SOURCE: An interview in Federico Fellini: Comments on Film, edited by Giovanni Grazzini, translated by Joseph Henry, The Press at California State University, 1988, pp. 157-67, 180-93.

Grazzini is an Italian film critic. In the following interview, originally published in Grazzini's Federico Fellini: Intervista sul Cinema (1983), Fellini discusses 8 1/2 and highlights some of the philosophies and collaborative methods that have influenced the development of his films.

[Grazzini]: 8 1/2, which many consider your finest film, [is] widely imitated to the point of becoming a genre, like the western, the detective story, the historical film, science fiction, war films. In almost every country in the world there has been and probably will be again directors who will make or want to remake their own 8 1/2.

[Fellini]: I on the other hand didn't want to make it. The night before the shooting, desperate, confused, I wrote old Rizzoli, the producer, a letter which began: "Dear...