8½
![Watch film 8½ — 35mm Trailer [Subtitled]](https://www.acmodasi.in/amdb/images/posters/7/5/8½-1963-Hbsum.webp)
Short description
Federico Fellini's 8½ centres on Guido Anselmi, a successful film director who has stalled. Unable to settle on the film he is meant to make, he checks into a spa, hoping that rest and the waters will restore him. Instead he is surrounded by the people who depend on the production: his producer, his collaborators, his wife, his mistress and others, all pressing him for answers he does not have. He withdraws into memories of his childhood and of the women he has loved, and the line between what he imagines and what is happening to him becomes steadily harder to draw.
The film was released in 1963 and runs 139 minutes. Fellini directed it and wrote the screenplay with Tullio Pinelli and Ennio Flaiano, with Angelo Rizzoli producing. It is the ninth of the twenty features Fellini directed, coming between Boccaccio '70 and Juliet of the Spirits. Marcello Mastroianni plays Guido, heading a cast of forty-nine credited performers that includes Claudia Cardinale, Anouk Aimée, Sandra Milo, Rossella Falk and Barbara Steele.
On IMDb the film holds 8 out of 10 from around 132,000 votes, and on TMDB 8.1 out of 10 from roughly 2,600 votes, indicating a widely held and durable reputation. A critics' rating of 9 out of 10 from 62 reviews places it slightly above those audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- Fellini considered giving the lead role to Laurence Olivier.
- Filming took place from May 9th to October 14th, 1962.
- Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, who attended the competitive screening of the film in Moscow, did not stay until the end of the session and fell asleep. When Fellini learned that Khrushchev had fallen asleep at the film's premiere, he decided not to attend the award ceremony and left with Giulietta Masina and friends to a country house near Moscow.
- Fellini constantly gave himself a written reminder – “Remember, it’s a comedy.”
- The working title of the film was “La Bella Confusione,” or “The Beautiful Confusion.”
- Thanks to the film's participation in the Moscow International Film Festival, Federico Fellini and Giulietta Masina visited the Soviet Union for the first and last time.
- This is Federico Fellini's eighth and a half film. Previously, he directed six feature-length and two short films (which he counted as one), as well as “Variety Lights,” created in collaboration with Alberto Lattuada (which he considered half a film).
- Like almost all Italian films of those years, this one was shot without sound. All dialogue was dubbed onto the footage during post-production. During filming, Federico Fellini (1920-1993) shouted instructions to the actors, and after filming, he often rewrote lines, resulting in dialogue in his films often appearing out of sync with the actors' movements.
- The original ending had Guido and his wife sitting in the dining car of a train to Rome, and the train enters a tunnel. Federico Fellini subsequently filmed another ending with a spaceship at sunset on the beach; he intended to use it only in a promotional trailer, but he and other members of the film crew decided that this ending was even better than the original.
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