Rodrigo Amaro "Intervista" ("Interview") takes life and movies to an unimagined extent. An nostalgic journey into memory, experiences and life in the way Federico Fellini sees them. And he asks those kind of questions: "What's real in movies? What's real in news and documentaries?". Even more: "What's real in life?" Defying, joking, molding, constructing and deconstructing films and the human existence, Fellini challenges and fascinates viewers through four intertwined segments which echo his work, his art and his early memories when of his arrival at the famous studio Cinecittá, way before of becoming the cinematic author of "Amarcord" and "Satyricon".The movie is composed of showing the behind the scenes of a movie directed by the maestro Fellini; the movie itself (film within the film) and its long and confusing process of shooting; the interview documented by the Japanese crew who hears the director's stories that later are intercut with scenes of a young Fellini (played by the lovable Sergio Rubini) living his first experiences at Cinecittá while interviewing a impressionable film star. They're all mixed into an magical and dreamy imitation of life.But how can one distinguish what's scripted and what's real? You can't. But you can try. The reunion between Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg, 27 seven years later after "La Dolce Vita" is wonderful, almost brings tears to our eyes. But they really kept all this time without seeing each other as they say? Maybe, maybe not, very unlikely but somehow we buy this as a fact. It looks genuine, they're so thrilled and surprised with this event. They play themselves in the movie, watching the characters they played in another Fellini classic, when they were very young. That's the film's magic, to capture both these stars in different situations and periods of life, all captured in a beautiful frame where Marcello can play magic tricks and prepare a delightful and nostalgic surprise to Anita and then watch the famous sequence of the Fontana de Trevi that the two performed in 1960. This dialog between medias and time is hypnotic, mysterious and funny too. It's a perfect fusion of realities, facts and fiction friendly put together in one single film.One of Fellini's finest and a treasure to be sought. 9/10

felixoteiza This is a beautiful Fellini, one the most beautiful he ever made and I don't understand why is so underrated. A joy to watch from beginning to end, a visual gem, a masterpiece; one with which the master confounds the skeptics, shows he's still in top form. I don't remember any other Fellini containing such breathtaking scenes, astonishing in their exuberance and richness in color as that in the oriental set with Maharajahs and elephants or those carrying such evocative power as that of the two aging European sex symbols of the 1960s watching themselves on a white sheet, shedding a few tears and drinking to the good old times. Oh, to be young and beautiful again...(sigh). Oh, and that final sequence of the cast and crew huddling inside the plastic tent during a storm, the collective soul going from joy and euphoric enthusiasm to muted, thoughtful melancholy, while bathed all with the music coming from the back of the truck under the rain. There's also something surreal about that haunting scene, under the rain, behind the rain, that makes it stay with us for a long time, forever: the girl blowing it away in her saxophone and the boy taking it away at the piano, both framed by the big box of the vehicle; a beautiful portrait of ineffable energy and youthful poetry. Oh, and also nobody, nobody but Fellini himself could have done a better job playing The Maestro at his best, with the juices of creativity pouring through each one of his pores.This is Fellini at his best, the full essence of his genius distilled in a single cinematographic piece, where he reaches his own outer limits. For one thing, I noticed here a great number of scenes with deep, ample backgrounds--even in some interiors--except for those where such a thing was impossible--the inside the trailer of the diva for ex.. But you will rarely see here characters in closed, claustrophobic quarters or plastered against a wall. I'm not a film scholar or a psychologist, but to me that means that at this point Fellini had finally become master of his space, that he totally owned his surroundings. He was free at last to do pure cinematographic art without being burdened by ghosts from the remote past, by the heavy load of unsolved traumas; he had finally exorcised his demons—even the resident fascist here is a nice, inoffensive little old man—and so become the filmmaker he always wanted to be. It is in this film where the master has reached his peak. Intervista is a cinematographic gem from beginning to end. The pacing, the acting, the score are impeccable, flawless; so much so, you find hard to believe that any of this could have been prepared, scripted, rehearsed as any regular movie, it feels so spontaneous, so authentic.This is a movie that Fellini had absolutely to make. He owed that to the world, his legacy wouldn't have been complete without it. The world can do without 8 ½ but it absolutely needs Intervista. And Fellini was one of the few chosen who could accomplish such a feat--the only other one I can think of being Buñuel. Because here we see the real man, Fellini in all his humility and humanity, a man in love with movies and people. I have seen enough movie shootings in public places to know that this can be at times a very stressful activity and tempers tend to flare during difficult times but I don't have any doubt that the joy and enthusiasm his collaborators show working with him here is real. I can't possibly imagine Hitchcock or Kubrick getting away with the same thing and I'm even less sure we would have wanted to watch their respective "Intervistas". But Fellini not only shows us how he shoots movies, he makes us also part of his team, we become—in the flesh of the Japanese journalists, the young actors, the crew—part of his family. Already in the introductory shot he makes clear we are his invites in that metaphoric opening wide of the gates of Cinecitta and in the fact that he's himself the one to greet us, no some subordinate or studio bureaucrat. That's enough to reassure us that what we'll get during the next 104 min. will be the real deal.Another thing I loved about Intervista is that it is a movie that doesn't take itself seriously, probably to the image of his creator. There are some hilarious moments that can only be seen as his ironic or sarcastic comments about movie directors in general or even himself: For ex., the director who won't settle for anything less than a pear for lunch. Or the other one who suffers a meltdown when a cardboard cut elephant drops its trunk. I found also the commercials very good and very tasty, said to have been Fellini's concepts. And finally, the score, a put pourri of some scores of other Fellini's films, the kind of music you'll like to be the last thing you hear when leaving this world.In all, perhaps not the best but certainly the most beautiful, most joyful, of all Fellini's. 9/10.

Cosmoeticadotcom Old men tend to make art that is shallow, imitative of their earlier, better works, and which would never garner an ounce of praise were it not for their backlog of greater works somehow letting their patina still rub off. In America, the best proof of this nostrum is the awarding of the lifetime Academy Award to a film director, or actor. Apparently, Europe is not immune to such worthless laurels either, for, in 1987, Federico Fellini's disastrously bad film Intervista won the Cannes Film Festival's Fortieth Anniversary Award and the Grand Prize at the Moscow Film Festival. In it, one can see many pastiches from earlier Fellini films, much as Ingmar Bergman cribbed ideas and scenes from his earlier masterpieces for his disastrously bad last film Saraband, the way Akira Kurosawa tossed random ideas together for Dreams, and the way Woody Allen has constantly reworked themes from his 1970s and 1980s great films into his last decade's worth of mostly mediocrities. That said, even the worst of Allen's recent films, like The Curse Of The Jade Scorpion, were better than Intervista. Fellini might take some solace in the fact that Intervista is a better film than Bergman's incest-ridden Saraband, but it's a minor comfort, at best, and this shoddy film still falls well shy of even Dreams.

Chris Bright "Intervista" means interview and naturally that's not at all what this is.Fellini does start off with a fictional interview with a Japanese TV crew but the movie develops to include a recreation of his own first trip to Cinecitta (as a journalist to interview a famous actress), a look at the process of making a Fellini film, reminiscences of his own previous movies, cinema in general and the music of Nino Rota, sideswipes at TV and advertising and the silly questions asked by journalists.We jump about between several layers of 'reality' - the fake 'interview', the '30's recreation, the creation of that recreation, real people playing more or less fictionalised versions of themselves. At one point we have Fellini-surrogates Mastroianni and Rubini, and Fellini himself, all in a car together.The film lacks the epic sweep and spectacle of "Roma", perhaps due to its genesis as a TV film, and much of it will mean little to those unfamiliar with Fellini's earlier work. Nonetheless, there is much to enjoy, from Rubini and Mastroianni's discussion of masturbation, through the scenery-painters' rather blunt dialogue, to the rightly acclaimed and very poignant scene of Mastroianni and Ekberg revisiting "La Dolce Vita".In fact the Mastroianni/Ekberg scene probably sums up the whole film - a wistful look back at past glories and a perhaps rather rueful look at where Fellini, and the rest of us, had arrived at by 1987.