Intervista

Federico Fellini's Intervista is a film about filmmaking, built around a Japanese television crew that arrives at Cinecittà to interview the director. Fellini plays himself, guiding the journalists through the studios where he is preparing a new project, an adaptation of Kafka's novel America. The interview becomes a starting point for memories and imaginings, moving between the rehearsal rooms, screen tests and casting sessions of the present and Fellini's recollections of his early days at Cinecittà, where he first came as a young journalist to interview a film star. Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg appear as themselves in a sequence that revisits their famous scene from La Dolce Vita, staged again for the visiting crew.

The film was written and directed by Fellini and stands as the twentieth of the twenty features he directed in chronological order, following Ginger and Fred. Ibrahim Moussa produced it, and the large credited cast of 78 includes Sergio Rubini as the journalist, Antonella Ponziani, Maurizio Mein, Paola Liguori, Lara Wendel and Antonio Cantafora, alongside the director and his guests. It runs 108 minutes and mixes comedy with drama.

Released in October 1987, Intervista met with a generally favourable response. On IMDb it holds a rating of 7 out of 10 from around 3,600 votes, while on TMDB its average is 6.8 out of 10 from a much smaller pool of 96 votes, a difference that reflects the narrower, more dedicated audience behind the latter figure.