{"id":26697,"date":"2025-06-04T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-06-04T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=26697"},"modified":"2025-06-03T17:17:48","modified_gmt":"2025-06-04T00:17:48","slug":"the-unexpected-overlaps-of-wes-anderson-and-federico-fellini","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/the-unexpected-overlaps-of-wes-anderson-and-federico-fellini\/","title":{"rendered":"The Unexpected Overlaps of Wes Anderson and Federico Fellini"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Wes Anderson\u2019s new film, The Pheonecian Scheme<\/em><\/a>, is another great work from the best American director of his generation, a delightful yet sneakily weighty screwball comedy-cum-adventure story-cum morality tale made at such a high level of craftsmanship that we almost take it for granted: if any other director put out a movie of this quality we\u2019d be hailing it as their masterpiece.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The film is unlikely to win over any of Anderson\u2019s detractors<\/a>, whose rote complaints and criticisms miss the mark every time he releases a new one, but at this point who cares? That Anderson is able to continue creating his worlds, and that we get to visit them every couple of years is, frankly, a miracle. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I choose that phrase \u2013 \u201cbuilding his worlds\u201d \u2013 carefully. People often describe his immersive sets as dollhouses and dioramas, but it goes further than just set dressing (although there\u2019s no limit to the praise he and his crew, particularly long-time production designer Adam Stockhausen, deserve). At this point in his career, Anderson truly is a world builder, moving away from any semblance of so-called realism in order to bring us a version of reality built in his image. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And yet, for as fantastical as that reality is, as specific to his tastes and obsessions, it still manages to reflect back to us universal truths about life on this side of the screen. In this way, Anderson reminds me, more than any other filmmaker, of Federico Fellini.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tonally and aesthetically, those two are pretty far removed from one another. Anderson favors precision and symmetry, Fellini the rococo and baroque. Anderson\u2019s characters deliver fine-tuned dialog with deadpan gravitas, Fellini\u2019s yell and gesticulate and yearn openly. Anderson carefully structures his films like novels, plays, and magazines, replete with titled chapter and act breaks; Fellini, especially in his late period, preferred a loose episodic (or \u201cfresco<\/a>\u201d) model. If Anderson is a maker of dollhouses, Fellini is a circus ringleader.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And yet, Anderson has long cited Fellini as one of his major influences. There is even a short documentary film about this: The Fantastic Mr. Fellini<\/em> (2020) is a 45-minute interview with Anderson on his love of the Italian auteur. Sadly, this doc is currently unavailable to watch, but Anderson has spoken elsewhere of what he takes from Il Maestro, explaining<\/a> during the press tour for The Grand Budapest Hotel<\/em>, \u201cI always think about Fellini in terms of the characters, he makes deep characters that are sort of cartoons, and somehow he finds that balance and sometimes I\u2019m trying for something like that with some of mine.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fellini himself was a professional cartoonist, and Anderson has become one with his forays into animation<\/a>. But more than that connection, or the inspiration Anderson draws from Fellini\u2019s use of character, it is Fellini\u2019s evolution as an artist, as well as the critical and public reception to his work, where I see the greatest comparison between the two. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Fellini\u2019s early work as first a screenwriter, and then director, fall within Italian neorealism, but when he began making a name for himself on the global arthouse scene via critically acclaimed works like I Vitelloni<\/em> (1953), La Strada<\/em> (1954), and Nights of Cabiria<\/em><\/a> (1957), he had veered away from that movement. By the time he became a full-on international sensation with La Dolce Vita<\/em> (1960) and 8 \u00bd<\/em><\/a> (1963), he\u2019d embraced a surreal, carnivalesque style that would later bear his name: Felliniesque<\/em>. His post 8 \u00bd <\/em>films, almost all shot in lavish color and often taking place in the ancient past<\/a>, became even stranger and more phantasmagoric.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his late period, Fellini rarely shot on location, preferring instead to construct his elaborate settings within Rome\u2019s famed Cinecitt\u00e0 Studios. The brainchild of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, Cinecitt\u00e0 was meant to bolster the nation\u2019s film industry so that it might challenge Hollywood\u2019s influence on a global scale. Partially destroyed during WWII, Cinecitt\u00e0 was rebuilt in the aftermath and, ironically, became a hub for large-scale Hollywood productions, including Ben Hur<\/em>, Quo Vadis<\/em>, and Cleopatra<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fellini fell in love with Cinecitt\u00e0 during his first visit to it as a young reporter on assignment (a story he brought to screen in his feature-length love letter to the studio, and his penultimate film, Intervista <\/em>[1987]). He shot I Vitelloni<\/em> at Cinecitt\u00e0 , but his association with it truly begins with La Dolce Vita<\/em>. Moving forward, he forsook the outer world, explaining<\/a>, \u201cFor me, Cinecitt\u00e0 has replaced the real world. I shoot in the studio to express a subjective reality, purified by contingent realistic elements, which are useless: it\u2019s a selected reality.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This perfectly sums up Anderson\u2019s artistic evolution as well. While none of his early films were remotely \u201crealist,\u201d neo- or other, they still took place within a world recognizably our own. But you see Anderson start to move into more fantastical realms starting with The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou <\/em>(2004). The scope of his films became global, as did their productions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2013, Anderson teamed with Prada to produce the charming short Castello Cavalcanti<\/em><\/a>, which stars Jason Schwartzman as a hapless American race car driver who crashes his car in an Italian village that happens to be his ancestral home. An open love letter to Fellini, with homages to La Dolce Vita<\/em> and Amarcord<\/em><\/a> <\/em>(1973), it was, appropriately, shot at Cinecitt\u00e0. (Anderson and crew considered filming 2023\u2019s Asteroid City <\/em>at Cinecitt\u00e0 as well, before settling on a location in Spain.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But even as Anderson\u2019s work continued to leave behind any trappings of \u201crealism,\u201d the themes and stories took on weightier subject matter, including the rise of facism, political radicalism and revolution, and, in his latest, the moral reckoning over the destructive effects of industrialism. Despite his proclamations that he didn\u2019t care about politics, Fellini also dealt with similar subject matter, most noticeably in his depiction of the boorish, buffoonish (but still dangerous) nature of Italian fascism in Anderson\u2019s favorite of his films, Amaracord<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like Fellini, Anderson\u2019s output generally receives positive notice (if not always great box office), but it also brings out complaints that he\u2019s gone too far up his own ass. While I wouldn\u2019t begrudge anyone for simply not clicking with either filmmaker\u2019s style, I truly believe that this reaction comes from a narrow-minded and slavish devotion to false notions of realism, revealing the complainers incapable of locating deeper truth within, as Fellini put it, \u201csubjective reality.\u201dThat, ultimately, is their loss. Anderson continues to follow in Fellini\u2019s footsteps as an uncompromising artist of the highest order. He may even become as synonymous with a historical studio as Fellini is with Cinecitt\u00e0: following the filming of The Pheonecian Scheme<\/em> at Studio Babelsberg in Potsdam\u2014the oldest large-scale studio in the world, and the place where Anderson previously shot Grand Budapest\u2014<\/em>the building that hosted the film\u2019s costume and production design\u2019s offices was officially renamed The Wes Anderson Building.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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