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
Federico Fellini cinematic achievement. Long fascinated by Carlos Castaneda’s "", Fellini accompanied the Peruvian author on a journey to the Yucatán to assess the feasibility of a film. After first meeting Castaneda in Rome in October 1984, Fellini drafted a treatment with Pinelli titled "Viaggio a Tulun". Producer Alberto Grimaldi, prepared to buy film rights to all of Castaneda's work, then paid for pre-production research taking Fellini and his entourage from Rome to Los Angeles and the jungles of Mexico in October 1985. When Castaneda inexplicably disappeared and the project fell through, Fellini's mystico-shamanic adventures were scripted with Pinelli and serialized in