"I have made a movie as if in flight, " says Master Film Maker Federico Fellini, "as if it were a sickness to be got through. " Few pictures have been as eagerly awaited as Fellini's Casanova, the director's most recent bout with "sickness, " which has lasted nine months, and appeared for a while to be terminal. Now scheduled for pre-Christmas release in the U.S., Casanova managed to survive the theft of two reels of early footage; almost identical alternate work prints were substituted. Then last December Producer Alberto Grimaldi canceled Casanova in mid-filming, blaming Fellini's extravagance: $7 million had already been spent, roughly two-thirds of the picture shot. Fellini sued and a Roman judge found that the director had not been spendthrift. Production resumed, and last week TIME Correspondent Leo Janos visited the set outside Rome. His report:
Casanova is Fellini's most ambitious film in years and his first English-language picture. It is also evidently a chilling, worldly departure from Amarcord, last year's lyrical reminiscence that won Fellini his fourth Academy Award. The new movie is peopled by many of the androgynous grotesques that crowded his fantasy Satyricon (1969). Fellini, 56, has ensured his film a stormy reception in Italy by comparing the 18th century rake-protagonist to the typical modern Italian: "He is all shop front, a public figure striking attitudes ... in short, a braggart Fascist."
The real Casanova—played in the movie by Donald Sutherland—was an intellectual, a gambler and a great Venetian libertine, who seduced and abandoned ladies by the hundreds in his travels across Europe. His Memoirs are usually considered to rank among the classic 18th century autobiographies. Fellini disagrees. He professes to have ripped the pages with rage as he read them. "Unfortunately, I had already signed to do the film," he says. "No nature, animals, children, trees. The stron-zo [turd] roamed the whole of Europe and it is as if he never moved from bed."
Shooting Days. Whatever his misgivings, the director has lavished on Casanova extravagant care even by his own high standards. At a cost of $10 million, Fellini has given full vent to his surreal, picaresque vision of Casanova; he has used 500 extras, commissioned 54 sets by volatile, brilliant Designer Danilo Donati, as well as 3,000 costumes and 400 wigs. Nearly 150 shooting days have been spent on the sound stages and back lots of Rome's Cinecitta studio.
During the final days of filming, Fellini hunched against a Mitchell camera, chewing on the ball of his fist as if it were an apple core. He was watching two young actresses rehearse a scene that was not going well. In Italy, the sound track of a film is dubbed in later, so Fellini can direct like a latter-day D.W. Griffith, instructing as the camera rolls: "Move toward me, Olimpia. Pause. Take a deep breath. Look down at your hands. Bravar Actress Olimpia Carlisi is not acting to the camera, but to her director, her Svengali.