In 1968, Federico Fellini decided he was going make the greatest homosexual movie ever made. What he meant by a homosexual movie, no one was quite sure, but it was going to be great. In fact, it going to be the greatest homosexual movie ever, or so Fellini kept telling anyone who would listen.

Fellini was living it large with the international success of La Dolce Vita, 8½, and Juliet of the Spirits. He was now described by some critics as “the greatest living director.” What Alfred Hitchcock thought of this news, no one knows, but Fellini was not going to disagree. He travelled to America where he was fascinated by the rise of hippie culture, free love, and young boys with long hair who looked like girls. It was the Age of Aquarius, the hippies told him. Fellini was an Aquarian, born on the 20th of January 1920. He was superstitious and believed what he was told. This was then was the Age of Aquarius—his time. Who was he to disagree?

The subject matter for his new film was the first century story Satyricon by Gaius Petronius written during the reign of Emperor Nero. Petronius fell foul of Nero and was accused of treason. To avoid one of Nero’s gruesome executions, Petronius cut his own wrists, bound them up, then picked at them during a dinner with friends until he inevitably bled to death. Much of Petronius’ original text for Satyricon had been lost but this did not concern Fellini, as he was more interested in imagining what had happened in those missing gaps. This was not going to be Petronius’ Satyricon but Fellini’s Satyricon. It was the first time the director’s name appeared before the title of his film.

Satyricon told the story two young streetwise punks Encolpius and Ascyltus and their mutual lust for a boy Gitón. The pair fall into various misadventures before Ascytlus is killed and Encolpius abandons his lustful ways for a more-considered life.

Author Paul Gillette set the scene for Fellini’s movie in his introduction to the film-tie-in book of Satyricon:

Imperial Age Rome was a cesspool of vice and carnality. The leisure classes, having been turned from power, devoted themselves exclusively to the pursuit of pleasure. Marriage was regarded as a mere formality, more often than not ignored; bisexuality was considered the most desirable state of sexual appetite, the term being equated with ‘sexual completeness.’

When a boy attained the age of reason, or as soon as possible thereafter, his parents would seek to place him under the tutelage of a young man who had proved himself learned and wise in the ways of the world. It was the function of this wise young man, called a “mentor,” to teach the boy all worth knowing—not the least worthy of which was sex. At the same time that the lad was being taught logic, literature and numbers, he was being introduced to sexual experience in the form of manual, anal and oral contact with his mentor. When it was thought that he was sufficiently prepared, the boy was introduced to the heterosexual world; thenceforth, he was free to do as he chose. The same master-apprentice relationship existed among females.

Petronius’ tale was a scandalous satire on this world, poking fun at the people and their loose morals and practices.

Fellini saw a parallel between mid-first century Rome and the 1960s. But although this was a time of free love, rock concerts, and students rioting on the cobblestone streets of Paris, Fellini wanted an older, respected bunch of actors to appear in his movie. He called Danny Kaye and summoned him to the Cinecitta Studios. The versatile song-and-dance comedian arrived at Rome airport without the slightest idea what Fellini wanted, other than he wanted him to star in his next movie. Over lunch, Fellini told Kaye, he didn’t want him as the star but rather the villain of the piece, Lichas—a murderous gay transvestite pirate and mortal enemy of the story’s narrator Encolpius. He kidnaps Encolpius to keep as his catamite then marries him while dressed as a bride. Kaye baulked at the idea. This wasn’t the kind of family entertainment that had made him famous.

Taking on such a role might bring unwanted attention to Kaye’s private life. Kaye was bisexual and had a long-term relationship with Laurence Olivier. According to biographer Donald Spoto, Kaye once organized for Olivier to be stopped on entry to the US at New York airport. Kaye had disguised himself as a customs officer. He then allegedly carried out an intense cavity search on the noble Shakespearean actor, before revealing his true identity.

After his meeting with Fellini, Kaye quickly returned to America. Less said, soonest mended. Yet, seven years later, Kaye did play a dubious pirate with an obsessive interest in children, when he starred as Captain Hook against Mia Farrow’s Peter Pan. Perhaps Fellini had been right in his choice of Kaye. The role eventually went to French actor Alain Cuny.
 

 
Undeterred, Fellini told the press he would cast Mae West, Groucho Marx, Jimmy Durante, Van Heflin, Boris Karloff, and Michael J. Pollard. No one was going to stop the great Fellini from making his movie. But Groucho Marx said “No.” Durante said “What?” Mae West turned the offer of playing a sex mad high priestess and mother figure down as she didn’t like the idea of being a “mother figure.” Boris Karloff was interested but too busy, perhaps a day or two in May?. Pollard said “Yes,” but nothing came of it.

Fellini even appeared on TV stating he was going to cast the Beatles. While this would have certainly been a more interesting film to make than the folly of The Magical Mystery Tour, the question was: which Beatle would play which role? Would McCartney be the young love interest Gitón? Would Lennon be Encolpius?  Harrison Ascyltus? And what about Ringo? The suggestion captured the media’s imagination. Fellini added that he hoped the Beatles would write the score for the movie. Meanwhile, back in London, the Beatles’ press office said they knew nothing of any proposal for John, Paul, George, and Ringo to star in any great homosexual movie, Fellini’s or otherwise.

The novelist Henry Miller watched Fellini’s performance on television and noted the director was merely improvising—riffing like a jazz player on the celebrity names he pulled out the air to see the response each one received. Now, he said he would cast Terence Stamp and Pierre Clementi who would star as Encolpius and Ascyltus. Fellini added:

I’d like [Elizabeth] Taylor, [Richard] Burton, [Brigitte] Bardot, [Peter] O’Toole, [Louis] de Funes, Jerry Lewis, [Marlon] Brando, Lee Marvin, the Beatles, the Maharishi, Lyndon Johnson and [General] de Gaulle, or else no one, not a known face, to increase the sense of foreign-ness.

It was becoming clear that it was going to be “no one”—though Michael J. Pollard was still keen.
 

Fellini and ‘the unknowns’ he eventually cast.
 
More of Fellini’s ‘Satyricon,’ after the jump…

 
For a man as superstitious as Federico Fellini the omens of 1973 were not good.

Too many friends were ill or dying; his private life was the focus of the paparazzi with claims of affairs with various young starlets; his relationship with his wife Giulietta was almost at an all-time low—though she continued to appear with the great director at functions like, as one acquaintance suggested, a politician’s wife out canvassing voters; and his usual life of extravagance was severely curtailed as the tax man was after him for non-payment of taxes. Things were not looking good. And Fellini was about to turn fifty-three which, by his own estimation, was on the back slice of life.

That summer, in need of money and a desire to keep working, Fellini agreed to make a movie on the life of Casanova for producer Dino de Laurentiis.

Fellini had often hinted that he would one day make a film about Casanova. He used it as a ploy to raise money for his other film projects—-Yes, yes, I’ll make ‘Casanova’ one day but now, now I want to make this….whichever film was his latest obsession. Fellini probably never had any intention of making a film about the great lover as he loathed Casanova. He saw in him some of his own negative traits which he hoped he could exorcise by making this damned film. He said:

“After this film, the moody and unreliable part of me, the undecided part that was constantly seduced by compromise—the part of me that didn’t want to grow up—had to die.”

Fellini was also aware that he perhaps subconsciously placed all his fears and the “anxiety [he couldn’t] face in this film,” adding that “Perhaps the film was fed by fears.” This unease sapped Fellini’s confidence and led him to believe he should have let this film project go as he feared Casanova would be “the worst film I have ever made.”

De Laurentiis was aware of Fellini’s misgivings but chose to ignore them. He knew with Fellini’s name attached to a film about Casanova, he could break the American market. Indeed, he favored an American actor to play the lead. He considered Marlon Brando, then Al Pacino, before finally deciding on the newly crowned “world’s sexiest man” Robert Redford to play Casanova. One can see the cartoon logic—world’s greatest lover must have considerable sex appeal. Robert Redford has sex appeal ergo Redford is Casanova.

Fellini baulked at the choice. He wanted Marcello Mastroianni—an actor he could depend on. Unfortunately, Mastroianni was unavailable. While de Laurentiis searched for another international name (he also considered both Michael Caine and Jack Nicholson) to sell the picture to the US, Fellini started writing the script with his collaborator Bernardino Zapponi.

Zapponi brought his experience as a writer and knowledge of Casanova to the project. He arrived at Fellini’s office with several volumes of Casanova’s biography, only for the director to tell him such source material was not needed, as facts were anathema to imagination. This, Fellini explained, would not be a biographical film but rather a movie that filtered the director’s own thoughts on sex and death and aging thru the prism of Casanova. As Fellini later explained:

“I never had the intention to recount complacently, amused and fascinated the amorous adventures of Casanova.”

Instead he was to be:

“A prisoner as in a nightmare, as immobilised as a puppet, he reflects continually on a series of seductive and disturbing faces which succeed only in incarnating each time a different aspect of himself.”

Or as he had once said in an interview with the BBC:

Everything is autobiographical. How is it possible to live outside of yourself? Anything we do is also a testifying of yourself. If a creator makes something that pretends to be very objective, it is the autobiography of a man who is very objective…

...How is it possible to do something outside of your myth, of your world, of your character, of your history, of yourself?

It was becoming slowly apparent to de Laurentiis that this was not the sex ‘n’ costumes film he had intended to make. In July 1974, de Laurentiis pulled out, telling Variety other work commitments prevented him from giving Fellini’s Casanova the attention it demanded. Fellini sought to raise the money himself and eventually brought in Alberto Grimaldi to produce the film. He also managed to raise money from Universal Studios by bringing in Gore Vidal to write a new script. While Vidal’s script was shown to the studio to raise cash, it was never used in the final film.

During all these behind-the-scenes manoeuvres, rumors spread through the press that Donald Sutherland was to star as Casanova. It’s difficult to ascertain who exactly first suggested Sutherland but his “candidature” for the role was “built up from simple repetition of the rumor.” To help this rumor along, Sutherland sent Fellini a highly flattering letter and twenty roses. Fellini wasn’t convinced. He still wanted the unavailable Mastroianni.

Looking for advice, Fellini visited a clairvoyant, Gustavo Rol, who claimed to have made contact with Casanova. During a seance, Rol filled page after page of notes from the great Casanova aimed at helping Fellini make his movie. When he left the seance, the director read some of the notes Rol had transcribed, which offered the sexual advice never to make love standing-up or after a meal.

Without Mastroianni, Fellini agreed on Sutherland to play Casanova. When asked why? Fellini declared:

“I need him. He’s a sperm-filled waxwork with the eyes of a masturbator!”

Sutherland told Time Out that he would not have played the role for any other director:

“I’m not playing Casanova. I’m playing Fellini’s Casanova, and that’s a whole different thing.”

It certainly was different as Sutherland soon found out when they met:

Walked into La Scala, him warning me that they wanted him to direct an opera and he was not going to do one. I remember three guarded doors in the atrium as we walked in. At the desk the concierge, without looking up when Fellini’d asked to see the head of the theater, demanded perfunctorily who wanted to see him. Fellini leaned down and whispered, truly whispered, “Fellini.” The three doors burst open.

With that word the room was full of dancing laughing joyous people and in the middle of this swirling arm clasped merry go round Fellini said to the director, “Of course, you know Sutherland.” The director looked at me stunned and then jubilantly exclaimed, “Graham Sutherland,” and embraced me. The painter Graham Sutherland was not yet dead, but nearly. I suppose the only other choice was Joan

Sutherland had two millimetres filed from his teeth, his eyebrows removed and his hairline shaved back by two inches. He wore a false nose and chin. Fellini had turned Sutherland into a puppet—a mere mechanism for telling his story. On set, he never called him “Donald” or Mr. Sutherland” but addressed him as “the Canadian.” He offered little in the way of direction or support and could be very disparaging. “That poor guy,” Fellini said, “He believed he was going to become him.”

“Sutherland!—the incarnation of a Latin lover. He had two tons of documentation under his arms. I told him: ‘Throw out the lot. Forget everything.’”

Yet Sutherland was magnanimous in writing about his experience working with Fellini:

I was just happy to be with him. I loved him. Adored him. The only direction he gave me was with his thumb and forefinger, closing them to tell me to shut my gaping North American mouth. He’d often be without text so he’d have me count; uno due tre quattro with the instruction to fill them with love or hate or disdain or whatever he wanted from Casanova. He’d direct scenes I wasn’t in sitting on my knee. He’d come up to my dressing room and say he had a new scene and show me two pages of text and I’d say OK, when, and he’d say now, and we’d do it. I have no idea how I knew the words, but I did. I’d look at the page and know them. He didn’t look at rushes, Federico, the film of the previous day’s work. Ruggero Mastroianni, his brilliant editor, Marcello’s brother, did. Fellini said looking at them two-dimensionalized the three-dimensional fantasy that populated his head. Things were in constant flux. We flew. It was a dream. Sitting beside me one night he said that when he had looked at the final cut he had come away believing that it was his best picture. The Italian version is really terrific.

The film’s production was delayed by strike action and then seventy-four reels of film were stolen and ransomed. This meant Fellini had to change his film. Some scenes were dropped, others edited to fit the footage available. The finished movie bombed with the critics. At best, it was considered a misfire, at worst a disaster. Sutherland was given the unenviable task of attempting to deliver an intelligent and considered performance to a director who only wanted a marionette to play the role. Fellini’s abhorrence of Casanova undermined his ability to make a work of art or even a film that would resonate with an audience. The film could be admired but not always liked.

Fellini’s final verdict on Casanova was that it seemed to him his “most complete, expressive, courageous film.”
 

 

 
More ephemera from Fellini’s ‘Casanova,’ after the jump…
 

 
Federico Fellini’s Roma isn’t one of his more popular films by a long shot, perhaps partially because it’s such an hardhearted departure from his previously dreamy and romantic depictions of Rome. As a partial autobiography, the film begins with the story of young Federico’s move to the idyllic city he had fallen in love with from the movies. Flash forward to modern day, and Fellini the successful director is attempting to film the new Rome, busy, noisy, dirty, dilapidated, and gaudy—the apex of which is captured in a truly tasteless Vatican fashion show.
 

 
Despite Fellini’s ambivalent beliefs and later interest in the supernatural, he always identified as Catholic, a loyalty the church never really seemed to appreciate. The Vatican actually censored some of his movies, Roma obviously was among them. You can’t blame them too much either—the garish spectacle of Catholic haute couture does seem to make a mockery of the church, with clergy on rollerskates and nuns in elaborate headgear. The garishness of it all got the scene edited down quite a bit, but you can see the uncensored version below, in all its sacrilegious glory.
 

 
The great Italian director Federico Fellini was in the midst of production on Satyricon—his self-described “sci-fi” film that looked back at the pre-Christian Romans as if they were Martians—when he shot Fellini: A Director’s Notebook, a light-hearted quasi-documentary “introducing” himself to Americans for NBC.

It’s a testament to the times that such a thing could have been broadcast on an American network television. And it’s “a Fellini” in every way, so the project was, shall we say, already quite extraordinary to begin with. That it burst into millions of American homes for one night in 1969, as easily accessed as running water… well, wow. That takes it to a whole other level.

Fellini: A Director’s Notebook features his wife Giulietta Masina, actress Caterina Boratto, composer Nino Rota and Marcello Mastroianni (we even get a look at Mastroianni’s home). We seeing him working on the set. There are also appearances by Genius the Medium, some very Fellini-esque hippies and a variety of whimsical and eccentric characters who come into the director’s office wanting to audition for him. Fellini descends into the subways, goes to a slaughterhouse and visits the Appian Way, all the while discussing his creative search for atmosphere and the bizarre.

As with all of Fellini’s films, this boasts some of the most extraordinary faces—the faces, as he says of “real Romans”—that you’ll ever see. The master’s eye was so attuned to the smallest detail in his films, but it’s Fellini’s faces that are unique in all of cinema. Every face in this film is a work of art.
 

 
Donald Sutherland’s big break came in Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen, when co-star Clint Walker refused to play a scene—as Sutherland explained to the Daily Telegraph:

‘...Clint Walker sticks up his hand and says, ‘Mr Aldrich, as a representative of the Native American people, I don’t think it’s appropriate to do this stupid scene where I have to pretend to be a general.’ Aldrich turns and points to me and says, ‘You — with the big ears. You do it’....It changed my life.’

“Big Ears” was born Donald McNichol Sutherland in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, in July 1935. He moved to England in the late 1950s, where he briefly studied at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, leaving after 9 months to start his professional career as an actor. Sutherland was soon acting in various BBC plays, and guest starring in episodes of such cult TV series as The Saint and The Avengers. Sutherland also co-starred with Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee and Michael Gough in the classic Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors, where he played a newly-wed doctor who suspects his wife is a vampire. After a stint in repertory theater, including 2 disastrous productions, Sutherland’s career seemed stalled. The Dirty Dozen changed that.

During the 1970s, Sutherland made some of the most iconic and seminal films of the decade, including M*A*S*H (a film he originally hated), Kelly’s Heroes (which nearly cost him his life), Klute, Little Murders (a cameo), the unforgettable Don’t Look Now, The Day of the Locust (as the original Homer Simpson), 1900, Casanova, The Eagle Has Landed and National Lampoon’s Animal House.

When asked on the set of Bear Island, in 1979, if he considered himself a star, Sutherland replied that Peter O’Toole is a star, as he has that certain something, while he just makes a lot of movies. Personally, I’d beg to differ. Sutherland gives a brief history of his career, discussing the highlights M*A*S*H, working with Fellini on Casanova and the remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Some man, some talent, some head of hair.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous MInds

Donald Sutherland’s hairstyles throughout the years

Donald Sutherland: His Films and Hairstyles

 
With thanks to NellyM
 

 
Making a movie is a very mathematical operation, Federico Fellini explains in this interview from 1972. It is like firing a missile into space—everything has to be prepared.

This control over film-making is neatly contrasted with the often random nature of documentary-making, when moments later a telephone rings and the interview is stopped. Fittingly, the sequence is kept in, as if it had been scripted.

There is also a great interplay between Fellini and interviewer Philip Jenkinson, where the director responds to the questions about his films—Roma, Amacord, Satyricon, his techniques, and his life, but rarely giving a definitive answer. There is a drama going on here between the two, of nuance and mood, with Fellini cleverly avoiding his being tied to one thought, one explanation, one answer. That is for the critics, he says.

Ultimately, Fellini defines movie-making, or artistic creation, as a form of autobiography.

Everything is autobiographical. How is it possible to live outside of yourself? Anything we do is also a testifying of yourself. If a creator makes something that pretends to be very objective, it is the autobiography of a man who is very objective…

He ends in a similar form:

...How is it possible to do something outside of your myth, of your world, of your character, of your history, of yourself?

It brings the interview almost full-circle, but Fellini’s answers throughout only leave the viewer wanting to know more. This is a classic and rare TV interview and demands to be seen.
 

 
With thanks to NellyM
 

 
Federico Fellini had been working on his 12th feature film Casanova. It had been a difficult experience. Filming had taken over a year to complete, and Fellini had spent in excess of $10m, using up 3 producers. He claimed he hated his leading star, Donald Sutherland. There had been union disputes, and the negative had been “kidnapped” and returned. Then the Vatican declared one of Fellini’s previous films “obscene”. But the great master was unfazed by all of this.

‘I’m sorry if I disappoint you by not describing the tears in my eyes, my role as the victim, the artist forced to sacrifice his own integrity and purity,’ Fellini explained in an interview with the BBC in 1976.

‘I’ve never compromised. But then I’ve always been lucky.

‘On the occasions that I could be reproached for compromising, was directly attributable to my own laziness, because I was in love, or I wanted to finish the film. Or, simply because I was fed-up by it.

‘I don’t think absolute liberty is necessarily a good thing for people creatively. As far as I, or people like me are concerned.

‘Being Italian, I have a particular type of psychology: I am an artist who is conditioned to the idea of delivering his work to All.

‘The Popes in the 14th and the 15th century, or the great Lords of days gone by, they always used to commission painters or writers to create a madrigal or a crucifixion for them. It’s this necessity of an obligation - a contract - it’s an authority that forces you to work.’

For Casanova that authority was the American film company. Fellini may have had control over the designs, the sets, the costumes, the cast, the script, and the direction, but ultimately Fellini was answerable to his producers. This was partly why he had chosen to work with Donald Sutherland.

‘Well, in Casanova,’ said Fellini, ‘There was a precise plan for a certain type of character. Because the film is an American film - made by an Italian crew for a major American company. My contractual position is that the producer made me make the film in English.’

Fellini made Sutherland have his head partially shaved, his eyebrows removed and his teeth “cut” by 2mm. A false nose, chin and eyebrows were then added. Sutherland had to rethink how best to interpret Casanova’s experience in terms of 18th century expression.

Fellini wanted authenticity, and he knew his film would cause outrage from the prudes and hypocrites of his homeland, who had already burnt copies of The Last Tango in Paris on the streets of Rome.

‘You’ve got a real moralistic tyranny in Italy,’ Fellini said. ‘It is fast coming to the point where people are being told how to make love, how to dress, how to shave, how to look at a woman. I feel completely bewildered and confused. Clearly what’s going on in our country is a real mess. I cannot honestly see how we are going to extricate ourselves.

‘The Italians are like confused children. They’ve had a thousand years of Catholic up-bringing which has left us uncertain in our context of life. We are incapable, apparently, of making personal judgments because we have always asked other people. We ask our fathers, the teacher, police, the ministry, priests, the Pope. We have always asked others to give their opinion for us, without ever having to judge for ourselves individually.’
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

Pier Paolo Pasolini: A rare interview on the set of ‘Salò, or 120 Days of Sodom’

 
With thanks to NellyM