Fellini: I wake up early, around 6 o’clock. I get up, try and do some exercises – I try and then give up. I walk around the house, open and shut windows, make coffee, telephone friends. Then I go out and take the production company car waiting near the house. I get in and invite the driver to take the longest route possible because it’s during this drive, during this little half-hour, that I try and gather my thought about what I’m going to film. While we’re crossing the city, it seems to me that all this bustle and movement – the people, trams, city life starting up again – help me, force me almost, to realize that I have to go to work. The privilege of having a chauffeur-driven car and the sight of thousands of people rushing oof to work make me feel guilty because, honestly, I don’t know what I’m going to do when I get to the studio. Like a good Catholic, the sense of culpability forces me to organize my thoughts, to anticipate what my morning might hold. But working like this can’t be defined as improvisation because it’s the state of mind necessary for confronting a day’s work in the studio. Ans then, once I’m in the studios, I’ve reached my true home, the place I’ve always lived in. The troupe, the lights, the costumes, all of it is so familiar, so indispensable to me.

Art is a necessity, an interpretation of life, which, if left to itself, is probably devoid of meaning – monstrous. Art, on the other hand, is something that offers comfort, reassures us, speaks to us in highly protective terms. It forces us to meditate on life and on man who, without art, is nothing more than a beating heart, a stomach that digests, lungs that breathe, hands that strike the air, eyes that fill up with images stripped of all meaning. I believe that art is the most successful attempt to inculcate in man the indispensable need for a life of the spirit which only art – no matter what art – is capable of expressing.

Television on the other hand….

I think television has betrayed the meaning of democratic speech, adding visual chaos to the confusion of voices. What role does silence have in all this noise? […] By replacing experience with this unending flow of obdurante electronic images, we’ve grown dependent on a virtual reality that is simply a fancy term for an eye laxative. Cinema has the capacity to offer us a high density of meaning by mobilizing each gesture, each color, each word, each element into a single powerful image, Television, on the contrary, can offer only the meaning of the facts that are being transmitted.

Federico Fellini (1920-1993)

Federico Fellini (20 January 1920 – 31 October 1993) was an Italian film director and screenwriter. Known for his distinct style that blends fantasy and baroque images with earthiness, he is recognized as one of the most influential filmmakers of all time. His films have ranked, in polls such as Cahiers du cinéma and Sight & Sound, as some of the greatest films of all time. Sight & Sound lists his 1963 film 8½ as the 10th greatest film of all time.

In a career spanning almost fifty years, Fellini won the Palme d’Or for La Dolce Vita, was nominated for twelve Academy Awards, and directed four motion pictures that won Oscars in the category of Best Foreign Language Film. In 1993, he was awarded an honorary Oscar for Lifetime Achievement at the 65th Annual Academy Awards in Los Angeles.

Theatre about Fellini’s live and work in Festivals

Fellini was selected by the Nederlands Theater Festival 2014 and invited to international Festival KONTAKT in Torún, Polen

End of mai 2014 Fellini performed in Festival KONTAKT in Torún, Polen.

The Toruń festival is one of the most significant theatre reviews organised in Poland. It takes place continuously since 1991, and nowadays every two years, alternating with the National Debutant Festivals “Pierwszy Kontakt”.

Fellini: It’s simply more natural to me to invent my own [recollections], inspired by the memory of lives and events that never existed but which feeds on them or calls them into existence. I invented everything, including my birth. And this invented self is the only true self I see reflected in the mirror of my films. I invented my youth, my family, relationships with women and with life. I have always invented. The irrepressible urge to invent is because I don’t want anything autobiographical in my films.