Martin Scorsese recalls his last conversation with Federico Fellini in “The Last Fellini,” a new documentary about the final decade of the Italian auteur’s life premiering at Rome Film Festival on Saturday.
“The Last Fellini,” which is produced by Italy’s Atomic and RAI Cinema, has been picked up for international sales by PiperPlay.
Scorsese is well known to be huge Fellini fan and has cited “8½” as one of his all-time favorite films. His film foundation was also involved in restoring Fellini’s masterpiece, “La Dolce Vita.”
Though much has been told about Fellini, the final chapter in his life remains largely unexplored. “The Last Fellini,” which is directed by Gianluigi Attorre — and also features interviews with Roberto Benigni, composer Nicola Piovani, journalist Vincenzo Mollica, comic book artist Milo Manara and Fellini’s inseparable secretary, Fiammetta Profili — looks at the iconic director’s struggles during the 1980s and ’90s when it became harder for him to find support for his projects.
In “The Last Fellini,” he details how he and Fellini almost teamed up on what he affectionately calls a “crazy” documentary series about different aspects of film production.
“We have one [segment] on the producer; we have one on the actor; we have one on the cameraman,” the editor and so on, Scorsese recalls Fellini telling him.
In a humorous twist, Fellini also told Scorsese that, for a producer, the most important role was that of the location manager.
“I said, ‘Yeah, and why is that?'” Scorsese remembers asking. “He said, ‘Because when you go location scouting’ — this was going to be in the script — ‘Whether you are scouting through Rome or Parma or wherever, the location manager has to know of a location that’s near the good restaurant, so you could stop and have lunch.’ … So that’s the main thing.”
Scorsese laughs heartily retelling this anecdote in the doc.
The plan was for the first one-hour segment of this Fellini documentary series to be on the actor. Scorsese, who had a deal with Universal at the time, had secured $1 million to finance it. But then Fellini became ill and died in October 1993.
As the doc’s narrative reaches 1993, his final year, it shows Fellini receiving an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement in Los Angeles. The day after the ceremony, he had his last phone conversation with Scorsese, which he recalls in the below clip.
“So I pick up the phone, and this time his voice was very weak, and he just said, ‘Thank you, Martin. Thank you, thank you. You know, I’ll see you soon. Yeah, I hope so.'”
Scorsese then goes on to speculate on what Fellini was thanking him for, since they hadn’t spoken directly about the fact that he had found the financing.
“I’m not quite sure, but his voice was very weak,” Scorsese reiterates.