Toni Maraini interviews Fellini in Bright Lights Film Journal:
Interviewer-You don't like to give interviews and
it's difficult for a journalist to get one. You should know I'm more a
poet than a journalist.
Fellini-Splendid.
Here's something that will amuse you. Because of the anxiety I had
about doing this interview, I woke up voiceless this morning, unable to
make a sound!
Perfect. I love journalists who don't talk much.
I'm reluctant to give interviews because I believe we
should avoid them and I'm trying to hold to this sane decision. But in
certain cases I end up by accepting, because there are friends who
insist I do interviews. Then there's the curiosity of meeting somebody
new. Also it's flattering; so out of an indecent vanity and a shameless
desire to prattle about myself, I consent.
I've given a lot of interviews; so, I don't trust what
I say. I repeat myself. I try to remember what I've already said and
what I still haven't said. For fear of repeating something I've already
said, I invent other things.
You mistrust yourself, then?
Yes, that's right. I mistrust myself, not the journalist, even if for
fifty years I've had the feeling that journalists asked me stupid
questions.
An interview is a halfway point between a
psychoanalytical sitting and a competitive examination. So, I
experience a slight uneasiness about all the interviews I've given. I
try to rethink myself rather than repeat myself. And besides, I have
some embarrassing limits. Sometimes I don't have answers.
Your answers are already in your films, by having created them.
That's right. The author's most important answer is the work itself,
and in my work people have found the few things I tried to say. Despite
that, the author generally is the least suited to talk about his work.
Those
who see the film want to ask questions, and, after all, this need is
stimulated by creation. In order to try to understand your last film,
for example, I reread some paragraphs from Krishnamurti, whom you know
as a thinker.
Yes, yes. In which book did you find these paragraphs? I'd like to see them.
Nevertheless, I don't think that an author, when he
creates, poses "others" problems. Really, when I'm working, I don't
think of others. Certainly, the author is conscious of the, as we say,
"craft" side of his own creation, of the how to express what he wants to say. But I don't think he worries too much about the problem of why and who to tell.
Yet, even if you don't tell it "to others," like every creator you tell
it to yourself. In this self-telling, doesn't reevaluation go on, a
gradual, revelatory consciousness of self?
As in life generally, the experience of working brings a greater
mastery at the technical level, and, therefore, better reasoning about
choices and how to carry them out. But in the deeper sense of knowing
to which you alluded, the idea that through my work I may have a
greater knowledge of myself, I will tell you I don't think there has
been an evolution. On my last birthday, a friend asked me what it meant
for me to be seventy, and my spontaneous response was, "Seventy? It
seems to me I've always been seventy!"
So you see, my answer reflects my true feeling. For me,
at seventy, I'm not much different from what I was at forty,
thirty-five, twenty-five, or even earlier.
This doesn't so much mean you've always had the feeling of being
seventy, but rather — if I understand you — that reaching this age and
looking back you have the feeling of always having had the same age
from youth on.
Yes, the adolescent age. Exactly. It's totally an adolescent age.
Whoever has created knows this state that I would call "motionless
time."
But it's precisely this state of pure consciousness and spontaneity
that anyone who creates tries to conquer or rather to safeguard.
You're referring still to our Krishnamurti!
Yes, and to
the importance of existential time, so typical of your film creations,
in contrast with time understood as a historical, straight, linear
sequence in which facts, chronologies, and so forth pile up.
It's true. Unfortunately, because of our goal-oriented training,
we Westerners have a vision of ourselves living through a continuous
time line that requires steps, changes, conclusions, and a goal one
must reach.
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