I am not the kind of director who sits in a chair smoking a cigar talking with a microphone to 10 assistants. I need to move. To touch. To put a painting on a wall. To arrange a set.
Interpretation
Fellini emphasizes the importance of physical involvement in the creative process rather than passive management.
This quote by Federico Fellini highlights the interactive and hands-on nature of his directorial style. He contrasts typical director behavior, where one might delegate tasks while remaining detached, with his own need for personal engagement and tactile involvement in the artistic process. Fellini believes that real artistry stems from direct action and personal connection to the work, rather than mere oversight.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of active participation in creative projects.
I’m just a storyteller, and the cinema happens to be my medium. I like it because it recreates life in movement, enlarges it, enhances it, distills it. For me, it’s far closer to the miraculous creation of life than, say, a painting or music or even literature. It’s not just an art form; it’s actually a new form of life, with its own rhythms, cadences, perspectives and transparencies. It’s my way of telling a story.
Talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since the cinema uses the language of dreams; years can pass in a second, and you can hop from one place to another. It's a language made of image. And in the real cinema, every object and every light means something, as in a dream.
No critic writing about a film could say more than the film itself, although they do their best to make us think the oppposite.
A created thing is never invented and it is never true: it is always and ever itself.
What's important is the way we say it. Art is all about craftsmanship. Others can interpret craftsmanship as style if they wish. Style is what unites memory or recollection, ideology, sentiment, nostalgia, presentiment, to the way we express all that. It's not what we say but how we say it that matters.
We can all pretend to be cynical and scheming, but when we’re faced with purity and innocence, the cynical mask drops off.
The stuff I'm passionate about is what I write; it isn't multi-million-dollar franchise movies.
Muse of the many twinkling feet, whose charms are now extending up from legs to arms.
It's work to play the same songs the same way for 70 shows.
My own thing is in my head. I hear sounds and if I don't get them together nobody else will.
What's missing in the musical theater is producers willing to nurture new work, raise the money and put it on.
It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.