouched", wrote prominent Fellini expert Dr. Peter Bondanella in Cineaste Magazine. “There is no question that Pettigrew’s film on Fellini represents the most detailed and lengthy conversation with him ever recorded."
Soundtrack
Nino RotaNino Rota
Nino Rota was an Italian composer and academic who is best known for his film scores, notably for the films of Federico Fellini and Luchino Visconti...
's themes from La dolce vita (1960), 8½ (1963), Amarcord (1973), and Casanova (1976), and various themes from City of Women (1980) composed by Luis Bacalov.
Theatrical releases
- Scotland: 56th Edinburgh International Film FestivalEdinburgh International Film FestivalThe Edinburgh International Film Festival is an annual fortnight of cinema screenings and related events taking place each June. Established in 1947, it is the world's oldest continually running film festival...
premiere (24 August 2002) - France: Heliotrope Films in tandem with MK2 International for world sales (May 7, 2003)
- United States: First Look International (April 2, 2003)
- Canada: Crystal Films (Québec, April 4, 2003) TVA Films (nationwide, 2004)
- Italy: Mikado (June 20, 2003)
- Spain: Cooper Films (June 22, 2003)
- Netherlands (September 10, 2003)
- Denmark (August 15, 2003)
- Japan: Toho Koshinsha Films (November 1, 2003)
- Australia: Palace Films (October 15, 2003)
- Brazil: Providence Films (June 20, 2003)
- Bulgaria: Marigold Films (July 12, 2003)
- Sweden: Sveriges Television (2003)
- Russia: Moscow Film Festival (June 26, 2004)
- Switzerland: CAB Productions (2004)
- United Kingdom: Metro Tartan Distribution (2006)
- Portugal: Costa do Castelo Filmes (2006)
- Ukraine: Klarmina (2006)
DVD and book releases
- North America - First Look Pictures (in Region 1 with cover art by Jean GiraudJean GiraudJean Henri Gaston Giraud is a French comics artist. Giraud has earned worldwide fame, not only under his own name but also under the pseudonym Moebius, and to a lesser extent Gir, the latter appearing mostly in the form of a boxed signature at the bottom of the artist's paintings, for instance the...
) - Italy - Cecchi Gori Editoria (in Region 2)
- Japan: Toho Koshinsha Films (in Region 2)
- Brazil: Providence Films (in Region 2)
- Bulgaria: Marigold Films (in Region 2)
- Ukraine: Klarmina (in Region 2)
- Portugal - Costa do Castelo Filmes (in Region 2)
- France and Switzerland - Les Films de Ma Vie (in Region 2) and Opening (in Region 2).
The Opening DVD is an 8-disc anamorphically enhanced
Anamorphic widescreen
Anamorphic widescreen, when applied to DVD manufacture, is a video process that horizontally squeezes a widescreen image so that it can be stored in a standard 4:3 aspect ratio DVD image frame. Compatible playback equipment can then re-expand the horizontal dimension to show the original widescreen...
international Collectors Edition that includes the theatrical version together with six films by Federico Fellini, and 105' of bonus material featuring the animated film, Il lungo viaggio di Fellini (directed by Khrajnovski, written by Tonino Guerra
Tonino Guerra
Tonino Guerra is an Italian poet, writer and screenwriter who has collaborated with some of the most prominent film directors of the world.-Biography:Guerra was born in Santarcangelo di Romagna....
), a 20' documentary by Pettigrew that takes the viewer from Rimini
Rimini
Rimini is a medium-sized city of 142,579 inhabitants in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy, and capital city of the Province of Rimini. It is located on the Adriatic Sea, on the coast between the rivers Marecchia and Ausa...
across the Apennine Mountains
Apennine mountains
The Apennines or Apennine Mountains or Greek oros but just as often used alone as a noun. The ancient Greeks and Romans typically but not always used "mountain" in the singular to mean one or a range; thus, "the Apennine mountain" refers to the entire chain and is translated "the Apennine...
to Rome
Rome
Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...
and the Tyrrhenian Sea
Tyrrhenian Sea
The Tyrrhenian Sea is part of the Mediterranean Sea off the western coast of Italy.-Geography:The sea is bounded by Corsica and Sardinia , Tuscany, Lazio, Campania, Basilicata and Calabria and Sicily ....
, interviews with Roland Topor
Roland Topor
Roland Topor , was a French illustrator, painter, writer and filmmaker, known for the surreal nature of his work...
and Donald Sutherland
Donald Sutherland
Donald McNichol Sutherland, OC is a Canadian actor with a film career spanning nearly 50 years. Some of Sutherland's more notable movie roles included offbeat warriors in such war movies as The Dirty Dozen, , MASH , and Kelly's Heroes , as well as in such popular films as Klute, Invasion of the...
, artwork by Jean Giraud
Jean Giraud
Jean Henri Gaston Giraud is a French comics artist. Giraud has earned worldwide fame, not only under his own name but also under the pseudonym Moebius, and to a lesser extent Gir, the latter appearing mostly in the form of a boxed signature at the bottom of the artist's paintings, for instance the...
, and rare footage of the maestro drawing a caricature of himself.
Designed as a companion to the documentary (which, in contrast, uses a single photo of Fellini as a baby), the book I'm a Born Liar: A Fellini Lexicon
I'm a Born Liar: A Fellini Lexicon
I'm a Born Liar: A Fellini Lexicon is a book combining film stills and photographs with transcripts of the last filmed interviews with Federico Fellini conducted by Canadian filmmaker Damian Pettigrew in Rome in 1991 and 1992...
has 124 film stills of Fellini at work and many unpublished photographs restored by the Cineteca del Comune di Bologna (Italy) .
DVD
- Pettigrew, Damian. Fellini: I'm a Born Liar. Produced by Olivier Gal. Edited by Florence Ricard. Los Angeles: First Look Home Entertainment, 2003
- —. Fellini, je suis un grand menteur. Paris: Les Films de ma vie, 2006.
Primary sources
- —. I'm a Born Liar: A Fellini Lexicon. Preface by Tullio KezichTullio KezichTullio Kezich was an Italian film critic, screenwriter, playwright and actor.Kezich was born in Trieste...
. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003
Secondary sources
- Calvino, Italo. Uno scrittore pomeridiano: Intervista sull'arte della narrativa a cura di William WeaverWilliam WeaverWilliam Fense Weaver is an English language translator of modern Italian literature.-Biography:William Weaver is perhaps best known for his translations of the work of Umberto Eco and Italo Calvino, and has translated many other Italian authors over the course of a career spanning more than fifty...
e Damian Pettigrew con un ricordo di Pietro CitatiPietro CitatiPietro Citati is a famous Italian writer and literary critic.He has written critical biographies of Goethe, Alexander the Great, Kafka and Marcel Proust as well as a short but unforgettable memoir on his thirty-year friendship with Italo Calvino.In Kafka, Pietro Citati has the great writer...
. Rome: minimum fax, 2003 - Feeney, F. X. Press Notes to Fellini: I'm a Born Liar. New York: First Look Media, Paris: Portrait & Company, 2003
- Danielson, Shane and Ginette Atkinson (ed). 56th Edinburgh International Film Festival Catalogue. Edinburgh: Edfilmfest, 2002
- Kezich, Tullio. Fellini: His Life and Work. New York: Faber and Faber, 2006
Online
- IndieWire - Interview with Wendy Mitchell
- ABC Radio National Movietime Interview with Julie Rigg
- Film Comment Michael Rowin: I'm a Born Liar: A Fellini Lexicon
- RaiLibro - Stas' Gawronski: "Il testamento artistico di Maestro"
- dsonline.it - Mario Verdone: "Un eccezionale documento biografico"
- Newsweek International Michael J. Agovino: "Directing the Director"
- PopMatters - Jonathan Kiefer: "Tales Out of School"
- The New Yorker - David Denby: "Monstres sacrés"
- The New York Times - A.O. Scott: "Putting Fellini in Front of the Lens"
- St Louis Post-Dispatch - Harper Barnes: "A Work of Art"
- DVD Vedict - "Spontaneity is the Secret of Life"
- Boxoffice Magazine - Wade Major: "Unabashedly Personal and Subjective"
- Cineaste Magazine - Dr. Peter Bondanella: Fellini: I'm a Born Liar
External links
- ARTE France - Federico Fellini et Damian Pettigrew
- Fellini I'm a Born Liar - TV GuideTV GuideTV Guide is a weekly American magazine with listings of TV shows.In addition to TV listings, the publication features television-related news, celebrity interviews, gossip and film reviews and crossword puzzles...
- IRS-RSI - Storyboard sketches from Fellini: I'm a Born Liar