Federico Fellini Leopardi. Fellini improvised as he filmed, using as a guide a rough treatment written with Pinelli. Despite its modest critical and commercial success in Italy, and its warm reception by French critics, it failed to interest North American distributors. Fellini won the "Praemium Imperiale", the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in the visual arts, awarded by the Japan Art Association in 1990. In July 1991 and April 1992, Fellini worked in close collaboration with Canadian filmmaker Damian Pettigrew to establish "the longest and most detailed conversations ever recorded on film". Described as the "Maestro's spiritual testament” by his biographer Tullio
Fellini Satyricon his crew. His words end in mid-sentence, as does Petronius's book, when a distant island appears on the horizon and the film cuts abruptly to frescoes of the film's characters on a crumbling wall. Fellini's project saw competition from another film titled "Satyricon", released the same year. Producer Alfredo Bini had registered the "Satyricon" title in 1962. When Fellini and his producer Alberto Grimaldi started work on their film, Bini contracted Gian Luigi Polidoro to direct his own version. Grimaldi sued Bini to halt the competing film, but lost; as a result, Fellini's picture was titled "Fellini Satyricon" to distinguish