Movie Quote of the Day (‘8½,’ on a Director’s Initial Idea for a Film)

Writer [played by Jean Rougeul] [to Guido, on the director’s latest project]: “You see, what stands out at a first reading is the lack of a central issue or a philosophical stance. That makes the film a chain of gratuitous episodes which may even be amusing in their ambivalent realism. You wonder, what is the director really trying to do? Make us think? Scare us? That ploy betrays a basic lack of poetic inspiration.”— 8½ (1963), screenplay by Federico Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano, and Brunello Rondi, directed by Federico Fellini

I burst out laughing the first time I saw Fellini’s classic and heard these lines. I couldn’t help but think that the director heard similar advice from a scribe as he struggled with his own case of writer’s block in creating this movie.

A director struggling with writer’s block who ends up making a film about a director with the same issue. Hmm…sounds self-referential. Not unlike the felt hat that Fellini’s film stand-in, Marcello Mastroianni, wears, almost as if to say, “Guess who all this is about—kind of?”